How To Kill Political Bad Faith With Fire
There is real power in saying no to a bad-faith questioner.
The guy hated Trump in his marrow. It wasn't that he opposed this or that part of the heinous Trump regime agenda, or that he took issue with how the president talks about people he doesn't consider fully human. He had real disgust for the man.
When he talked about the president, he spat more than he spoke.
I was talking to this Trump-hating fella a few weeks ago when the power of bad faith and false choices hit me like a brick to the back of the dome. Our conversation had started around golf – I like golf, I'm sorry, I know it's a problematic favorite – and went from there. I found out this guy is Canadian. Born and raised in the eastern parts of the Canada, he had moved to the United States for work twenty years ago and stayed put.
Our talk turned toward the coming midterms. I shared, without getting bogged down in the swamp of numbers I've written about, that I remain (very) confident in a sweeping Democratic victory. My Canadian buddy wasn't so sure. He seemed to be burdened by something he didn't want to say aloud. But after a little while and a couple more beers, he told me why he just can't envision Democrats ever winning again.
"There's too much woke shit," he said. "No one wants the woke stuff. Just stick to the economy. Woke is why we're here in the first place."
Denny Carter
I took a longer-than-usual sip of my beer and thought about how to respond to this insidious right-wing narrative without alienating this guy, without having him walk away from our talk thinking, no wonder these guys get their asses kicked all the time.
I asked what, exactly, he meant by "woke." Like almost everyone else over these past six years, he wasn't able to give me anything resembling a clear answer. Of course transgender rights came up. Of course trans people in sports came up. There was something about white guilt mixed in. Something about the past being the past. It was a melting pot of right-wing talking points that have become unquestioningly adopted by big media outlets since the early days of the country's racial justice reckoning in 2020 – the one that happened to sweep a would-be tyrant out of power and install a Democratic governing trifecta.
Finally I spoke up: There is, I said, no world in which a politician or a political movement has to choose between "woke shit" and economic matters like inflation and cost of living and energy prices. The woke shit is inextricably linked to the economic shit, I said. If a dignified life for all Americans is the goal – and my Canadian friend agreed with me on this point – then dignity must be delivered in many ways, in every way.
Rights for sexual and religious and ethnic minority groups cannot exist without economic rights for you and me and everyone else, and vice versa. There has never been a time when sacrificing the rights of some led more and stronger rights for others, as Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said so eloquently last week. Sacrificed rights leads to more sacrificed rights. That's as reliable as gravity, I said.
Denny Carter
So the whole thing is a false choice. All the right-wing pundits and Republican office holders and "based" post-left freaks who say the United States has to choose between wokeism and economic strength is lying to you. They know it's not true. They are operating in the kind of bad faith that transforms politics into a game that the left can't win.
That's when I thought of an old online video, one that might hold the answer for countering and neutering bad-faith politics.
'I Reject Your Question'
It's nice, I will say, to see folks opposed to the billionaire-funded destruction of western democracy grasp the critical role of bad faith in the whole sordid project.
Perhaps the pleasure I take in this growing recognition doesn't bowl you over as a regular reader of the guy who does the Bad Faith Times newsletter. And maybe you're skeptical that there is, in fact, more people observing the American right's approach to politics in the third decade of the 21st century and identifying the bad faith that fuels everything. I don't have stats or metrics on this phenomenon; just anecdotal evidence that folks – even the relatively unengaged among us – see how easy it is to pretend to believe something as a means to an end.
More and more, to borrow a Trumpian phrase, are noticing the regime's legal arguments turn to dust the second they enter a real courtroom presided over by a real judge who abides by the constitution. More and more are seeing people opposed to trans rights glom onto women's sports as a way to dehumanize trans people and delegitimize the fight for their basic rights. More and more are recognizing the utter ridiculousness of the GOP as some kind of workers party, fighting for the little guy while electing the slobbering servants of anti-democracy billionaires to high office.
Part of this burgeoning recognition of bad-faith politics is the realization that no amount of good-faith politics can effectively counter it. Being decent, being clear-eyed, being principled, and refusing to engage with bad faith arguments is no way to extinguish those arguments. Ignoring the right's bad faith – standing tall, chin up, against this lowly form of politics – only ensures it will continue, and even thrive.
Video in question. Let's make it viral again.
