Funny how both of these guys are so worried about Obama's believing in his own "mask," but expressed not a word of concern about McCain's self-constructed masks of "the maverick," "the straight talker," and "the man of honor." Especially when you consider the Hobbesian prescription that a politician ought ultimately to be judged by his deeds. A fascinating and enjoyable diavlog otherwise.

I'm not sure that the proper hypocrisy is a sufficient criterion for supporting a candidate. I wonder how Nixon fits in Runciman's theory. In some sense, he was a proper Hobbesian hypocrite. The problem was that he was so grasping for power that it led to his downfall. Also, Reagan was a true believer. His sincerity was genuine and he was very successful as a statesman. I'm not sure that Lincoln is a good example of a sincere politician. He was very calculating and the ultimate pragmatist.

Funny how both of these guys are so worried about Obama's believing in his own "mask," but expressed not a word of concern about McCain's self-constructed masks of "the maverick," "the straight talker," and "the man of honor."

Oh, far worse than that, I thnk. Or at least, the word "honor" is an understatement. McCain has meticulously constructed a mask of the fearless and ferocious warrior. His whole life struggle is obviously about living up to a macho caricature, and he's got a closet full of "manly" costumes, including the straight shooter, maverick, war, hero, etc. As an American Exceptionalist Neocon ideologue he not only has constructed a militaristic mask but also has inherited the weight, the pseudo-gravitas, of the full-body armor of his admiral father and grandfather. The mask that he's going to believe in (in the sense Hobbes would criticize as hypocritical) is the Commander-in-chiefy mask. McCain will finally redeem his mediocre career as a Senator by getting promoted to Admiral of the Whole Wide Free World. That's what he'll start believing in: Ba-ba-bomb Iran, boys. Anchors Aweigh! Obama has no such delusions and neither does Hillary Clinton.

Quoting Wonderment: Oh, far worse than that, I thnk. Or at least, the word "honor" is an understatement.

McCain has meticulously constructed a mask of the fearless and ferocious warrior. His whole life struggle is obviously about living up to a macho caricature, and he's got a closet full of "manly" costumes, including the straight shooter, maverick, war, hero, etc.

As an American Exceptionalist Neocon ideologue he not only has constructed a militaristic mask but also has inherited the weight, the pseudo-gravitas, of the full-body armor of his admiral father and grandfather.

The mask that he's going to believe in (in the sense Hobbes would criticize as hypocritical) is the Commander-in-chiefy mask. McCain will finally redeem his mediocre career as a Senator by getting promoted to Admiral of the Whole Wide Free World. That's what he'll start believing in: Ba-ba-bomb Iran, boys. Anchors Aweigh!

Hmmm. That fits in with the picture that Sydney Schanberg paints, especially this:

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law

no no, you've got it wrong. it's that we've had enough perspective and we don't want to hear it anymore. I'm not sure if you're aware but Wall St. and their buddies just lost trillions of dollars and guess what? The losses became public! The gains are private and the losses have to be cleaned up by me and you.....so really, I've had plenty of "perspective." I don't want to hear any more about free markets because what dems and cons, really, have been making fun of libertarians about - just became reality.

This was a very thought provoking diavlog. I wasn't totally convinced by it though. At first blush it seems it would be best to drop the sanctimony and the deception. For example Mitt Romney, instead of fabricating some story about how he had a change of heart about the abortion issue could have said, "I was an executive in a state where trying to fight for this issue would have been counter-productive, now that I am running on a national ticket I am free to have different priorities." My hunch is that this would have never worked. It even seems rational to be bothered by this story: it's an incomplete contracts problem. So if I would be bothered by honesty why shouldn't I also be bothered by hypocrisy? Is the answer is that we shouldn't care so much about the hypocrisy per se?

