Hypocrisy accusations are woven into the fabric of politics—they are probably the most common attacks that politicians make. As the political thinker David Runciman notes, hypocrisy is what you reach for “if you wish to do the maximum possible damage to your political opponent in thirty seconds of airtime.”
One side will point at, say, right-wing bastions of law and order who want leniency and special favors when their rule breaking comes to light. The other side will mock wealthy left-wing advocates of equality, diversity, and social justice who maneuver furiously to ensure spots at elite universities go to their children, not to those whom they claim to care about.
These attacks are so common because they are so easy. You don’t need to engage with or debate someone else’s principles on their own terms—that’s hard. All you have to do is say that they have not lived up to those principles, whatever they are.
Call it the “simple inconsistency” ploy. With it, you can avoid seeming to take a position. You’re not trying to push your own position on taxes or abortion. But you can give the impression that you’ve understood your opponent’s position because you’ve spotted an inconsistency that they apparently missed.
If we are making these kinds of attacks, we’re already in trouble. There’s no attempt to engage the other side on the issues and convince them they are wrong. A polarized era gives you few incentives to do that. But even if we can’t agree on any shared values, we can still attack the other lot for not living up to their values. That still has some bite. As Judith Shklar put it, when you don’t have a shared moral knowledge, “the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains.”
So hypocrisy accusations may be a symptom of breakdown and dysfunction. In a polarized world, you want to fire up your side with fury. Hypocrisy is a reliable source of fuel for the flames. As the temperature rises, you look around for even more stuff to chuck into the fire, and so the cycle continues.
The problem is that polarization crushes trust. When you point out the gap between your opponent’s words and deeds, on the slightest pretext, you aim to destroy trust in them. But they’re trying to do the same to you. As more accusations pile up, the effect is to reduce trust in politics and people in general. If everything and everyone seems fake, the result can be a thirst for a “real,” sincere, authentic politician to step forward. This person will offer the false promise of a politics free of hypocrisy.
If everything and everyone seems fake, the result can be a thirst for a “real” politician to step forward. This person will offer the false promise of a politics free of hypocrisy.
What’s a better way forward? Well, let me say upfront what I’m not proposing. It would be quite simple to do a contrarian take that we all should just relax about political hypocrisy: “Let it go! We’re all being too uptight!” But there’s too much at stake to slip into easy, empty cynicism. The hypocrisy of malign deception can break down society’s vital systems until they fail completely. Nor can we simply stamp out hypocrisy in politics.
As I write in my book, The Hypocrisy Trap, the function of hypocrisy in politics and life is more complex than we recognize. Indeed, democracy relies on the existence of some hypocrisy. For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely.
It’s fairly obvious why we can’t let all hypocrisy slide. But we have a blindspot when it comes to understanding the effects of calling out hypocrisy relentlessly and trying to stamp out hypocrisy completely. And it’s a blindspot that erodes our trust in our political institutions and can mean we end up electing even more deceptive politicians. Taking a more practical and nuanced understanding of hypocrisy can allow us to participate in politics more effectively and with a clearer-eyed view of our elected leaders.
So how is our political environment being damaged by unrestrained accusations of hypocrisy?
First, we’re creating cynicism by exhausting the concept. In politics, accusations of hypocrisy are relentless but not costless. We empty hypocrisy of meaning when we overuse it as an accusation. We make it just another term of abuse in the game of politics. As Judith Shklar explains, “In the unending game of mutual unmasking, the general level of sham rises. As each side tries to destroy the credibility of its rivals, politics becomes a treadmill of dissimulation and unmasking.” We end up mired in cynicism and distrust.
Second, we’re distracting ourselves from the bigger issues. Ironically, these attempts at unmasking may end up missing things instead. If people are too focused on personal inconsistencies, they may not see how groups or institutions are creating a system where they can afford to play by different rules, with no consequences. Hypocrisy accusations may be distractions based on naive assumptions about how power can be curbed.
Third, we’re pushing ourselves toward what my book identifies as the bad “worlds” of hypocrisy. If we hound politicians for the slightest inconsistency, decent people who are aware of their flaws won’t enter politics. Instead, we will get people who aren’t aware of their flaws or who don’t care about them. If we get angry at politicians for falling short of an impossible standard, we will either end up with an ever more punitive attempt to enforce complete consistency, or a cynical state where no one cares about hypocrisy as long as they are strong enough to do what they want.
If all this is true, then we need to think differently about hypocrisy in politics. We don’t have to like hypocrisy—it’s so dislikeable. Instead, we need to accept that tolerating a certain level of hypocrisy in politics is the least-bad option overall.
