The Psychology Behind Politicians Who Protect Criminals and Disarm Citizens

Why do some American politicians defend corruption, excuse criminal behavior, and protect people who abuse the public trust? Psychology offers an unsettling explanation: the human tendency to identify with our own kind can become so powerful that loyalty replaces accountability.

Corruption in American politics is often discussed in terms of money, power, influence, and personal ambition. Those factors are important, but there is another dimension worth examining. The psychology that allows people to excuse violence, defend corrupt individuals, and disarm those who would likely bring those violent actors to justice is the concern.

Why do some politicians condemn corruption when it involves their opponents but minimize it when it involves their allies? Why do they sometimes appear more concerned with defending violent criminals than with establishing the truth?

One possible explanation lies in an element of our own human behavior: we tend to favor people we perceive as being like us, and we can become remarkably effective at rationalizing the misconduct of those with whom we identify.

When that tendency enters politics, the consequences can be devastating. There is something to be said about the “Us Against Them” position.

In a landmark 1971 study, psychologists Henri Tajfel and his colleagues demonstrated that even relatively arbitrary group distinctions can produce favoritism toward a person’s own group.

People do not necessarily need a long history together or a meaningful shared experience to begin favoring those they consider members of their group. The psychological distinction between “us” and “them” can influence judgment all by itself.

In politics, that distinction can be reinforced by ideology, party affiliation, shared grievances, and a common struggle for power. We tend to see this more among the political left. Criminality is often overlooked, and an added element of protection for the criminals is put in place. That protection is gun control applied to the average, law-abiding, American citizen.

Over time, defending the party can become more important to Democrats than defending honest principles, while literally shielding the criminals themselves becomes common practice. Irrational justifications for their actions are often made.

Admitting that an ally, such as a violent protester or illegal criminal migrant, has acted corruptly may feel like helping the opposition, so those who support these groups can never bring themselves to recognize their illegal activity in public. They are forced to defend it.

It may seem threatening to a politician’s political identity, or undermining to a cause the politician supports. Watching the bad actors get shot and often killed while attempting to commit a crime may be an even more disturbing situation, not because the politician has a personal relationship with the criminal but rather feels a sense of personal defeat when that criminal is killed by a potential victim. In other words, the politician may see the actions of the potential victim toward the criminal as a personal attack on the politician themselves. This is known as “ownership by association.”

The result is a dangerous reversal of priorities. Instead of judging criminals by the standards they claim to uphold, blue state governors, AGs, and congressional representatives begin adjusting those standards to protect the criminals, who they now see as their allies.

Corruption becomes easier to excuse when the person benefiting from it is considered one of our own. Psychological research offers another important insight. The “In-Group Loyalty and the Punishment of Corruption” study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Comparative Political Studies in 2019, examined the psychological dynamic in which people become more willing to tolerate corruption when the person benefiting from it belongs to their own political or social group. The researchers found that loyalty to one’s own group can weaken the tendency to punish corrupt behavior, even when the group member’s conduct is exposed.

The association politicians often make with criminals starts to become clear when we see the politicians themselves behaving badly. An example would be those elected representatives covering up fraud in Minneapolis, only to find out that they themselves may have played a large role in the corruption. These findings help explain why people repeatedly associate with others who excuse misconduct. Wrongdoing can gradually become normalized in their minds while the rest of the world watches the behavior in disbelief.

Recognizing this may seem like common sense, but when politicians shield and protect violent criminals from those who seek justice, the level of danger to the average American citizen increases significantly.

In a political environment, the process might look like this:

An elected official witnesses misconduct or violence by a member of a demographic for which they have publicly announced their support. Fellow party members minimize the allegations. Supporters attack the credibility of the investigators. Citizens who demand accountability are branded as disloyal or even the enemy. The narrative often shifts, with support of the media, to label those who want accountability as Nazis, racists, or fascists, when in fact those people are simply trying to hold the bad actors accountable in pursuit of a safer environment for everyone.

The question is no longer whether the conduct was right or wrong. The question becomes whether acknowledging the wrongdoing will get people negatively labeled.

When that happens, a corrupt individual may no longer need to defend himself alone. He now has an entire network with incentives and government officials to protect him. The result is a political culture where the good are scrutinized and the bad are protected. The victim/predator society is now created, and you pay the beneficiaries with money taken from your paycheck under the threat of criminal prosecution.

The disturbing psychological dynamic at work, when anti-gun politicians support policies that restrict the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves while publicly expressing sympathy for, excusing, or defending violent criminals, raises a troubling question: When politicians make it harder for innocent people to protect themselves, whose interests are they really serving?

Whether it’s driven by ideology, political loyalty, or a refusal to acknowledge the consequences of their own policies, the result is the same. Law-abiding citizens are left more vulnerable while criminals who disregard the law remain armed and dangerous. In effect, these politicians risk creating a system in which the rights of the innocent are sacrificed in the name of protecting a narrative that excuses the guilty.

The Second Amendment was never intended to guarantee criminals an advantage over their victims. It exists to ensure that Americans retain the means to defend their lives and liberty against those who would threaten them.

If a politician demands investigations, prosecutions, and resignations when opponents are accused of wrongdoing but dismisses comparable allegations against criminals they defend without examining the evidence, citizens should ask why. When those same politicians implement gun restrictions on the good guys, knowing that the bad actors they are letting out of jail early are paying no attention to those laws, good people need to hold those politicians accountable.

The greatest danger is not simply that a politician may defend criminals, including violent actors and illegal aliens who have no business being in America. It is that at the same time they are disarming and making vulnerable the very people they were hired to defend.