"I expect Will is extremely hostile to the notion of corporate bail-outs on any scale." Oh, I'm sure he does and isn't that just so convenient for him? What else are we supposed to do? Let him get his way twice? The people who run the show were given "free" reign and now that they f***ked up so bad we're supposed to .....what? Let Great Depression 2 take over? Or maybe we should "let the market correct itself" and after that total bloodbath is over then all will be right with the world? Libertarianism is total lala land b.s. and the past week has been it's death knell. Not only were its basic tenants mainly untested - once they were tested - total failure. BTW what about the market is the least bit unregulated? The market is a set of rules that govern numbers. What about that scenario is organic in any way? Insider trading rules, short trading rules, futures rules....the entire "market" is just a bunch of rules. What's the point of defining yourself and your life as "someone who wants slightly less rules."? As in: "There's a rules book with 64,000 pages and 4,000 rules governing the

Thanks, I guess, but what's not grounded in reality? That is reality. The only reason we're okay is because they took a trillion of my and your dollars and gave it to irresponsible 'tards. No offense, but I can't imagine how you can be conservative after the last eight years.

Boop, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are no more private than the Post Office, and conservatives and libertarians (who are btw not the same) have never favored their existence. So you're really punching at air here. Also: "free rein", "basic tenets"

Quoting fedorovingtonboop: hey Will, how's dem free markets doin'?. Total collapse? Man, now THAT'S free!

I'm totally with you on this one. Libertarians are totally hosed right now, LOL! Now you can explain to everyone why Will's economic theories have anything to do with this discussion on the advantages and pitfalls of different types of hypocrisy in politics.

yes, they are absolutely, partially private...but only when it's beneficial to them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governm...rise#Ownership
they're only a small part of the big picture here anyway. punching at air?? trillions lost and I'm punching at air?? yeah, cons favored their existence as fully private entities, and if they'd gotten their way we'd still be screwed. i never said cons and libs are the same. retards just lost trillions of dollars because they were insanely, ridiculously reckless and I'm punching at air? wow, truly no one gives a shit, i guess, huh?

they don't have anything to do with the discussion. obviously, I'm pointing out that the questionable judgment of the of the speakers may make you want to skip the whole thing entirely.

Great DV. David pegged perfectly in his Clinton-versus-Obama analysis my (often-stated on this board) long-standing queaziness about Obama's "genuineness" deficit. Obviously, given the sheer insanity of endorsing the GOP's continued pillaging of all that is good about America, there's just no sane alternative to going ahead with attempting to elect Obama, but my qualified support for Obama is still attended by grave doubts on this very issue. Thanks to both. EW

actually wait a minute! my points have everything to do with the subject matter in the diavlog. hypocrisy in politics! how could you (Will) possibly be more hypocritical than to support deregulation and then not own up to anything when you fail miserably? furthermore, this past week could be the most amazing example of hypocrisy in politics ever recorded: a bunch of insane retards, out of sheer greed and with a wink and a nod, lost the investment money of the entire world in hopes of getting even more rich than they already were. instead of making gains, they lost all of it and now guess what? the little people, who they were trying to screw over in the first place, end up having to pay for their idiocy. trillion$

Quoting fedorovingtonboop: they don't have anything to do with the discussion. obviously, I'm pointing out that the questionable judgment of the of the speakers may make you want to skip the whole thing entirely.

Sorry, but I don't find this particular ad hominem arguement compelling. Personally I'm not sure that I even agree with a strong libertarian view of market regulation, but that has nothing to do with this discussion about the role of hypocrisy in politics. This is a perfect illustration of the portion of the discussion in which the eighteenth century view of politeness and hypocrisy as a facilitator of discussion between people who have some irreconcilable differences is clearly valuable even in modern times. It seems to me that there is a tendency in modern politics to bundle up an individual's views into a mass of policies which then allows that individual to be judged as good or bad. In reality, most executors and theorists of policy get lots of things right and lots of things wrong. Clearly we can all agree that Henry Kissinger's application of realism had some exceptionally positive

ok then what about the (updated) argument right below it?