For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely.
The first step is to realize that hypocrisy is unavoidable, at least in democracies. Anyone promising otherwise is also a hypocrite—and a potentially dangerous one. So we need a reckoning with all the reasons that hypocrisy is baked into democratic politics. Democracies are about power as well as principles, meaning that ambiguity and compromise are inevitable. Democracies allow a range of groups to exist, such as unions, religions, companies, and cities. Each wants to hold power and advance its interests. To get them onside, politicians need to persuade them—but the variety of interests means politicians need to present things a bit differently to each. That means inconsistency and compromise slip in.
If you end up getting power, things get even harder. You need to deliver for your group’s interests, which means you must be flexible, focused, and tactical. But, while being partisan, you also have to keep promoting principles such as freedom and the rule of law—and stick to the persuasive things you said to different groups in the past. Power needs to exist alongside principles; you can’t just ditch one or the other.
Unfortunately, that combination is not popular. The public hates it when politicians don’t live up to their big, clear claims. As Judith Shklar puts it, “Democracy generates disappointment, and a sense of always being deceived.”
Then comes the harder part. We need to edge toward an understanding that trying to stamp out political hypocrisy completely is both futile and self-defeating. But that’s difficult because politics makes antihypocrisy seductive. It feels so good when someone promises to rip away the suffocating lies and replace them with something real. It can also feel like the right thing to do. If a politician is promising to uphold ideals, supporting their stance seems like a blow against pervasive political cynicism. Maybe we can believe, just one more time, in something true?
Time to steel ourselves and accept that antihypocrisy is a false promise. In fact, we are just choosing between one kind of political hypocrite and another.
There are the politicians who engage in some pretense as part of the normal run of democratic politics. Those are the hypocrites we usually get angry about: the politicians who seem false, who we suspect are carefully controlling their public statements, while saying what they really think in back rooms. The other kind are the ones who deny that they ever act like this, who present themselves as unsullied by the dirty compromises of politics. They look down on the other politicians wallowing in the muck. They make a big, explicit play about not being hypocrites. These are the politicians who present themselves as true believers, the real deal, or as authentic straight talkers.
But hypocrisy in politics is unavoidable, so antihypocrites can never live up to their claims—especially if they want to get anything done. So we need to change our views and see that these politicians do not offer an escape from hypocrisy but just serve it up in a more deceptive form. They prey on our tendency to see ourselves as consistent, truthful people, and they claim that they, too, are just like that ideal self-image. In contrast, other politicians are toxic liars.
All this kicks away at our support for compromises that make democracies work. Instead, it offers a vision of politics as a quest for purity and truth. That vision is like a sweet treat that tastes good but makes us sicker in the end. The politician can never sustain it—democracy always disappoints—and that means an even more toxic collapse of trust later on.
Taking a more practical and nuanced understanding of hypocrisy can allow us to participate in politics more effectively and with a clearer-eyed view of our elected leaders.
To move our politics to a healthier place, we also need to come to terms with our part in creating political hypocrisy. We are inconsistent in the demands we place on politicians. We pull them between the logic of power and the logic of principles, depending on how we feel. But we don’t admit this. Instead, we embrace the fantasy of a simple war of principles or adopt a cynical view that everything’s just corrupt.
So we need to edge closer to understanding that democratic politics has to do contradictory things, and we play our part in that dynamic. That means not buying in completely to the idea that politics is about seeking truth and achieving purity but instead retaining the sense that it’s also an act of collective problem solving.
That double view of politics is hard to face directly because it triggers an unpleasant dissonance. It’s easier to keep switching effortlessly between demands for complete sincerity and demands to just get something done. But forcing either extreme breaks democratic politics. We need to recognize that in politics, inconsistency is a feature, not a bug.
That means realizing that we may not be choosing between truth and lies but between “politicians who are sincere but untruthful and those who are honest but hypocritical.” It means recognizing the value in flawed striving for something better, rather than rejecting the attempt altogether. And it means tolerating the flexing of absolute rules when the context demands compromise.
I’m not urging desiccated centrism, stunted ambitions, or lazy complacency. We shouldn’t abandon political convictions but rather see them as the framework for navigating trade-offs. But the path is not easy. It requires tolerating compromise, incoherence, and maybe even disappointment. That goes against our political instincts and incentives. But maybe those incentives will change if we realize how our overuse of hypocrisy takes us to dark places when it goes unchecked.
Excerpted from The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives by Michael Hallsworth. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2025 by Michael Hallsworth. All rights reserved.
Disclosure: Michael Hallsworth is a member of the BIT which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
