We should stop twisting ourselves into party-loyalty pretzels.
After a lot of anticipation that James Comey’s hearing would reveal some kind of “smoking gun,” a lot of people were left disappointed.
Comey wound up claiming that President Trump had actually told him to “get anybody satellite to my operation and nail them,” making it sound like Trump must have had nothing to hide. And as for obstruction? Well, that charge would require proving intent, and we can all agree that that’s a pretty tough thing to do. After months of speculation that this was the new Watergate, I can admit that my first reaction to the hearing was, “Eh, whatever.”
But then, I thought . . . wait a minute. The former director of the FBI just called the president of the United States a liar for saying that the FBI was “in disarray,” was “poorly led,” and “had lost confidence in its leader,” and my reaction was, “Eh, whatever”?
How could this be?
Every day, it seems as though we are becoming more and more numb to the should-be-outrageous — and no, I’m not just talking about this as it relates to President Trump. Yes, it’s absurd to automatically write off any politically inconvenient portions of James Comey’s testimony as being nothing more than retaliatory lies (especially while automatically accepting any vindicating portions as truth). It’s also absurd to be Nancy Pelosi and say that it’s “not such a big deal” that Loretta Lynch told Comey to refer to the criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton as a “matter” — something that amounts to an intelligence official essentially using her position to campaign for a presidential candidate, a very big deal indeed.
There are a lot of reasons that government officials are rarely held accountable for their actions, and one of them is this: With every single political scandal comes a swarm of people who are hell-bent on defending the person at the center of it, all for the sake of party loyalty.
It’s amazing, really. Good, intelligent people wind up twisting themselves into partisan-loyalty pretzels, defying basic reason in order to defend their “side.” Unfortunately, politicians are not judged objectively on their actions, but either uniformly propped up or torn down depending on what’s politically convenient. Think about it: I highly doubt that the Republicans crying “nothingburger” would be singing the same refrain had Trump been Obama and Flynn been Rice. And it’s not just Republicans — you can bet your a** that Pelosi wouldn’t be saying it was “no big deal” if President Trump had flat-out ordered Comey to refer to the Russia investigation as a “matter.” Party loyalty makes people outraged at what they’d defend from their own, and defensive of what they’d be outraged at over the others — which makes “outrage” lose its power in political discourse altogether.
With every single political scandal comes a swarm of people who are hell-bent on defending the person at the center of it, all for the sake of party loyalty.
This has always been an issue, but there’s no question that the current political climate has made it worse. President Trump, love him or hate him, is a polarizing figure — and often it seems that your only two options are being completely on his side (forbidden from ever criticizing him, because criticizing Trump is only for idiot, ISIS-loving #FakeNews libturds) or against him (forbidden from suggesting that he’s ever been right, because saying he’s done something right makes you a racist, Nazi hick).
It’s not that I don’t understand the impulse. If you share a party’s vision for the country, then of course you’re going to want the members of that party to stay in power. It’s not an evil thing — in fact, I don’t even think that it’s usually deliberate. I don’t believe that people are consciously thinking: “Well, I want Donald Trump to stay president, so, no matter what happens, I’m going to just defend him and call this flap nothing, even if I believe that it is something.” Much of it is subconscious — in politics and in life, people often decide which sources or stories are “credible” based on what they want to be true.
As understandable as it might be, however, it’s important to challenge this kind of thinking. For one thing, selective outrage assures politicians that they’ll have a built-in cheerleading squad to defend them from any wrongdoing. What’s more: Once you’ve made it obvious that you decide what is and is not outrageous based on political convenience, even your legitimate whistle-blowing can be discredited as more political propaganda. It’s important to try as hard as we can to keep these conversations as unbiased as possible, and to remember that never placing our full trust in any of the people who have power over us is the only way to ensure that we stay free.
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