We Should Want Our Politicians to Be Hypocrites

By Logan Tantibanchachai

Thursday, October 29, 2026

 

Hypocrisy has become the defining accusation of our political moment. The standard response to being accused of some moral failing by one’s political opponents is to go “but they did it, too.” Accusations of hypocrisy abound. Simultaneously, the obsession with hypocrisy has coincided with a separate, but no less pernicious, desire for our politicians to be authentic.

 

Put those two impulses together and you come to a surprising conclusion. If the worst thing a person can be is a hypocrite, the surest way to avoid that accusation is to abandon moral standards altogether. You can’t be caught falling short of an ideal you never claimed. The politician who campaigns as a family man and gets caught with a mistress is a hypocrite; the politician who openly degrades and takes advantage of women is authentic. Many in today’s society seem to have determined that the second person is better.

 

But that’s backward. We should want our politicians to be hypocrites. More precisely, we should want them to profess standards higher than the ones they can reliably meet, and to suffer when they fail to meet those standards. That’s both because setting moral standards for our nation’s leaders matters and, more important, because the moral character of our leaders affects, for better or worse, the moral character of the American people.

 

The ideal politician is one of genuine integrity; the hypocrite only becomes preferable when it comes to the question of moral failing. That is, when our politicians fail to act virtuously, how do we want them to respond in setting moral standards? Do we want them to lower their standards in response (act “authentically”) or to continue setting high standards and to continue failing them (act “hypocritically”)?

 

The tribute vice pays to virtue.

 

François de La Rochefoucauld, the 17^th-century French moralist, famously said “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” The hypocrite hides his failings because he knows they are failings, and his concealment amounts to an implicit admission that the rule is right and he is wrong. By contrast, the shameless—the “authentic”—man concedes nothing. In proudly admitting to his moral failings, he rejects the notion that they are failings.

 

This does not justify hypocrisy, but in those who lead, it does mean hypocrisy is preferable to many of the alternatives. The biblical saying that the law is a teacher applies to the people who make the law, too. When a politician speaks publicly, he signals to the public what acceptable conduct looks like. And when leaders hold themselves to a higher standard, even one they sometimes fail to reach, they reinforce it for everyone watching. But when they openly dismiss that standard, they create a permission structure for everyone else to dismiss it as well.

 

In general, our society rests on that principle. We have wide latitude to be crude, petty, or sinful in private, and in return we are obligated by the norms of decency not to celebrate those things in public. Normally we judge people by what they say and do in the open. When private misconduct comes to light, however, the offender is expected, depending on how serious it is, to acknowledge and repent for it. What constitutes repentance can vary, but what should be unacceptable is the refusal to repent altogether—and for most of American history it was. For example, when Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds came to light, he published a lengthy confession, admitting that “this confession is not made without a blush.” More recently, even Bill Clinton, after months of denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky, stood before religious leaders and said, “I have sinned.”

 

The price of authenticity.

 

We can already see the results of valuing authenticity above all else. Look at who has built enormous audiences in recent years, especially among young men. On the right, Nick Fuentes broadcasts a message of overt antisemitism, misogyny, and racism, and his followers cheer it. On the left, Hasan Piker has built a similarly substantial following off comments like “America deserved 9/11.” While the two aren’t identical, and neither represent the entirety of their movements, they share an appeal to authenticity—in both cases, their audiences trust that they’ll speak their minds. And for these two, transgression seems to be proof of that sincerity. (Fuentes himself seems to recognize this, arguing in one interview that his mass appeal comes from “authenticity.”) An audience highly prone to conspiratorial thinking assumes that all mainstream political rhetoric is scripted and, thus, exiting that mainstream represents sincerity. For the followers of this sort of content, then, moral transgression is in itself a credential, and the more ugly the transgression, the more credible the speaker.

 

But their audiences don’t follow them in spite of their vices; they follow them because Fuentes and Piker refuse to pretend that they don’t have them. Every viewer who says “at least he’s honest” has accepted the idea that the pretense of decency, the lack of authenticity, is the real problem in our politics today. And that is the downstream effect of our leaders abandoning a pretense of decency—because what’s the point of trying to be better if the people at the top can’t even pretend to be better than they are.

 

The old norms kept figures like Fuentes and Piker away from public discourse. That wasn’t because the gatekeepers were saints themselves, since many were hypocrites. But their hypocrisy did useful work in keeping the ugliest ideas on the fringes of public life: Having publicly professed standards of decency, they were bound to enforce those same standards. In 2002, for instance, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott toasted Strom Thurmond’s 100^th birthday by saying that if the country had elected him on his 1948 segregationist ticket, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Within two weeks, following a public condemnation from President George W. Bush, Lott had apologized repeatedly and stepped down from his leadership post. By contrast, look at the current White House’s response to an advertisement by Republicans in Ohio that many have deemed wrong and offensive; they have doubled down and criticized opposition to the ad.

 

Hypocrisy and the American promise.

 

Political theorists have understood the necessity for political hypocrisy for a long time. The political scientist Ruth Grant argues that some hypocrisy is unavoidable in democratic politics, because politicians have to persuade voters and build coalitions around shared goods while making trade-offs that favor some interests over others. She suggests that how often we see hypocrisy in politics shows how strong the moral impulse in public life still is: Nobody bothers to describe their motives in terms of the common good unless the audience still cares about the common good. The British political theorist David Runciman goes further. The real danger, he warns, isn’t a politics rife with hypocrisy, but instead a politics without hypocrisy at all, where leaders forthrightly announce the terrible things they plan to do and their followers applaud the candor.

 

American history offers examples of how hypocrisy can lead to worthy ends. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, articulated the American ideal that “all men are created equal,” while enslaving hundreds throughout his life. That was hypocrisy of the gravest kind and Jefferson’s legacy is still contested today. But because his words were written down, later generations could hold the country up against those lofty ideals. Frederick Douglass did so when he asked what the Fourth of July could mean to the enslaved. Abraham Lincoln did the same at Gettysburg. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Declaration and Constitution a “promissory note” that the nation had yet to honor. None of them asked America to lower its ideals to meet its conduct. Instead, they asked that America’s conduct rise to meet its ideals. But that demand would not have even been possible if the Founders, in an appeal to authenticity, had never professed those ideals.

 

Three kinds of politicians.

 

There are three kinds of politicians. The first is the person of real integrity, who professes high standards and largely lives by them. The second is the hypocrite, who professes those same standards and falls short. The third is the shameless “authentic” figure, who professes nothing and so can never be caught failing moral standards.

 

All else equal, we want the first, and we should never stop hoping for, looking for, and electing such leaders. But the nature of politics, and the fallen nature of man, means we won’t always get the first kind. And when we don’t, a hypocrite who still answers to real standards is far better than a leader who has discarded them entirely.

 

This is not a defense of lying. Nor is it a defense of sin. Hypocrites should be held to account. But how we hold them to account matters. There are two ways to close the gap between what we say and what we do: raise our conduct or lower our standards. We’ve, by and large, chosen the second. But just because that may be the easier option doesn’t mean it’s the right one. We—regardless of our political convictions—should raise the moral standards for our politicians, not lower them in the name of authenticity. The standards we set for those who lead us become the standards we set for ourselves, and we should want better for ourselves and our children.