The question is never whether businesses should have to serve people whose identities they disdain or whose ideologies they object to. It’s about whether Christians can claim victimhood more readily as business owners who don’t want to serve LGBTQ customers or as would-be diners who restaurant workers don’t want to serve. It’s never about whether states or the federal government should control abortion law. It’s about Republicans getting the electoral advantage.
So rather than talking about these turnabouts as hypocrisy, we should be talking about how they show that Republicans don’t believe the rules should ever apply to them. How they’re rejecting any accountability for the powerful even as they insist on the most brutal forms of punishment for people without power. How all they care about is themselves and what benefits them right now, without any thought to anyone else or a future past their own most immediate ambitions.
Whether the positions Republicans take at any two moments in time can be reconciled with each other doesn’t matter. What matters is that they think it’s helpful to them at that moment. In that sense, the entire right-wing worldview is like how Donald Trump lies. He doesn’t usually do it in big strategic ways. He doesn’t think ahead. He doesn’t care if he gets caught. He’s just looking to control a specific moment, gain dominance of an interaction, and then move on and dismiss as irrelevant whatever it was he said in pursuit of that.
Yes, it’s a completely bankrupt worldview. Of course it is. But to fight it, we need to be clear about what it is we’re watching in action.
