"Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters": On Principles Over Partisanship
There's an old slogan that captures something important about how moral language actually works in partisan discourse: your terrorists are our freedom fighters.
What the phrase exposes is that the categorical labels we use to sort people into "deserving of contempt" versus "deserving of solidarity" are often not doing the moral work we pretend they're doing. They're doing partisan work disguised as moral work. The same behavior gets coded one way when done by people we oppose and another way when done by people we support. The category isn't tracking the behavior; it's tracking the affiliation.
Once you see this pattern, you start seeing it everywhere — including in places you didn't want to see it.
The right-wing version: Trump supporters routinely mock "snowflakes" for being offended by language, while themselves being extravagantly offended by football players kneeling, by Starbucks cup designs, by M&M mascots, by Bud Light cans, by any number of trivial cultural signifiers. The principle "people shouldn't be so easily offended" gets applied to the left and suspended for the right. Being offended is weakness when they do it; being offended is principled cultural defense when we do it.
The left-wing version: SJW discourse routinely condemns dehumanizing language, pile-ons, and mockery of people for immutable or trivial features — while engaging in sustained dehumanizing language, pile-ons, and mockery directed at people coded as deserving (rural Americans, religious conservatives, "cheugy" millennials, women with the wrong politics, men with the wrong aesthetics). The principle "don't engage in cruelty toward people for who they are" gets applied to protected groups and suspended for unprotected ones. Cruelty is violence when they do it; cruelty is accountability when we do it.
These aren't equivalent in their political content — the underlying questions about race, gender, economics, and power are real and the sides are not symmetrical on the merits. But the structural failure is identical: a principle is held up as universal while being applied selectively, and the selectivity tracks tribal affiliation rather than any consistent feature of the cases.
This is what "partisanship over principles" looks like in practice. A principle that only applies to outgroups is not actually a principle. It's a weapon. And a weapon that's called a principle is more dangerous than an honest weapon, because it lets the wielder feel righteous while doing what they'd condemn in others.
The test of whether someone actually holds a principle is what they do when applying it would require them to defend people they dislike, criticize people they're aligned with, or acknowledge that their own side is doing what they've been condemning the other side for doing. Most people fail this test most of the time. The rare person who passes it tends to be unpopular with everyone, because they keep refusing to make the partisan exceptions that everyone else makes.
The standard response to "your terrorists are our freedom fighters" is some version of: "but in our case, the labels really do track moral reality, while in their case, the labels are propaganda." Sometimes this is even true. But the move is suspicious because it's exactly the move both sides make. Everyone thinks their categories are accurate and the other side's are propaganda. The universal conviction that one's own tribe is the exception should give pause to anyone holding it.
Principles over partisanship means being willing to:
Apply the same scrutiny to your own side's mockery, dehumanization, and pile-ons that you apply to the other side's.
Recognize that "they deserve it" is what every tribe says about its targets, and that the universality of this conviction should make you suspicious of it when you find yourself holding it.
Defend the consistent application of a principle even when, in a particular case, it requires you to be on the side of people you find distasteful.
Accept that you will be unpopular with your own tribe for doing this, because tribes reward partisan loyalty, not principled consistency.
This is hard. I won't pretend it's easy or that I always do it well. But naming the pattern is the precondition for resisting it. And the pattern is everywhere — in political discourse, in fandom wars, in subcultural gatekeeping, in religious in-grouping, in every domain where humans sort themselves into us-and-them and then use moral language to launder the sorting.
Your terrorists are someone else's freedom fighters. Your cringe is someone else's authentic expression. Your obvious bad people are someone else's neighbors. The labels are not doing what you think they're doing. And until you can apply your principles to your own side with the same vigor you apply them to the other side, you don't actually have principles. You have a team.
— suggested by Claude 4.7 Opus (Anthropic) in conversation