"They're The Same Picture"

If you spend any time at all on social media, you’ll very quickly run into the claims that both sides are terrible and all politicians are the same. Sure, this policy or that policy from the Republicans might be particularly egregious, but that’s only because the Democrats don’t have the ability in this moment to do something that’s basically just as corrupt or nefarious. The comment is delivered with a sense of confidence and finality: cynical detachment is the only rational response to the contemporary American political landscape.

This isn’t a new or surprising conclusion to reach, especially when our politics seem so messy and our politicians so prone to disappointing us. The news is a never-ending circus of dysfunction and even elected officials from the party we support seem willing to compromise in ways that make us cringe. But, at a moment when liberalism as a political philosophy is facing off with a straightforwardly illiberal brand of politics, the idea that everyone is equally bad is less a clever insight and more a dangerous false equivalence. It’s also a kind of luxury, thriving on detachment and flattering the speaker as someone too savvy to be fooled by the politicians who are all cut from the same cloth. This way of thinking allows us to absolve ourselves from having to engage too deeply with the actual stakes of democratic life.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of saying “they’re all corrupt,” or “I don’t trust either party.” It makes us feel savvy, like we’ve cracked the code of politics. It allows people to float above the mess while also paying oneself a compliment and avoiding having to do a lot of deep thinking about what’s actually going on.

It’s also, frankly, a luxury we can’t afford when the basic norms and institutions of liberal democracy are under siege. We don’t have to love or agree with every policy, politician, or strategy on either side, but not all dysfunction is democratically equivalent. So what I want to suggest is that, rather than washing our hands of politics entirely, we focus on the illiberalism and work to root it out.

When some politicians are openly embracing election denialism and racial gerrymandering, glorifying political violence as patriotism, pushing book bans and demonizing journalists, promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, and bilking taxpayers to enrich themselves, well, the idea that “they’re all terrible” amounts to intellectual negligence. We can debate policy priorities or legislative tactics, but if one politician is pushing authoritarian ideas and another isn’t, they’re not the same.

Liberalism, as both a political philosophy and a series of governing norms and institutions, depends on our ability to make distinctions. It thrives when we debate and disagree. But when one politician advertises a plan to throw Zionists in concentration camps and castrate them, we can’t throw up our hands and say, “They all do it; that’s politics.” When one politician wants to expand access to voting and another vows to make it more difficult, we need to respond to the difference. One side has a liberal political vision and the other has an illiberal one. It matters a lot to our society because authoritarianism loves false equivalence. If illiberal politicians can line their pockets and lie a hundred times a day while citizens come to believe that all politicians are liars, that all news is fake, that all parties are equally self-serving, then we’re well on our way to a politics that centers power instead of trust and truth.

This might sound harsh, but the choices that we’re facing aren’t between perfection and imperfection as much as they’re between imperfection and collapse. We need to be clear that Candidate X and Candidate Y aren’t the same if only one of them will defend the conditions—pluralism, civil rights, transparency and accountability, the peaceful transfer of power—under which liberal political discourse can even take place. As I wrote last week, when it comes to candidates, I know no one’s perfect and that I’m never going to be able to vote for someone who agrees with every position I hold. What I want is a “reasonable person who will take my call and think seriously about what I’m asking.” If one candidate shows us the data that proves our elections are secure and the other insists that the data is all lies and we have to count ballots by hand because he believes President Trump’s baseless claims of massive fraud, there’s a clear and important difference.

These differences aren’t trivial and so we have to commit to telling the truth about what’s happening. And the truth is that it’s pretty much never the case that both sides are equally terrible and all politicians are the same. Rather than turning our backs on politics and leaving the field to bad actors, we can spend this election year calling out the autocrats and supporting the political liberals.