Part 3 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series →
Last installment I said I’d take up the question you hear at every Little League snack bar and every Thanksgiving table the second you start documenting things one party has actually done. But Democrats do this too. The asymmetry isn’t real, you’re just on a team, both sides are corrupt, both sides take the money, both sides lie. I’ve heard a version of it a hundred times in person, and I have said versions of it myself.
I want to take it seriously rather than glide past it. Both sides being hypocrites is genuinely true. The question I’ve been chewing on is whether the hypocrisy is the same kind of hypocrisy, at the same scale, and the same depth — because if it is, then this whole series is partisan hackery and you should stop reading. And if it isn’t, that distinction is the most important thing on the table.
Let me start with the Democrats, since that’s the harder case to make if you’re already inclined to write me off.
Where Democrats actually are hypocrites
The Democratic brand is the party of working people. Labor unions. The middle class. Healthcare for all. Higher wages.
And then there is the record.
In 2018, Republicans put forward a bill called the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, S.2155, known in shorthand as the Dodd-Frank rollback. It raised the asset threshold at which a bank had to be subjected to the strictest federal stress tests from $50 billion up to $250 billion, freeing dozens of medium-sized banks from the post-2008 oversight regime. Seventeen Senate Democrats voted with all Republicans to pass it. Several of the lead Democratic supporters — Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, Mark Warner — were also running for reelection that year in states where the banking industry was a major donor base. Five years later, in March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. The Federal Reserve’s own postmortem identified the 2018 rollback as a contributing cause, noting that under the prior rules SVB would have been subject to stricter oversight at least three years earlier. So seventeen Senate Democrats helped pass a bill the Federal Reserve subsequently said helped enable the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. That is hypocrisy. That is “party of working people” voting for the donor class.
In 2022, when Democrats controlled the Senate and were passing the Inflation Reduction Act through reconciliation, an amendment was added to exempt private equity firms from the new 15% corporate minimum tax. Seven Senate Democrats joined Republicans to pass that exemption, worth tens of billions of dollars to one of the wealthiest industries in the country. Several of the same Dems also helped block a $35-per-month insulin cap for non-Medicare patients in the same bill. Private equity got the carve-out. Diabetics did not. That is hypocrisy.
The clearest one, for me, is healthcare. In 2003, Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, told an AFL-CIO conference: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program.” In 2009, with Democrats holding the House, the Senate, and the White House, the single-payer option was not just dropped — it was kept out of the legislative conversation entirely. The bill that passed became the Affordable Care Act, written largely with input from the insurance industry it was supposed to constrain. By 2018, comfortably out of office, Obama was again talking up Medicare for All. The pattern is: campaign on single-payer when you do not have the power to pass it, drop it when you do. That is hypocrisy.
So yes. Some Democrats take corporate money and vote for the people who pay them. Some Democrats campaign on policies they later quietly kill. None of that is in dispute. The party has a real Wall Street-friendly faction, and that faction has done real damage.
But the Republican pattern is different in shape
Here is where the “both sides” argument starts to lose its footing. The Democrats’ hypocrisy is individual hypocrisy. The Republicans’ hypocrisy is the platform.
The Republican brand has been fiscal responsibility for forty years. The actual record: Reagan inherited roughly $1 trillion in national debt and left office at $2.85 trillion. George H.W. Bush left office at $4.4 trillion. George W. Bush took it from $5.7 trillion to $11.9 trillion. Trump in his first term took it from roughly $20 trillion to $27.7 trillion — about $3 trillion of that increase was the 2017 tax cuts alone, before COVID added the rest. Every modern Republican president has exploded the national debt while campaigning on cutting it. Every modern Democratic president — Clinton, Obama, Biden — either reduced the deficit or left it lower than they found it. Clinton left a surplus.
That is not one or two members being hypocritical. That is every president of the party for forty years doing the opposite of what the platform promises.
The brand has also been “law and order” for as long as I can remember. The current party leader is a man with 34 felony convictions on the New York books, two impeachments, a federal-fraud civil judgment, a sexual-abuse finding in the E. Jean Carroll case, and an outstanding pardon promise to the people who attacked 140 police officers on January 6, 2021. The “back the blue” party is being led by the person who pardoned the people who hit cops with bear spray and flagpoles. Again — not one member off the reservation. The whole platform contradicts the brand.
The brand has been “small government” since Reagan. In practice, the past decade has been state legislators dictating what can be in school libraries, what can be taught about race in a public school classroom, what doctors can say to a pregnant woman, what a transgender teenager can do, what a drag performer can wear in public, and what kind of mail-order pill is legal in a given zip code. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law tells public school teachers which words they can use with kindergartners. The Texas abortion law deputized random citizens to sue anyone who helped a woman get a procedure. None of that is small government. It is the government in your kitchen, your library, your daughter’s bedroom, and your doctor’s office. The party that says it wants the state out of your life is the party building the new architecture for the state being in your life.
The brand has lately become “party of the working class.” Trump took 40% of union households in 2024. Meanwhile every Senate Republican has voted against the PRO Act, against raising the federal minimum wage (still $7.25 an hour since 2009), against expanded overtime protections, and for national right-to-work legislation that economists across the spectrum agree depresses wages for all workers, not just union workers. 100% of Republicans voting against worker protections, 100% of the time, while branding the party as the home of the working man.
I am not saying any one of these examples is going to surprise you. I am saying that when you put them next to each other, what you have is not a few hypocrites in a party that has a working majority of people willing to live up to its platform. What you have is the platform itself running in the opposite direction of the brand, with no internal voices saying guys, we should at least try to do what we said.
Why the shape of the hypocrisy is the actual point
When my friend at the Little League field says “both sides,” what he is pointing at is real. Democrats absolutely take corporate money. Democrats absolutely kill their own policies when their donors do not like them. Democrats absolutely have hypocrites in their caucus.
What I keep coming back to, though, is whether there is a faction inside that caucus pushing back on the hypocrisy. With Democrats, there is one. Elizabeth Warren is a sitting senator and has built her whole career on it. Bernie Sanders has been arguing for Medicare for All for thirty years on the Senate floor. AOC and her cohort will primary a member of their own party who takes industry money. Heidi Heitkamp lost reelection in 2018. Joe Donnelly lost. Claire McCaskill lost. Voters in those states fired the very hypocrites the party kept fighting about. There is an open civil war inside the Democratic Party between its corporate wing and its progressive wing, and you can watch it play out in real time at every primary.
With Republicans, there is no equivalent fight. There is no GOP senator currently arguing publicly that the party should pull back from its post-Trump direction. The Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger wing was purged from the House. Mitt Romney retired. Ben Sasse retired. Lisa Murkowski has been the only consistent crossover vote and she is one of a hundred. The internal opposition has either been removed, retired, or silenced. The hypocrisy is the platform, and the platform is what every Republican gets nominated to defend.
That is not the same shape of hypocrisy. One side has hypocrites and a real faction fighting them. The other side has total unity around a contradiction.
I am not saying Democrats are honest and Republicans are dishonest. I am saying the kind of dishonesty differs in a way that matters, especially when the question is whether reform is possible from inside the party. Inside one party, you can primary your way toward better candidates. Inside the other, there is no candidate to primary toward.
If you came into this part hoping I was going to say “both sides are equally bad, throw them all out, vote third party,” I understand the impulse. I have it some days myself. But after a year of watching this up close, I don’t think it tracks. They are both flawed. They are not the same kind of flawed.
Part 4 is about what happens when those contradictions are not bugs but features — Steve Bannon’s old “flood the zone” line, and what it does to your ability as a regular person to keep track of any of it.
Even that's Odd 
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