The Unbearable Thinness of Being

How they live with themselves, revisited.

HAVING SURVIVED ANOTHER ELECTION CYCLE, the ads, the pundits, the incessant appeals for money,  I find myself once again pondering the question of how politicians live with the hypocrisy and duplicity. How does Lindsay Graham, for example, call Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” in 2016, then become his biggest booster for the next four years, then say “Count me out, I’m through” after January 6, then again become Trump’s golf buddy because he has “magic?” How does Ted Cruz stand by Trump’s side after his wife is humiliated and his father is accused of assassinating JFK? How does J.D. Vance write Hillbilly Elegy, then become a toady even as Trump declares “J.D. is kissing my ass?” And I don’t even ask about Mitch McConnell. I’m not sure he’s even human.

The short answer, of course, is that they do what the need to do to gain office or keep it. When Trump became president, Graham and Cruz and most other Republicans determined that anything other than full-throated adulation was hazardous to their careers. Many Republican candidates in the recent midterms made a similar calculation. For some it paid off, for others it didn’t.

But I think there’s more to this than simple expediency and calculation. I recall from Psychology 100 that people will go to great extremes to avoid or reduce cognitive dissonance; that is, to maintain a coherent set of ideas, free of conflict or inconsistency. How do these guys live with so much of it?

I believe a politician learns early and by gradual steps to manage cognitive dissonance. Right from the start of your first political campaign, there are inevitable conflicts among issues and the positions you take on them. Or your own views on a matter of public discourse might conflict with the majority of your voters or, if already in office, your constituents. Maybe you’re a dove on military matters but a large defense firm employs hundreds of your voter base. Or you think the police need to be reined in but a crime wave is tormenting your community. In such cases, you must find a way to hedge or dissimulate—only a little, of course—to stay afloat.

By the time you’ve been in national office for a while, this behavior has become habitual. You’re accustomed to asking your staff “What should my position be on this?” Over time, the gulf between your political persona and your “real” self becomes normal and familiar. You don’t even notice it anymore.

 The best evidence of this bifurcation of the self was given by Cassidy Hutchinson in her testimony before the January 6 committee. Asked how she felt about the chaos and criminality that she’d witnessed in the White House, she said that as a member of the administration staff, she was “disappointed.” But then she continued: “As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie. And it was something that was really hard, in that moment, to digest, knowing what I’d been hearing down the hall, and the conversations that were happening.”

And there it was. Ms. Hutchinson, like so many of those in politics at both high and low levels of power, had compartmentalized her persona into two separate beings. There was Cassidy the White House staffer who felt “disappointed,” and there was Cassidy the American who was “disgusted.” That sort of bifurcation of one’s personality—of one’s moral compass—is “difficult to digest,” indeed.

Of course, she’s a relative amateur to this compartmentalization. Pros like Lindsay Graham and others have fewer gastrointestinal issues as they continue to sell their country out. The trick is to make sure to stay in your political role and push your citizen role deep, deep, down where you can’t hear its screams. Since the political part of a senator’s life tends to dominate, that’s not too hard.

I’m sure Dr. Jekyll must have felt it, too.