How Liberal Hypocrisy Prevents The Liberal Agenda

There are few things in this world I dislike more than hypocrisy. Granted, most of us occasionally slip into it from time to time, and I’m no exception. However, when I find that I’ve done so, I do what I can to correct it.

But I also value ideological consistency because I believe it’s the hallmark of someone who is guided by actual principles rather than whatever their team’s preferred talking points are at any given moment. As such, I try to address any hypocrisy I detect in myself and move forward as a better person.

However, it seems many liberals have embraced their own hypocrisy as a way of life, and the New York Times called them out on it.

A pair of New York Times journalists who recently set out to explore what happens when Democrats control all the levels of power in state and local governments across the country were shocked to discover that "blue states" — not red ones — "are the problem."

"What do Democrats actually do when they have all the power?" Times video journalist Johnny Harris asked at the outset of an opinion video posted by the paper last week.

Harris teamed up with Times editorial board writer Binyamin Appelbaum to examine why famously liberal states — such as New York, California, and Washington — struggle to advance the progressive policies despite little to no Republican opposition.

OK, that seems like a productive place to start. After all, those are three very progressive states, especially these days. While there are Republicans there, they tend to be so outnumbered at the state level that they might as well not even exist.

It’s bad enough that many from those states have been trying to find places to relocate to get away from the progressive policies being enacted at the state level with almost no pushback.

If they can’t enact their agenda there, they won’t get it enacted anywhere.

So what did they find?

They focused on three core initiatives of the Democratic Party platform: affordable housing, economic equality, and educational opportunity. And in the end, they discovered that "liberal hypocrisy," not Republican opposition, "is fueling American inequality" and that things are actually much worse in blue states than they are in red.

"In key respects, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states," the journalists noted in a written report accompanying the video. "It is in the blue states where affordable housing is often hardest to find, there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding and economic inequality is increasing most quickly."

"Blue states are the problem," Applebaum, who covers economics and business for the Times, exclaimed.

"Blue states are where the housing crisis is located. Blue states are where the disparities in education funding are the most dramatic. Blue states are the places where tens of thousands of homeless people are living on the streets. Blue states are the places where economic inequality is increasing most quickly in this country. This is not a problem of not doing well enough; it is a situation where blue states are the problem," he added.

Now, keep in mind that this is the progressive New York Times that discovered this. This isn’t some conservative publication looking to score points against the libs. No, this is the Old Gray Lady itself.

But they’re right.

Despite having every advantage politically, progressive policies don’t seem to happen in California. I mean, I remember when the liberal state banned gay marriage.

(It should be noted that no one tried to boycott the state or pull sporting events out or any of that crap, either. Hollywood didn’t threaten to stop filming movies there or anything.)

Over at Hot Air, my friend Ed Morrissey offered up some of his thoughts on this.

The most amusing aspect of this revelation isn’t that progressive policies don’t work — which they don’t, as we see in urban areas that haven’t elected a Republican to office in decades. It’s that progressives mostly don’t even bother to try those core policies at the state level. Affordable housing gets the NIMBY treatment, something I saw up close in the Twin Cities. Affordable housing is a policy best applied to other people’s neighborhoods, which is all the more infuriating given efforts by Democrats in Washington to eliminate suburban autonomy through HUD policy.

And that’s really part of the problem across the board, really. Progressives don’t want to live with the ramifications of their beliefs, they want you to live with them.

It’s no different than Al Gore hopping on a private plane to go somewhere to address climate change while expecting you to sell your car and take the bus. Yes, sacrifices need to be made, but they should be made by other people.

While it’s easy to point out all those famous people who say one thing and do another, the truth is that it runs all the way down into the little people.

Sure, you can find exceptions, but they’re just that, exceptions. They’re not the totality.

It’s the same reason that I’ve heard the dreaded “n-word” from white liberals than I ever heard from conservatives—though just one instance would have earned it that distinction, and I heard it way more often than that. It’s because they think their politics absolves them of any sins they may have.

Sure, they don’t give to charity, but they support the government taking money from you to give to the poor, so they’re better than you. That’s how their minds work.

So it’s no surprise that their own hypocrisy gets in the way of their states becoming some weird Utopia. They don’t want to deal with the ramifications of those policies, so there’s no way they’re going to bear the brunt of them.

That’s for the little people like you and me to deal with.