The near-constant accusations of hypocrisy may be a warning sign that something is deeply rotten in U.S. politics. The political theorist Judith Shklar warned 40 years ago about the dangers of a "pattern of ideological politics in which charges of hypocrisy are exchanged with unbroken regularity." She described a form of politics in which rather than arguing over principle, political factions instead tried to prove that their opponents didn't actually believe their own principles. Her message is well worth remembering today.

Born in 1928 in Latvia, her family fled to Canada when she was a child--escaping both the Nazis and the Soviets. She later moved to the U.S. to study, and became a leading political theorist at Harvard. While less remembered than fellow liberal giants of political theory of her era like Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls, her vision of a "liberalism of fear"--in which preventing cruelty, and the fear it creates, by both public and private actors, is the primary goal of liberal politics, has been garnering some renewed attention lately.

In her 1982 book, Ordinary Vices, she makes the case that cruelty is the primary sin of politics, but also devotes a series of essays to several competing political "vices," including hypocrisy.

Shklar doesn't defend hypocrisy, exactly, but sees it as inevitable. The supposed egalitarianism of our society, she writes, "does not arise from sincerity. It is based on the pretense that we must speak to each other as if social standings were a matter of indifference." She continues: "Our manners are just as artificial as those seen at Versailles in Moliere's day, but they are infinitely more democratic."

In her view, democratic debate itself requires us to be a bit hypocritical. It's less important that we have genuine respect for people with whom we fundamentally disagree than that we act as if we do, and conduct ourselves as if those views are worth of respect.

To Shklar, accusing an opponent of hypocrisy in the course of a political debate is a form of "psychic warfare" meant to "collapse his self-image."