“It’s an emperor’s-new-clothes moment,” says Duke University political scientist Ruth Grant, author of “Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics.”
Much like the phenomenon of the ketman principle in totalitarian countries, Ms. Grant says that hypocrisy is also particularly common in liberal democracies like the United States, where fealty is paid to high moral ideals while the actual conditions are tied more to power and political pragmatism.
For women more broadly, it may also be a time of greater introspection – and challenging assumptions, says Grant. She says the push to call out hypocrisy even if it spotlights your own individual or group’s flaws has already crossed partisan lines.
Political Science