Somebody on Twitter, Ethan Grey, who says he’s an ex-Republican, tried to summarize the basic “Republican message on everything of importance”:

1. They can tell people what to do.  2. You cannot tell them what to do.

You’ve watched the Republican Party champion the idea of “freedom” while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want and so on.

If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by “freedom” were likely too generous. Here’s what they mean:

1. The freedom to tell people what to do.  2. Freedom from being told what to do.

When Republicans talk about valuing “freedom”, they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it.

He cites Covid-19 as a recent example:

We were told by experts in infectious diseases that to control the spread of the pandemic, we had to socially distance, mask, and get vaccinated. So, in a general sense, we were being told what to do. Guess who had a big problem with that.

All Republicans saw were certain people trying to tell them what to do, which was enough of a reason to insist that they would not be told what to do. Even though what they were told to do would save lives, including their own.

Another instance:

They claim to be for “small government”, but that really means government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when [they see] an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.

My favorite example of this is how Republicans hate government spending unless it’s for the “Defense” Department, which gets an enormous percentage of the federal budget and is the part of our government best positioned to forcefully tell other people (i.e. the rest of the world) what to do. But parts of the government that can tell Republicans what to do, like the Internal Revenue Service (pay your taxes) and the Environmental Protection Agency (stop polluting), should be starved of funds whenever possible (or abolished, like the Department of Education).

Maybe a Republican could complain about Democrats in the same way — we want to tell them what to do but we don’t want them telling us — but I’m hard-pressed to think of Democratic behavior that fits.

Anyway, Frank Wilhoit, a classical music composer, once tried to summarize conservatism too. This is sometimes called “Wilhoit’s Law”:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s really the same point Mr. Grey made on Twitter. In fact, Grey offered his own, less elegantly stated, version of Wilhoit’s Law further down in his thread:

1. There are “right” human beings and there are “wrong” ones.  2. The “right” ones get to tell the “wrong” ones what to do.  3. The “wrong” ones do not tell the “right” ones what to do.

Thus, we have various ways to summarize what’s been called “the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the modern Republican Party”. Take your pick.