I've read the book . . . David follows a long tradition of academic apologists for leader hypocrisy, but I just don't find these persuasive . . . Gerald Cohen's IF YOU'RE AN EGALITARIAN HOW COME YOU'RE SO RICH is an excellent alternative (and he'd be a fun guy to have on) and I believe there's a direct critique of Runciman, Grant and Shklar forthcoming in the journal POLITY.

Yes, you are punching at air. If you're against having your taxes pay for the mistakes of politically-connected retards, then really you should be over in the libertarian corner. If, on the other hand, you think Fannie Mae was a great idea, go ahead and stand with the Democrats, since it was created during FDR's administration.

One interesting tidbit re the bailout plans that may or may not have been mentioned is that Sec. Paulson supposedly still has somewhere between $100 million and $500 million (i.e., most of his personal fortune) in Goldman Sachs stock . . . I certainly wouldn't say he's "hypocritical" in wanting to bail himself out (including banning short sales of GS stock and, most recently, recategorizing it as a different type of bank than it really is) but it does strike me as an interesting example of a politician's personal behavior being potentially quite directly relevant to their political actions . . . (here's the most recent disclosure re Paulson's assets available). http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/CIDs...9962&year=2005

Mr. Acid Glee is exactly right. To suggest that the collapse of Fannie & Freddie has ANYTHING to do with a failure of "free-markets" reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what went wrong and what forces brought it about.

Quoting fedorovingtonboop: ok then what about the (updated) argument right below it?

The reason that your argument is not convincing is because ad hominem arguments are by their nature fallacious. Who someone is and the actions they have taken do not have any bearing on the logical underpinnings of what they are saying, unless the question at hand is specifically about them. The diavlog at no point engaged in a debate over the potential personal hypocrisy of either participant, but rather the role that hypocrisy plays in modern politics. If you think that hypocrisy is a universally bad thing, that's a position that we can talk about, but simply calling Will a hypocrite does nothing to expand upon the discussion that began in the diavlog. If you do not wish to discuss the content of that discussion, why are you writing comments here?

Regarding the various meanings of "hypocrisy," I've thought for a few years now that the word often gets abused (or grossly overused) and that it would be both more parsimonious and more charitable if people were to revert to the older meaning of the term in most cases. I think Prof. Runciman is entirely correct on at least this point (mentioned toward the beginning of the diavlog), when he talks about the word as used in the 16th--19th centuries. In fact, it's right there in the etymology of the Greek word (hupokrites), an actor playing a character, a stage-player. However, isn't there one very famous counterexample? "Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast." "But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men..." "Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?" Presumably, Christ did not mean the Pharisees were somehow faking belief in Torah law. You'll see the same word used in English New-Testament

Excellent high-brow discussion of a rather low-brow subject: Can there be anything more low-brow (or populist?) than the expectation of sincerity in politicians, especially in their private lives? In the US and the UK this usually boils down to marital fidelity and sexual orthodoxy. Other countries, not blessed with a Puritan heritage, tend to be less exacting on this score... More seriously though: Surely, if we expect politicians to be sincere or non-hypocritical, it is because we are trying to discern how they will govern once they come to power. We want to know what they "truly" and "sincerely" believe because we hope that there will be some connection between their professed beliefs and the policies they eventually implement. According to Mr Runciman, echoing Hobbes, the truly dangerous politicians are those who flaunt the sincerity of their convictions without thinking through the difficulty of governing responsibly. This is a bit sophistical, it seems to me (but maybe I have misunderstood something). It is true that Bush and Blair were all too sincere in their good intentions when they invaded Iraq, but Hobbes was thinking mainly of religious fanatics who were willing to overthrow legitimate

Quoting Francoamerican: Excellent high-brow discussion of a rather low-brow subject: Can there be anything more low-brow (or populist?) than the expectation of sincerity in politicians, especially in their private lives? In the US and the UK this usually boils down to marital fidelity and sexual orthodoxy. Other countries, not blessed with a Puritan heritage, tend to be less exacting on this score...

