My professor asked, “are Trump supporters any more prejudiced than non-Trump supporters?” I ruefully shook my head while the questioned registered with me. I knew my answer already.

Absolutely freaking not.

I’m writing my thesis on American Exceptionalism in Presidential foreign policy rhetoric and I’ve been realizing that just about the only category exceptional in America is hypocrisy.

I’m going to start by saying I’m one of the hypocrites; so are most of the American people though, so let’s call it even and get to it.

Americans like me say they want transparency and government accountability. When Edward Snowden made Americans aware of the NSA phone surveillance program it was a massive story. The public anger was fueled by a betrayal of trust; a curtain being pulled back. The art of balancing security with personal privacy is the crux of every national security decision and we say we want both. We don’t want anyone, much less the government, butting into our personal lives, but we also want the government to stop every terrorist attack on the United States.

We want our cake and we want to eat it too. We make the bed but we refuse to sleep in it. We want it both ways. Yes, there are effective ways to ensure our homeland security without significantly compromising personal privacy; yes, the NSA phone collection campaign was an abuse of power, but the underlying issue is not black and white. The great majority of steps the government takes to ensure citizen’s safety infringes on privacy and freedom. The desire to have the homeland secure without sacrificing an inch of privacy is a pipe dream.

Hypocrisy transcends partisanship. Democrats have been judging Republicans for the past 18-months for either tacitly or explicitly supporting Donald Trump, as they rightly should. Unfortunately, they and I have contracted a legitimacy robbing self-righteousness.

If an equally reprehensible and dangerous candidate emerged out of the radical-left I would like to think that they would have no chance to run through the primaries and destroy most of the institutional safeguards that were constructed to prevent their rise, and that the voters would be smart enough to see through the façade of rhetoric and withhold their support. The rational part of me, though some may call it cynical, thinks there is an 80-20 chance it would mirror Donald Trump’s rise.

Trump is running an abhorrent campaign based on prejudiced rhetoric; mostly fueled by economic and demographic (racial) characteristics. While a radical left-wing candidate may play on different prejudices, they would be appealing to the same part of human nature as Trump is. The problem with Trump is that his prejudices have been labeled inappropriate, correctly so, by culture and society. Aside from this cultural taboo, his prejudice is just as powerful and intense as the prejudices held by all Americans, regardless of party affiliation.

Here comes the Holy Grail. The Separation of Church and State has been bastardized into a partisan talking point devoid of a nationally accepted definition.

Many people on the right want this standard to cut one way. They want religion to be protected from the government, but they also want the government to mirror their personal religious beliefs. Politicians in the United States must at least appear to be grounded in Judeo-Christian principles to have any chance of winning office. Although atheism is becoming more acceptable, belief systems such as Buddhism, Hinduism and especially Islam have very little political capital, and candidates who profess these beliefs are routinely discriminated against. Though the Constitution states no religious test shall be required for those seeking office, the informal requirement for Judeo-Christian philosophy is thriving.

The situation on the left is no better. People like Bill Maher routinely rail against Christianity, and any other religious belief system calling them Novocain for the weak-minded who are unable to deal with the world’s cruelty. Secularism or Rationalism, whatever you call it, is a life philosophy or a system of beliefs the same way religion is. A secular worldview affects people’s political beliefs just as religious worldviews. The act of speaking against religion in favor of rational secularism is simply a person promoting his or her worldview over another. To suggest religious beliefs and secular beliefs are on different levels ironically showcases a lack of objectivity.

American’s are united by their hypocrisy, both in search of it in our policy beliefs, as well as our journey to eliminate it. The toxic, self-righteous atmosphere that has settled over this election like an ominous cloud threatens to blind us to our common failures, which will only lead to more division and less improvement. We need something to bring us back together as a country after this election no matter who wins. Weakness, both accepting it and working to strengthen it, may just do the trick.