Turtles All the Way Down

On bottomless bad faith and a way forward

Earlier this week, my buddy MB and I were discussing the preposterous events of Signalgate - the accidental inclusion of the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal chat in which senior Trump officials were discussing unpublicized details of forthcoming military operations. There’s no reason to recount all of the lies Trump and his minions have told since the story came to light on Monday. If you’re a senior Trump official in good standing, you are a serial liar by definition. Like many other people, my friend brought up “Hillary’s emails” - which received more attention than any other single story of the 2016 campaign, and which prompted Trump’s repeated call to “lock her up” for crimes her use of a private server for some official business allegedly entailed. That Signalgate is a more egregious breach of security protocols is beyond dispute. But MB’s point was broader - that Republicans do this *all* the time. Fulminate for years on end about some purported outrage liberals in office are said to be guilty of, outrages that, of course, have the most dire consequences for America’s wellbeing or that represent the worst calumny imaginable. And then do far worse once they seize the reigns of control.

Crying wolf about deficits when Democrats have control of the federal budgetary process and then proceeding, without fail, to make deficits worse when Republicans control that process is the archetypical example of the last forty years. Others include: insisting Democrats are waging an unprecedented attack on free speech and then, once in charge, engaging in the most serious attacks on speech and press freedom in this country in decades; screaming bloody murder about liberals’ war on meritocracy, including racist charges about “DEI pilots” and so forth, and then installing in the most critical positions people of singular incompetence and ignorance (e.g., the current Secretaries of Defense and of Health and Human Services); expressing the deepest outrage at President Obama’s and President Biden’s abuse of executive orders and then acting as if any time King Donald has a stray impulse, he’s entitled to arrogate to himself through executive orders authority never before contemplated in America, and so many more.

The point isn't to charge, for the six millionth time, that Republicans are unceasing hypocrites. That's in the water-is-wet category.

The point is to remind ourselves and the political leaders who seek to represent us that their approach to endless rightwing fulminating needs to change fundamentally. It's both bad politics and unprincipled to cave in to blatant bad faith out of some misguided notion of decorum, or fear of losing popular support, or because maybe Republicans have a point about some tempest in a teapot (Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?) when, in this era, Republicans’ only goal is to seize power and then abuse it once they have it.

Democrats have limited tools at their disposal right now, as we all know. But they need to start practicing, both for the sake of the party’s future, and the country’s, a different mode of politics. As Josh Marshall wrote yesterday, one thing they can do is adopt a parliamentary opposition’s approach. In parliamentary systems, the opposition has a shadow cabinet. One purpose of that is to provide the public with an ongoing narrative about what the government is doing wrong and how the opposition would act differently if and when they return to power. The point of this exercise isn’t to lie about your opponents. It’s in part to ensure that the public doesn’t only hear one side of the political story. In the American context, that job could fall to ranking members of the relevant House and Senate committees. It could also fall to particularly capable spokespeople, like Pete Buttigieg. Bernie and AOC aren’t just drawing massive crowds because everyone who attends one of their rallies is perfectly aligned with them, ideologically. They’re exciting people because they’re at least providing an image of what a fighting Democratic Party could look like. The American Right has megaphones at its disposal, via FOX News and other outlets, that liberals lack. But that’s no excuse for curling into the fetal position while trying to ride out the current storm (mixed metaphor alert!). Fighting fire with fire doesn’t require matching Trumpists’ bad faith. It does require ceaselessly providing counter narratives to that bad faith.

I was having lunch with a friend yesterday and we got to talking about who might the future leaders of the Democratic Party be. As most of you know, my ideological leanings are further to the left than what I recognize to be the center of gravity of American politics. But especially for the era we’re currently in, what may trump ideology, if you will, is whether our leaders are willing to fight. Tactical retreats will sometimes be necessary. But too-clever-by-half maneuverings as a substitute for principled, full-throated opposition only cede to Republicans the opportunity to define all the terms of debate, as well as what the Democrats themselves stand for. That’s a recipe for disorientation, disillusionment and capitulation. Being caught in constant lying is the price of doing business for Donald Trump. He can live with that. What Democrats need to do, repeatedly, relentlessly and aggressively is not just to accuse him of lying because, duh. Instead, they need to hammer home how the lying, whether about social security, tariffs, vaccines, immigrants etc., serves one purpose and one purpose only — to reward Donald Trump’s cronies and to punish his enemies, with everyone else as collateral damage. That will be far more likely to break through if Democrats organize the equivalent of a shadow cabinet whose job is to spell out the connection between the bad acting and the overarching purpose it serves. And as an added benefit, doing so might help some people who are horrified but demoralized to, at the very least, begin to imagine what a more battle-ready Democratic Party *could* do.

If we’re going to begin to turn the tide of the ceaseless malevolence we’re living through, waging politics requires thinking differently about countering that malevolence.