There is a particular kind of hypocrisy in American politics that we usually explain as selfishness.
Someone takes advantage of a government program, then votes to eliminate it.
Someone receives financial assistance, then complains about other people receiving financial assistance.
Someone benefits from a social program for years, then suddenly becomes deeply concerned about government spending when someone else qualifies for it.
We call these people hypocrites.
But I think something more interesting is happening.
Because hypocrisy describes the contradiction.
It doesn’t explain it.
The better question is this:
Why would someone enthusiastically accept something for themselves, then become angry when somebody else receives exactly the same thing?
I recently came across an almost perfect example.
A conservative baby boomer was talking about student loan forgiveness. He explained that he had student loan debt himself and that his debt had been forgiven under Joe Biden.
He accepted it.
He benefited from it.
But now that Donald Trump is president, his position is that other people shouldn’t have their student loan debt forgiven.
His forgiveness was apparently justified.
Yours isn’t.
At first glance, this makes absolutely no sense.
If student loan forgiveness is morally wrong, why did he accept it?
If people have an obligation to repay the money they borrowed, why didn’t that obligation apply to him?
If forgiving debt rewards irresponsible behavior, why wasn’t his forgiveness rewarding irresponsible behavior?
You can keep asking questions like this forever, but you’re unlikely to find a consistent ideological principle.
Because the principle might not actually be the point.
The hierarchy might be.
The Difference Between Having Something and Having More Than You
Psychologists have spent years studying something called narcissistic rivalry.
Researchers Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, Michael Dufner and their colleagues developed a model of grandiose narcissism that separates it into two different strategies.
The first is narcissistic admiration.
This is the part that attempts to elevate the self. Someone wants to be impressive, successful, admired or exceptional.
But the second strategy is much darker.
Narcissistic rivalry is about protecting a superior position by devaluing other people.
That distinction is incredibly important.
Imagine two people who both want to feel successful.
The first person thinks:
I want to succeed.
The second thinks:
I need to succeed relative to you.
Those sound similar.
Psychologically, they are very different.
The first person can watch you become successful without losing anything. Your success doesn’t change theirs.
The second person has a problem.
Because if their psychological reward comes from occupying a superior position, your success threatens the distance between you.
They don’t necessarily need to lose anything tangible for this to happen.
They can have exactly as much money, exactly as much property and exactly as many opportunities as they had yesterday.
But if you move closer to them, their relative position has changed.
And sometimes relative position is the thing they actually value.
What If the Point Isn’t Winning?
Imagine you are the only person in your neighborhood with a swimming pool.
Every summer, everyone sees your pool.
You have something they don’t.
Then every house on your street gets one.
You haven’t lost your swimming pool.
It’s exactly the same pool.
It works exactly the same way.
Its usefulness to you hasn’t changed at all.
But one thing has disappeared.
The distinction.
You no longer have something everyone else doesn’t.
For someone motivated primarily by enjoying the pool, that shouldn’t matter very much.
For someone motivated by the status attached to owning the pool, it can matter enormously.
That difference helps explain a lot more than swimming pools.
It helps explain why people can support a benefit when it elevates them and oppose that same benefit when it elevates everybody else.
Because sometimes what looks like a fight over resources is really a fight over relative status.
Zero Sum Politics
There is another psychological concept that helps explain this.
Zero sum thinking.
Zero sum thinking is the tendency to interpret one person’s gain as another person’s loss, even when the situation doesn’t actually require that tradeoff.
If you win, I lose.
If your life improves, my position declines.
If your group advances, my group must be surrendering something.
Researchers studying zero sum beliefs have found that these perceptions can emerge even when resources aren’t objectively zero sum.
And this is where politics becomes interesting.
Suppose the government forgives your neighbor’s student loan tomorrow.
What happens to the student loan that was forgiven for you five years ago?
Nothing.
It remains forgiven.
Suppose someone else gets access to healthcare.
Do you lose your doctor?
No.
Suppose a poor family receives food assistance.
Does food disappear from your refrigerator?
No.
Suppose another person gets an opportunity that helped you earlier in your life.
Does your previous success disappear?
Again, no.
Yet these policies can still generate enormous resentment.
Why?
Because under zero sum thinking, we don’t necessarily evaluate outcomes according to what we possess.
We evaluate them according to where we stand.
And those are not the same thing.
“But I Deserved It”
There is still a psychological problem that has to be solved.
Most people don’t want to think of themselves as hypocrites.
You need some explanation for why taking the benefit was acceptable when you did it but unacceptable when someone else does it.
Fortunately, the human mind is exceptionally good at creating one.
I deserved it.
That’s the escape hatch.
My circumstances were different.
I worked hard.
I paid taxes.
I made good decisions.
I fell on hard times.
I needed help.
I earned it.
But when someone else needs exactly the same assistance, we suddenly become forensic accountants examining every decision they have made since birth.
Why didn’t they work harder?
Why did they borrow the money?
Why did they have children?
Why don’t they get another job?
Why should taxpayers pay for them?
Notice what happened.
When evaluating ourselves, we have access to the entire context of our lives.
We know our struggles, our intentions, our sacrifices and our explanations.
When evaluating somebody else, we can reduce their entire existence to a moral judgment.
That creates an incredibly convenient political worldview.
