The Two-Party System: Sanctuary for Scoundrels

When confronted with the fact of their own hypocrisy, a favored rhetorical tactic of duopolist ideologues, whether Republican or Democrat, is to counter that "the other side does it too." Thus, the Republican's hypocrisy excuses the hypocrisy of Democrats and the Democrat's hypocrisy excuses that of Republicans. In this way, the biconditional logic of two-party ideology results in the universal acceptance of duplicity and deceit as constitutive of politics as such. The duopolist ideologue is the unmitigated scoundrel who seeks to prove that he can be trusted because he admits that he lies. In an opinion piece for USA Today, Jonah Goldberg provides us with an exemplary case of such ideological knavery on the subject of deficits.

Are Republicans hypocrites for caring about the deficit? Maybe. But that's OK. The tricky thing about cries of hypocrisy in a two-party system is that the accusation almost always cuts both ways . . .

Part of the problem is that neither side actually much cares about deficits qua deficits. The Democrats didn't like what Bush was borrowing money to spend on, chiefly the war and, by Democratic accounting, his tax cuts. Similarly, the Republicans don't like the idea of going deeper into hock for corporate bailouts, the deeply flawed stimulus and, possibly, socialized medicine . . .

Are Republicans hypocrites for suddenly caring about all of this? Sure, OK. But that doesn't make them wrong. Just as suddenly not caring about any of it doesn't make the Democrats right. [Emphasis added.]

If the utter moral and political bankruptcy of the two-party system is apparent in its acceptance of hypocrisy, then the decadence and degeneracy of duopoly ideology is nowhere more clear than in the duopolist's explicit advocacy of it. The hypocrisy of Republicans in their concern for deficit spending may not "make them wrong," as Goldberg puts it, but it does imply that they cannot be trusted to actually do anything about it. In an article for The Examiner challenging Republicans and Democrats to account for their irrational allegiance to the duopoly parties, Chad MacInnes asks the obvious question in this regard:

If so many of these career politicians campaign against continuing to run massive deficits, then why do we always seem to have massive deficits after we continue to re-elect those people who profess to end them?