Consistency is a basic principle of justice, and one important form of criticism is the exposure of hypocrisy. There are many occasions for exposing hypocrisy these days. In the aftermath of the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Florida home, we can point to Hillary Clinton’s private server. Asked to denounce Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, we can cite Stacey Abrams, who never accepted her defeat in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia.

In his Substack column, The Upheaval, N. S. Lyons mocks this approach. By his account, every political system has a dominant party, Team A, and a subordinate party, Team B. One perquisite of dominance is the right to enforce the rules when they are ­convenient—and suspend them when they are inconvenient. Although Team A insists on the sanctity of the rule of law, there exists no neutral arbiter to hold it accountable, “because Team A has consolidated all the power to decide the rules, and to enforce or not enforce those rules as they see fit.” So don’t waste your breath appealing to neutral standards. And stop whining about inconsistencies.[…]