Principled or Partisan? Part 1 of 2
The Erosion of Democratic Values
A note to the reader: This week’s newsletter tackles uncomfortable territory - the gap between our democratic principles and our partisan practices. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about whether principles matter at all, or if they’re just convenient tools we deploy against our enemies and abandon when they implicate our allies. Some examples will challenge comfortable narratives on all sides. That’s the point.
This is Part 1 of a 2-Part Essay
The Cartoon Test
In 2015, gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve people over satirical cartoons of Muhammad. The Western world rallied around a principle: freedom of speech is sacred, even when — especially when — it offends, it challenges, it exposes.
“Je suis Charlie” — “I am Charlie” — became a global rallying cry. We stood firm: in a democracy, no religious sensibility or any sensibility for that matter, however deeply felt, can justify silencing expression. The principle seemed clear, unambiguous, worth defending at the highest levels of government and culture.
This evokes the famous quote attributed to the famous French philosopher Voltaire: I may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the celebrated U.S. Supreme Court Justice made what is considered the definitive statement on freedom of speech in 1929:
if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.
Heady stuff. Noble sentiments.
Now fast forward to 2024. University students organized peaceful protests supporting Palestinian rights. Administrators banned demonstrations. Police arrested protesters, sometimes violently. Politicians around the world demanded crackdowns, sometimes callously. And remarkably, many of the same voices who championed Charlie Hebdo now called for censorship, for restrictions, for police crackdowns, for consequences from exercising the previously sanctified freedom of speech.
The principle didn’t change. The target did.
This is the core question of our time, the one that cuts through every political debate, every cultural battle, every crisis of institutional trust:
Do we actually have principles, or are we just partisans?
Is freedom of speech a cherished principle?
Or only when the speaker is from our team and only when the message is in line with our beliefs?
Does Oliver Wendell Holmes’ plea for “freedom for the thought that we hate” now fall on deaf ears?
When Outrage Becomes Selective
Consider how we calibrate our outrage over political violence. In 2020, massive nationwide protests followed George Floyd’s murder. Most demonstrations were nonviolent, but some turned destructive, with property damage, arson, injuries, and a number of deaths. Police in many cities responded with riot gear, tear gas, “less‑lethal” munitions such as rubber bullets, and thousands of arrests. Elected officials from both parties condemned the looting and attacks that occurred, even as they differed sharply over how to characterize and respond to the broader protest movement. The dominant official line was that violence and destruction, even when attached to a grievance many saw as legitimate, could not be accepted in a democracy.
Then came January 6, 2021. A mob forced its way into the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 Presidential election. The attack left five people dead in connection with that day and its immediate aftermath, injured around 140 police officers, and sent lawmakers scrambling to reach secure locations. Yet some of the same voices that had urged the harshest crackdowns in the 2020 unrest now minimized the Capitol assault—portraying it as exaggerated, recasting parts of it as “legitimate political discourse” and calling for pardons or clemency for many of those prosecuted.
The contrast exposes a deeper question: whose violence is treated as an existential threat, and whose is granted the benefit of the doubt?
When Minneapolis protesters burned the Third Precinct police station in 2020, some, including President Trump and Senator Tom Cotton, branded it “domestic terrorism”. When January 6 rioters smashed Capitol windows in 2021, assaulted police, and hunted lawmakers, Trump called the participants “very special” and “patriots”, while media allies like Tucker Carlson dismissed them as “tourists”. The selective rhetoric highlights uneven standards for condemning unrest.
The principle — that political violence undermines democratic legitimacy and cannot be tolerated — should be absolute. But watch how it bends and twists depending on whose violence we’re discussing. The same act becomes noble resistance or unconscionable terrorism based solely on whether we agree with the cause.
And here’s what makes this so corrosive: both sides do it. Progressives who condemned January 6 as an insurrection found ways to justify property destruction during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. Conservatives who defended January 6th as legitimate protest had demanded harsh crackdowns on BLM demonstrations. The principle evaporates the moment it becomes inconvenient.
If you condemned one but excused the other, what principle were you actually following? Because it wasn’t opposition to political violence. It was opposition to the other team’s political violence.
The Conspiracy Gradient
In 2016, a conspiracy theory emerged claiming Democratic officials ran a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza restaurant basement. Pizzagate, they called it. No evidence. No basement, even. Yet the theory spread wildly, culminating in a man showing up with an AR-15 to “rescue” children who didn’t exist. We rightly dismissed this as deranged conspiracy thinking, dangerous misinformation that put real people at risk.
