It’s tougher and tougher for me to take our big national education debates seriously. Why? Because neither side intends for their positions to be taken seriously. The shameless hypocrisy (and memory-holing of past positions—including those fervently held just ten months ago) makes even meaningful arguments appear unprincipled and performative.

It was last year when Republican wonks were fuming about Biden trampling statute in his push for college loan “forgiveness” and begging the courts to stop him. Democrats (and the mainstream media), of course, waved off these objections as legalistic exercises in obstruction. Now? Republicans celebrate Team Trump’s statute-agnostic assault on higher education, DEI, and the Department of Ed. And right on cue, Democrats and their media brethren decry the administration’s lawlessness and beseech the courts to step in.

Republican influencers spent the past half-decade railing against teacher education programs for promoting ideological litmus tests and progressive dogma. Their counterparts across the aisle patronizingly Dem-splained that requiring teacher candidates to be trained to spot “white supremacy culture” or to show competencies in “diversity” and “equity” isn’t political—it’s just sensible pedagogy. Now? Oklahoma’s Republican state chief is implementing a certification exam for teacher applicants from California and New York that screens for “America First” principles in order to protect students from “radical leftist ideology.” And Democrats are denouncing the move as politicizing teacher training.

Democrats and higher education leaders cheered when the Obama and Biden teams used tortured interpretations of Title IX to promote the agendas of #MeToo and transgender activists. Republicans denounced their maneuvers as legal sleight-of-hand, overreach, and an abuse of the “pen and phone.” Now? Team Trump has responded in kind, weaponizing Title VI, Title IX, and more, while mostly abandoning even the pretense of formal process in favor of executive orders and shock-and-awe administrative tactics. Democrats and college presidents are predictably shocked and outraged.

We can ride this swing all day. Remember when Republicans were troubled by efforts to smuggle woke nostrums into schools under the auspices of social and emotional learning? Now they’re cheering governors who promise to sanitize textbooks in accord with Trumpist thought. Or remember when the left wanted to strip reading lists of works by dead white males in order to “diversify” literature? Now, they argue it’s censorship to remove a sexually explicit graphic novel from a middle school library shelf.

Remember way back during Trump’s first term when Republicans were outraged that the Obama administration had bribed red states to expand Medicaid? Now they’re gleeful that the new federal tuition tax credit is bribing blue states to expand school choice. I’m old enough to remember, way back under President Biden, when Democrats modified the federal research apparatus to evaluate proposals partly based on considerations of equity and diversity, rather than simple scientific merit. Now? They’re furious that the Trump administration is canceling research projects for reasons having to do with DEI, rather than simple scientific merit.

You know the old saw that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue? This ain’t that. This is industrial-strength disdain for anything beyond the appetites of the moment.

I mean, the appetites themselves are semi-consistent. The left likes DEI, the right doesn’t. The left wants to spend more than the right does. But how, when, and where these appetites shape policy is now just a question of which levers your tribe controls at the moment.

Look, a certain amount of “for it / against it” hypocrisy used to be baked into some high-profile political maneuvers, like filibustering judicial appointments, gerrymandering, or election law. But  each side also had some discernible principles and good-faith arguments when it came to these substantive debates—especially in education. But as public discourse has migrated to social media, the half-life of any given position has been reduced to TikTok proportions. When influence is measured by clicks and nothing is remembered for longer than 48 hours, consistency doesn’t matter. Attention does.

This isn’t hypocrisy, you say? This just shows that R’s (and D’s) have adopted new principles in the last [checks watch] ten months? Hmmm. Okay. If you want to explain to me the unifying principles behind Trump’s simultaneous effort to eliminate the Department of Education, oversee staffing at private college campuses, empower the states, dictate gender policy via executive order, and create a new federal school choice program, I’ll listen. But c’mon, man.

This has practical consequences. Principles give us something to stand for, a core set of beliefs. They impose limits and provide predictability. Absent principle, there is no obvious ceiling (or basement). It’s easy to rationalize pretty much anything. As principle and foresight recede, will-to-power fills the vacuum.

Of course, we’ve learned that each party will advance on ground broken by the other. One didn’t need much imagination to see how Democrats might regret Biden’s excesses, and one doesn’t need much to recognize that Republicans may soon regret Trump’s. But that kind of foresight requires self-awareness and reflection. There’s little room for that in the performative here-and-now.

This dynamic isn’t unique to education, of course, but hypocrisy’s effects are outsized when it comes to education. Educators are supposed to cultivate character and forge citizens. Educators are supposed to teach virtues like principle, restraint, and respect for the rules. They haven’t exactly been doing a bang-up job of that to start with. And I’ve no idea how they can ask students to take those virtues seriously when it’s quite obvious our nation’s leadership caste does not.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”