The Social Function of False Equivalence

Why People “Balance” the Unbalanceable

Photo by Karl Hedin on Unsplash

There’s a psychology I find endlessly fascinating among Trump apologists: the person who will readily concede every damning thing—the corruption, the meme coin hawking, the foreign bribes, the ignored court orders—then immediately pivot to insisting that fairness requires you to acknowledge his positive accomplishments. It’s the “but he made the trains run on time” syndrome in real time.

At first glance, this seems like intellectual cowardice or moral confusion. But I think something more specific is happening: these people are performing social maintenance, not moral reasoning.

Think about how this works in practice. You’re at a dinner party, family gathering, or workplace conversation when someone mentions Trump’s latest corruption scandal. The person who immediately responds with “but the economy was strong” or “but he shook up the establishment” isn’t making a serious moral argument. They’re managing relationships.

By finding something—anything—positive to say about what you’re criticizing, you signal to everyone present that you’re not that kind of partisan. You’re the reasonable one who sees multiple perspectives. You won’t make Trump supporters defensive or force them to confront uncomfortable truths. You won’t make Never-Trumpers feel like you’re completely naive. You’re safe to be around.

It’s a form of social diplomatic immunity. The forced “balance” demonstrates that you won’t push anyone to choose sides or examine their own complicity too closely. You’ll always provide an escape route from moral clarity.

This explains why the positive examples are always so forced and often trivial. “Sure, he tried to overturn an election, but gas prices were lower.” “Yes, he’s selling cryptocurrency from the Oval Office, but he’s not starting new wars.” The glaring disproportion between the criticism and the counterbalancing praise reveals that this isn’t really moral accounting—it’s social positioning.

These people have internalized the belief that moral clarity itself is a form of bias. That acknowledging clear wrongdoing without immediately pivoting to something positive makes you unfair, extreme, partisan. They’ve confused balance with wisdom, neutrality with sophistication, social accommodation with intellectual honesty.

The psychology is seductive because it feels mature and thoughtful. It flatters the person performing it—they get to see themselves as the adult in the room, the one capable of nuance while everyone else succumbs to tribal thinking. But it’s actually a sophisticated form of moral abdication disguised as intellectual rigor.

The tragedy is that this social accommodation enables the very corruption it claims to condemn. When every criticism must be accompanied by corresponding praise, criticism becomes impossible. There’s always something that can be cited as the other side of the ledger—some policy outcome, some symbolic victory, some disruption of norms that can be spun as beneficial.

More insidiously, it creates a framework where atrocities and policy preferences become commensurable—as if they exist on the same moral scale and can be weighed against each other. Systematic attacks on democratic institutions get balanced against tax cuts. Corruption gets balanced against deregulation. The attempt to steal an election gets balanced against mean tweets about the media.

This isn’t moral reasoning; it’s moral paralysis disguised as fairness. And it serves a clear social function: it allows people to maintain relationships with both sides by never fully committing to either. The dinner table stays peaceful. The family gathering avoids awkwardness. The workplace remains collegial.

But those relationships become hollow because they’re built on a shared agreement to avoid discussing what actually matters. When preserving social comfort becomes more important than moral clarity, the relationships being preserved lose their meaning.

The person insisting we acknowledge Mussolini’s transportation improvements isn’t making a historical argument—they’re desperately trying to avoid the social implications of calling authoritarianism what it is. And in that desperation, they become unwitting accomplices to the very normalization they think they’re resisting.

Sometimes the most sophisticated thing you can do is refuse to be sophisticated.