Then came the Epstein case. Not a conspiracy theory, but documented fact: a wealthy financier ran a sex trafficking operation involving minors. Flight logs. Witness testimony. Photos of powerful people on his island. Emails released (highly redacted) and slowly dripped out after much debate. No criminal convictions. No guilty verdicts. No push for justice for the victims. Evidence that would normally trigger the kind of moral outrage we reserve for the most heinous crimes.
Similarly, in the UK, parliamentary debates and media coverage rightly focused significant concern on grooming gangs of predominantly South Asian men, as highlighted in speeches citing racial targeting of victims and reports that documented local areas where certain ethnic groups were over-represented. Only passing mention was made to the fact that most child sex offenders nationally in the UK are white per 2020 Home Office data.
And yet ... where’s the outrage about the Epstein scandal? In North America or the United Kingdom? Where are the conservative pundits and influencers who built entire political movements on “protecting children”? Where are the conspiracy theorists who saw pedophile rings operating out of pizza parlors? Where are the righteous parliamentarians who spoke so passionately about the scourge of Asian grooming gangs? When actual, documented evidence emerges of the powerful exploiting the most vulnerable, when the conspiracy turns out to be real, the fury dissipates into awkward silence. With little consequence for the vilest of perpetrators.
The question isn’t whether these cases are equivalent; clearly not. One was fabricated, one was real. The question is why imagined abuse generated almost as much sustained fury and reaction as real extensive and documented abuse? Perhaps because Pizzagate targeted political enemies, while Epstein’s client list crosses party lines, implicating people on both sides of our tribal divide. When the truth becomes inconvenient, when it threatens our allies instead of just our opponents, suddenly we discover nuance. Suddenly we need more evidence. Suddenly we remember due process and presumption of innocence — legal principles we abandoned entirely when the accused were on the other team.
This is what happens when principles become tactical rather than foundational. We wield them as weapons against our enemies and holster them when they might wound our friends.
The Corruption We Choose to See
In 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accepted a free vacation on the Aga Khan’s private island. The Ethics Commissioner found he violated conflict of interest rules. Political opponents cried corruption. Calls for resignation echoed through Parliament and across media. The principle seemed clear: public officials shouldn’t accept gifts or benefits that could influence their decisions or create the appearance of impropriety.
Around the same time, Donald Trump maintained ownership of a global business empire while serving as President. Foreign governments booked entire floors of his hotels. His businesses received trademarks from China while he negotiated trade deals. His family members conducted business while holding White House positions. Fast forward to today: crypto ventures, NFTs, branded biblical branded merchandise sold while campaigning and governing. The scale dwarfs Trudeau’s island vacation by orders of magnitude.
For Trump’s critics, this was obviously corrupt, clearly disqualifying. For his supporters: smart business, fake news, witch hunt. Nothing to see here.
A good friend of mine embodied this divide: she vehemently defended Trudeau’s actions while denouncing Trump’s. She doesn’t see the inconsistency. That was the moment that convinced me that we have a problem of partisanship that triumphs over principles.
The only plausible difference is degree. But isn’t that splitting hairs? One cannot be half-pregnant; can one be half-corrupt? Or is it that the corruption we condemn depends entirely on who’s corrupt? That we don’t actually oppose corruption; we simply object to the other side’s corruption.
Democracy as Enlightened Self-Interest
I once had a high school history teacher who quoted Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others that have been tried”. But he didn’t stop there. He explained that democracy doesn’t exist because humanity achieved some enlightened state of moral consciousness. Democracy exists because it’s the best system we’ve found for managing human greed, selfishness and thirst for power. Done properly, it is a sustainable system. I didn’t understand then but over time I came to agree with this perspective.
Think about the mechanics:
Democracy gives everyone a voice, which reduces the incentive for violent overthrow.
It distributes power, preventing any single faction from complete domination.
It requires compromise, creating investment in the system’s survival.
It offers peaceful transitions, providing outlets for change without revolution.
It limits the inequality, so no one feels so hard done by that they need to overthrow the system.
To be clear, I am not arguing that our current version of democracy is what my history teacher had in mind.