I take it you're being somewhat ironic here, but it's just not surprising to me that "high-brow" elites typically object to popular anti-hypocrisy . . . though if you want a high-brow Oxford prof who doesn't, I'd again recommend G.A. (Gerald) Cohen . . . I agree with you that marital infidelity is only relevant insofar as it suggests "family values" are hard principles to live by, but in the case of Clinton-Lewinsky the public actually quickly forgave him despite elites declaring it was the biggest crisis in history . . . hypocrisy vis a vis, say, military service, environmentalism and egalitarianism strike me as more substantively important . . . not because Bush and Cheney and/or their kids would single-handedly put us over the top in Iraq or Afghanistan, but because a policy of hawkishness advocated primarily by chicken-hawks betrays a fundamentally aristocratic attitude

not really. If they'd acted responsibly in the first place, which occurred because they were turned into private enterprises, we wouldn't have to bail them out. a lack of libertarian behavior would eliminate the need for being opposed to bailouts because there'd be actual accountability.
also, they were formed by the dems as public corps, not private.

wow, you sound like bill oreilly's talking points memo. what planet are you living on? the entire world thinks we're a joke because we let people buy houses they can't afford. people were defaulting on their first payment. do you have the slightest idea what just happened? they leveraged your money against bad debt bought buy the most irresponsible retards ever.

It went private in 1968 - but if you want to pin this epic failure on both the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society, that's fine with me...

right. anyway,the point is that a publicly owned corp probably wouldn't be taking on ridiculously risky debt so that it'd have to bail itself out. there's not really any way to "spin" this one. pretty much the whole world is watching and we all know whose fault it is.

Thanks for the references. Actually I agree with you. I certainly don't think that important decisions, like whether or not to go to war, should be left up to "experts." The experts (neocons et al) who bamboozled the American public into war with Iraq were liars pure and simple. They manipulated intelligence and then manipulated public opinion through fear and intimidation. They were Machiavellians hiding behind moralistic bombast.

I just like how much Eli is into doing bloggingheads. He's always trying to get other people to be in diavlogues with him . From this one with Welch: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/145...3:08&out=63:32 And from his previous one, with Heather Hurlburt: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/141...3:49&out=44:16 It's like he's all, "Hey, guys! Who wants to go hang out at bloggingheads.tv and do a diavlogue?"

D'oh! I meant to post the above in the thread for Matt Welch's and Eli Lake's recent diavlogue. Too many tabs open to keep them straight.

Quoting bjkeefe: Funny how both of these guys are so worried about Obama's believing in his own "mask," but expressed not a word of concern about McCain's self-constructed masks of "the maverick," "the straight talker," and "the man of honor." Especially when you consider the Hobbesian prescription that a politician ought ultimately to be judged by his deeds.

A fascinating and enjoyable diavlog otherwise.

I think that has more to do with the book than anything else. It would have been nice to hear a view of McCain though.

Quoting Wonderment: Oh, far worse than that, I thnk. Or at least, the word "honor" is an understatement.

McCain has meticulously constructed a mask of the fearless and ferocious warrior. His whole life struggle is obviously about living up to a macho caricature, and he's got a closet full of "manly" costumes, including the straight shooter, maverick, war, hero, etc.

As an American Exceptionalist Neocon ideologue he not only has constructed a militaristic mask but also has inherited the weight, the pseudo-gravitas, of the full-body armor of his admiral father and grandfather.

The mask that he's going to believe in (in the sense Hobbes would criticize as hypocritical) is the Commander-in-chiefy mask. McCain will finally redeem his mediocre career as a Senator by getting promoted to Admiral of the Whole Wide Free World. That's what he'll start believing in: Ba-ba-bomb Iran, boys. Anchors Aweigh!

Obama has no such delusions and neither does Hillary Clinton.

What they were arguing is that masks are necessary hypocrisy of political power. What they were arguing that sincerity does not make you any less of a hypocrite in fact it can make you a more dangerous hypocrite. They were doubting Obama's level of self awareness about