— Oblivion (@droblivion.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 7:10 PM
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The video above went viral a couple years ago when online debate culture was at its peak, when every few days there would be another debased rhetorical battle between some right-wing grifter and well-meaning liberals trying to own that grifter with nothing but facts and logic. It was always the same old story, with the right winger taking full advantage of the liberal's actual concern for a cause or a group of people and weaponizing that care and concern against them.
This video was different though. Some bad-faith operator is asking the young man in the jacket to choose between "LGBTQ rights and economic stability," which qualifies as one of the most braindead political topics/issues/arguments ever devised. The question is designed for a left/liberal loss: If you "choose" rights for LGBTQ folks over "economic stability," then you've sacrificed all the hard-working normies who believe they've been abandoned in favor of marginalized groups. If you "choose" a stable economy – whatever that means – you're abandoning a population in need of government protection and deserving of the dignity for which they are regularly denied.
The whole thing is a trick. Pick option A and you lose. Pick option B and you also lose. Good luck. Pick wisely.
"Why can't you have both," the guy in the jacket says. "I refuse the question."
The questioner, his intellectual laziness revealed in all its glory, says no, you have to pick one or the other.
"You need to pick one."
"No I don't."
"I just said you did."
"So what," the respondent says, laughing because he knows his questioner loses as long as he holds strong and rejects the premise of the question.
Anthony Reimer
Eventually the questioner gives up, shakes hands with the jacketed guy, and walks away. His bad-faith questioning died because it was given no oxygen. It was not taken as the start of a real debate between two people operating in good faith. The premise of a society that must choose between LGBTQ rights and a strong economy was snuffed out before it could become an actual debate in the minds of the people watching the video.
The young guy with the ponytail and the jacket and the ear piece became the most effective political debater of all time, simply saying no to someone whose entire goal was to create a false choice, force his opponent to make a selection, then hammer away while he stammered and backpedaled and maybe conceded that the questioner was correct, you really could only have one of these two things.
Instead he took a blowtorch to the entire premise. It's something Tim Walz may have considered during his catastrophic 2024 vice presidential debate with JD Vance. When Vance – a lifelong knower of the bad-faith dark arts – proposed mass deportations of immigrants as a viable policy solution to the country's housing crisis, Walz could have been like Ponytail Guy and said you can have both: Immigration and a bolstering of housing supply designed to bring down housing costs and make home ownership more affordable for working families. Reject the premise. Deprive it of attention and legitimacy and watch Vance flail.
The respondent in this terribly awkward interview seemed to understand innately the words of French political philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who said almost a century ago that fascists "delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." If only Walz would have understood the same.
The role of bad faith is so central to 21st century conservative politics that it makes Tucker Carlson's idea of a good-faith conservative party more of an elaborate joke than a serious proposal for the post-Trump era. A party that would presumably challenge the Republican Party and possibly play spoiler for the authoritarian GOP apparatus could not say what it means and gain any support from the constituencies it would require to gain a foothold in national politics. As soon as such a party spoke in good faith about its economic aims – to immiserate the working poor and to enrich those at the very top of the economic food chain – they would be rejected outright by anyone willing to give them a chance.
Denny Carter
Saying something like "we don't actually care about housing costs, we just want to create a white supremacist ethnostate in which our allies have rights and our enemies have nothing," this good-faith conservative party would wither and die. Saying "our opposition to diversity programs is rooted in our belief that black and brown people are intellectually inferior to white people" would shock the conscience of a nation accustomed to its right wingers operating purely in bad faith, rarely saying the Real Thing aloud.
We're about to enter a period of American politics that will present several paths to sustained Democratic power in Congress and (possibly) the White House if the current occupant doesn't barricade himself in the ballroom bunker the Supreme Court is going to let him build. Those paths could be wiped out in short order if Democrats engage with the right's bad faith – parroted by mainstream media outlets terrified of offending Republicans – with nothing but Leslie Knope-style good faith.
Pro-democracy forces determined to gain power and enact republic-saving reforms in the coming years are going to face a barrage of false choices created in a thinktank lab funded by the Kochs or Peter Thiel or any number of democracy-hating billionaires. They are going to be given a choice between breathing life into the right's bad-faith political arguments or rejecting them outright, and there will be no middle ground.
Any Democrat who wants to be president in 2028 should be required to watch the Ponytail Guy video on a loop, Clockwork Orange style, until they internalize the power of rejecting bad faith.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