Equally, I don’t see proper democracy as altruism. I characterize it as enlightened self-interest. A system that attempts to balance everyone’s rights, provides access to the key ingredients to a good life, maintains some semblance of equality. This isn’t misguided idealism. It’s the political equivalent of a balanced investment portfolio – designed to weather all kinds of conditions. It insulates society from internal shocks because no group is sufficiently denied to foment rage and rebellion.
But — and this is crucial —this only works if we actually believe in the principles that make democracy function. Principles like equal application of law. Like free speech even for those we despise. Like accepting election results even when we lose. Like holding our own side accountable when they violate democratic norms.
The moment we start treating these as negotiable, as principles we only apply to our opponents, democracy stops being a stable system of mutual self-interest. It becomes just another arena for tribal warfare, where the only principle that matters is winning, at any cost.
The Davos Admission
In his 2026 Davos speech, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said something politely devastating. He argued that the “rules-based international order” is a “partially false, convenient illusion”.
Read that again. A Western leader stood before global elites and admitted that the principles we claim to uphold — human rights, rule of law, democratic values, self-determination — are selectively applied depending on strategic interests. We have all known this, of course. We support Saudi Arabia (autocratic, human rights abuser) while condemning Iran (autocratic, human rights abuser). We champion self-determination in Ukraine but not in Palestine. We demand free speech for our allies and unabashedly silence our critics.
But we rarely admit it so plainly. We maintain the fiction that our foreign policy is guided by principles, not economic interests. We tell ourselves comfortable stories about standing for democracy and human rights while forming alliances with dictatorships and enabling atrocities when it serves our strategic and economic goals.
Carney’s admission, however refreshingly honest, raises a deeper question. If even our leaders acknowledge the hypocrisy, what happens to the democratic project itself? Can a system based on principles survive when we publicly admit the principles are just convenient fictions we deploy when useful and ignore when costly?
The answer matters because this same dynamic — principles as convenient tools rather than actual values and guides — has metastasized from international relations into our domestic politics. We are starting to see through the hypocrisy abroad, but we have been slower to recognize it at home, slower to see how we ourselves treat principles as weapons rather than standards.
Where Are the Protectors?
Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes almost unbearable. For decades, conservative movements built their political power on “protecting children”. They fought sex education in schools, claiming it exposed children to inappropriate content. They banned books that mentioned LGBTQ themes, arguing they sexualized children. They restricted bathroom access, warning of predators. They built entire legislative agendas around the idea that children needed protection from sexual content and exploitation.
Then the Epstein files emerged. Actual documented child exploitation. Wealthy and powerful men trafficking teenage girls. Evidence. Names. And the response from many of these same “protect the children” movements? Relative silence. No massive protests. No emergency legislation. No calls for criminal investigations into everyone who flew on Epstein’s planes or visited his island. Megyn Kelly, an ardent poster child for the anti-woke movement, said: “Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile. He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls... He wasn’t into like 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young, like teen types... that would look legal to a passerby.”
Semantics. Unbelievable semantics.
Why these contortions? Because Epstein’s client list crosses political lines. Because some of those implicated might be politically aligned. Because it turns out “protecting children” was never actually the principle — it was a weapon deployed against specific political and cultural opponents. When actual child exploitation emerged, involving people across the political spectrum, people in positions of power and influence, the principle evaporated.
This isn’t unique to conservatives. It’s everywhere, permeating every political tribe.
Progressives champion “believe women” philosophy until the accused is politically aligned, then suddenly demand extensive corroboration and due process.
Libertarians decry government overreach until it targets groups they dislike, then applaud state power.
Law-and-order conservatives back police and prosecutions until investigations turn toward their own leaders, then cry political persecution.
We don’t have principles. We have partisans. And we will defend virtually anything our team does while condemning identical actions by opponents. The principle is just the jersey we wear while playing for our side.
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In Part 2 (coming on March 5th), we’ll explore how these small compromises accumulate into civilizational decay—the boiling frog syndrome. We’ll examine why institutional trust is collapsing, and most importantly, what each of us can do at the individual level to reclaim principle from partisanship. The path forward isn’t just about changing society; it’s about first changing ourselves.
A closing note
The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit, in an increasingly noisy and fractured world.
This isn’t self-help. It’s slow, meaningful practice.
If this essay stayed with you, sit with it. Notice what it surfaced. Return to it when you need to.
If you’re interested in simple reflection tools to support this kind of inner work, you’ll find them here.
For leadership and decision-making work under uncertainty, I write a separate publication called The Uncertainty E.D.G.E.™.