Accusing a leftist of being a hypocrite is like accusing a meat-eating Texas cattle rancher of being a carnivore.
The concerns of bourgeois morality find as little purchase with leftists as the concerns of vegetarians with meat-eaters.
A curious 'disconnect' is therefore displayed by earnest Fox commentators who upbraid leftists for their hypocrisy and double standards when, preaching the need for draconian measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, they support Joe Biden's opening up the Southern border to a flood of unvetted and untested illegal aliens among whom are human traffickers, drug smugglers, gun runners, and carriers of a variety of diseases including COVID-19.
The naïve Tucker Carlson, for example, appears shocked and surprised at leftist hypocrisy and double-standardization. He hasn't yet fully grasped, although he is learning, that for leftists, the (apparent) issue is not the (real) issue. In this case the apparent issue is public health while the real issues is the expansion of power for leftists who, in U. S. politics, are Democrats. Not the expansion of power for its own sake, mind you, but for the sake of the fundamental transformation of America that Barack Obama announced. (Tucker seems to think that the Dems just want power for the sake of power. Not so.)
Objectively, it is absurdly counterproductive to open the borders during a public health crisis, especially when the invaders are from a country like Mexico, as opposed to, say, Canada. But that is so only if the paramount concern is public health. When the paramount concern is to gain permanent power for leftist ends, then it all makes sense. Lives are worth sacrificing for the glorious end, which justifies the disreputable means.
Repeat this a few times until it sinks in: Leftists are not constrained by our values and norms. They use our values and norms against us. You can read all about it in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Truth, for example, is normative for us, but not for them. That is not to say that they won't tell the truth; they will when it serves their purposes. Otherwise they lie, repeatedly and brazenly. Their purpose trumps the norm, which is to say: they are not bound by the norm. It has no deontic hold on them, they being of the tribe of Lucifer. Alinsky dedicated his Rules to the fallen light-bearer.
We are bound by the norm of truth. This is why, when we violate it, the charge of hypocrisy reaches us and is a concern for us and an occasion for us to examine our consciences.
What Tucker and Co. need to come to understand is that our political opponents are political enemies: They cannot be reached by appeals to reason or to conscience, by admonitions or accusations of hypocrisy and double-standardization. We and they do not live in the same moral universe. To invoke a rather more terrestrial metaphor: we and they do not stand on common ground. Ours is the terra firma of reality. Theirs is a swamp of illusion abutting a gulag overlain by a utopian fog, mephitic and Mephistophelean.
I appear to be warming to my rhetoric. Time to pack it in. But one more thing, a bit of self-criticism.
I once said that if you removed from leftists all of their double standards, they would have no standards at all. Not quite right! For there would be one standard left standing:
Win at all costs and by any means!
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