Members-Only Article
I’ve been thinking in recent days about taking a pledge. I hope others do too. It’s sprawling enough in its scope that I haven’t known quite how to whittle or distill it down for the sake of pledging it or sharing it with others. But I will take this post as an opportunity to explain it both to myself and to you. Because I think it’s quite important.
Think of it as a rough draft.
Republicans like Marco Rubio are now claiming to be aghast, hurt and more than anything else unwilling to believe in Democratic promises of rebuilding national unity because Joe Biden’s campaign manager and incoming Deputy Chief of Staff called congressional Republicans “fuckers” in an interview. Days ago we heard that Biden’s forceful denunciation of Republican efforts to overturn the result of the election was “burning bridges” to Trump supporters. We’ve seen this pattern before: bad faith taking of umbrage to justify new forms of bad behavior and predation.
It’s not only that. The production of and the stoking of grievances is central to contemporary conservatism and its apotheosis, Trumpism. But it is mostly the weaponization of bad faith.
This to me is the greatest negative lesson of the Obama era: the willing engagement of good faith with bad faith in which bad faith is, by definition, always the winner. I am so proud of Obama’s presidency, all it represented, all it accomplished. But it does not diminish that to recognize that he and his administration wasted a great deal of time pursuing the vain belief that it could out-reasonable Republicans into good or at least good faith behavior.
Remember that one of the reasons Obamacare almost didn’t happen was that the White House spent about a year in a vain effort to convince some bipartisan senate “gang” to agree on a bipartisan plan. It was all one laborious, pitiful game of Lucy and her yanked away football, only played out with 60 and 70 and 80-something men. The actual bill was significantly watered down and enough time was wasted that Ted Kennedy’s illness, death and the subsequent special election to replace him in the Senate almost derailed the whole thing.
Republicans pocketed the time wasted and the concessions granted, walked away without providing any votes in support and then ran against Democrats for passing legislation on party line votes. There were other efforts to sequence things just right, build up political capital that could then be used to pull Republicans along. It was universally all a waste of time and a misdiagnosis of the problem: the belief that anything positive could emerge from the engagement of good faith with bad faith.
But it wasn’t only a waste of time. These characteristic Republican efforts lulled Democrats into trying to control things they could not control: what Republicans did. As we’ve discussed, this is a cardinal life error in politics and in the most personal and mundane parts of life. It leads to demoralization, feelings and the appearance of weakness and anxiety. If you play into these mind games – lulled into thinking you are or can control something that is not in your control – you end up, perversely, imagining you are responsible for or making possible aggressions against you. It all ends in pitiable efforts to barter reasonableness for an end to unreasonable behavior, a fake bargain in which the stakes are constantly raised with increasingly predatory behavior.
So my pledge is I won’t engage these discussions or treat them as meaningful or serious. I commend to you David Roberts article in Vox, which I commended to you earlier this month. Joe Biden should use every legitimate power at his disposal as President to do everything at once. No sequencing or playing for buy-in. You win an election. You gain certain legitimate powers. You use them. Period. Should Biden be open to bipartisan compromise? Absolutely. The door should be open. But it would be a grave mistake to spend any time coaxing anyone to come through it. We’ve played that game enough. Biden should always be willing to talk but not to delay.
A couple weeks ago Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) announced that “transparency” was “non-negotiable” in evaluating the prior business dealings of Biden’s foreign policy team. Here is how my pledge operates. John Cornyn won an election and has a vote on all Biden nominees. Biden has to deal with that. Biden should, quite apart from any nonsense from John Cornyn, demand high ethical standards of everyone in his administration. But we know from the last four years that government ethics and official profiteering are fine with Cornyn. None of these things matter to him at all. So he is entitled to his vote. But he is not entitled to any space in our heads taking anything he says seriously or engaging it in any way. Know what you can control and what you cannot and don’t try to control anything in the latter category.
A corollary to this is the importance of expressing derision and contempt for public voices who do take or pretend to take bad faith engagement seriously or as anything other than what it is.
Nothing good can come of the confrontation between good faith and bad faith engagement. In the future we may return to a civic space where a degree of good faith engagement can allow those of differing outlooks and ideologies to collaborate and compromise on consensus solutions. But we are not there now. We are not really there on the substance: we’re that divided. And we’re certainly not there on the good faith. Indeed, pursuing good faith engagement with bad faith actors only enables and fuels this corrosive, anti-civic behavior. The answer is for Democrats to use the political power they gain to make as much positive change as possible, using everything legitimate lever at their disposal. Getting sucked into Republican mind games is time wasting and destructive.
It is a path to a better understanding of the nature of political power, how to grow it and how not to dissipate or waste it by being the pawns of bad faith actors.