My benefits are earned. Your benefits are handouts.
The Ladder Only Matters If Someone Is Below You
This is why the phrase “pulling the ladder up behind you” has survived for so long.
It captures something deeper than ordinary selfishness.
You used the ladder.
The ladder helped you climb.
And once you’re safely at the top, you don’t merely stop caring whether the next person climbs.
You actively remove the ladder.
Why?
Because leaving it there changes the hierarchy.
This is the part of conservative politics that often gets disguised as individualism.
There is nothing inherently individualistic about taking advantage of collective resources.
Americans use collective resources constantly.
Public roads.
Public schools.
Mortgage subsidies.
Tax deductions.
Social Security.
Medicare.
Business incentives.
Agricultural subsidies.
Government contracts.
Disaster assistance.
Student loan programs.
The American economy is filled with mechanisms through which government distributes advantages, absorbs risks and creates opportunities.
The argument is rarely whether government should influence people’s economic lives.
It already does.
The political fight is often over who deserves to benefit from it.
And that is a very different argument.
When Privilege Becomes Normal.
There is another reason this psychology can be difficult to recognize.
Benefits we receive for long enough stop feeling like benefits.
They start feeling normal.
Imagine two people standing on different platforms.
One person is standing three feet higher than the other.
After enough time passes, the person on the higher platform stops noticing the platform.
From his perspective, that’s simply where the ground is.
Now raise the other person three feet.
The first person hasn’t moved.
Nothing has been taken from him.
But suddenly they are standing at the same height.
If his identity was partly constructed around being above the other person, equality can feel surprisingly similar to losing something.
That is one of the strangest things about status.
You can lose status without losing a single possession.
All that has to change is somebody else’s position.
This Explains the Contradictions
Once you start looking at politics through this lens, certain contradictions become easier to understand.
Someone can accept a government subsidy and oppose subsidies.
Someone can benefit from public assistance and attack public assistance.
Someone can employ immigrant labor while demanding harsher immigration policies.
Someone can take advantage of a government program and then demand that the program disappear.
And someone can have his student loan debt forgiven and then insist that nobody else’s student loan debt should be forgiven.
The behavior looks incoherent only if you assume the stated principle is the real motivation.
But substitute another principle:
I should be allowed to advance without allowing you to catch up.
Suddenly the contradiction starts disappearing.
The policy changes.
The justification changes.
The circumstances change.
But the hierarchy remains intact.
The Most Important Word Is “Relative”
This is why conversations about inequality so often go nowhere.
One side might be talking about absolute conditions.
Does this policy make people’s lives better?
Can more people afford healthcare?
Can more people buy homes?
Can families afford food?
Can young people escape crushing debt?
But another person can be evaluating the same policy through relative position.
Who gets something?
Who pays?
Who deserves it?
Who moves upward?
Who becomes equal to me?
Who is above whom?
These are fundamentally different ways of evaluating society.
One asks whether people are doing better.
The other asks where everybody stands in relation to everybody else.
And if your psychological satisfaction comes partly from being above someone, universal prosperity creates a strange problem.
Everyone can become richer while you feel poorer.
Everyone can gain rights while you feel you’ve lost rights.
Everyone can gain opportunities while you feel opportunities have been taken from you.
Nothing has necessarily been removed.
The distance has simply gotten smaller.
I Got Mine
That brings us back to the man whose student loan was forgiven.
His story is interesting precisely because nothing theoretical is required.
He already answered the most important question.
Do you believe student loan debt should ever be forgiven?
Apparently yes.
We know that because when his own debt was eligible for forgiveness, he accepted it.
The disagreement begins only when the beneficiary changes.
And that is where political psychology becomes far more interesting than political rhetoric.
People will give you elaborate ideological explanations for their beliefs.
Government spending.
Personal responsibility.
Fairness.
Markets.
Taxes.
Freedom.
But sometimes the easiest way to understand what someone actually believes isn’t to listen to what they say when somebody else receives something.
Watch what they do when the opportunity is offered to them.
Do they refuse the subsidy?
Do they return the government check?
Do they reject the tax deduction?
Do they decline the loan forgiveness?
Or do they take the benefit and discover their ideological objection afterward?
Because sometimes the real political philosophy isn’t complicated at all.
It’s four words.
I got mine.
You can’t have yours.
Sources
Back, M. D., Küfner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry: Disentangling the Bright and Dark Sides of Narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013-1037. DOI: 10.1037/a0034431.
Grosz, M. P., Hartmann, I., Dufner, M., Leckelt, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., Denissen, J. J. A., Küfner, A. C. P., & Back, M. D. (2022). A Process × Domain Assessment of Narcissism: The Domain-Specific Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire. Assessment, 29(7). DOI: 10.1177/10731911211020075.
Leckelt, M., Küfner, A. C. P., Nestler, S., & Back, M. D. (2015). Behavioral Processes Underlying the Decline of Narcissists’ Popularity Over Time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000057.
Davidai, S., & Tepper, S. J. (2023). The Psychology of Zero-Sum Beliefs. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 472-482. DOI: 10.1038/s44159-023-00194-9.
Grove, J. L., Smith, T. W., Girard, J. M., & Wright, A. G. C. (2019). Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry: An Interpersonal Approach to Construct Validation. Journal of Personality Disorders.
