It's The Bad Faith, Stupid
It's The Bad Faith, Stupid
The GOP's border security double cross presents Democrats an opportunity to lay Republicans bare—if they get the appeal right
The Republican business elites who want Donald Trump to win the election in 2024 also want you to believe they care a lot about immigration, and that Trump was ahead of the curve on the issue.
Jamie Dimon went to Davos a couple weeks back and said Trump was “right about immigration,” without much further elaboration.
Elon Musk, the immigrant apartheid beneficiary, is by contrast a human megaphone for every right-wing blood libel circulating on the internet. Immigrants poison the blood of America, and are part of a coordinated “globalist” effort to “replace” the electorate with reliable Democrats. The whole repugnant catechism.
It’s hard to know what Dimon wants us to think he has in mind, other than that he hopes to normalize Trump’s aberrant views on an issue that Republicans exploit during elections. Does Dimon support lying to voters about building a border wall that Mexico will pay for? Or the idea that countries where many people are impoverished and brown-skinned are “shitholes”?
I doubt Dimon is fluent enough in immigration policy to cite anything he genuinely admires about Trump’s record, and would demur that Trump has been vindicated on the issue of “border security.” But over the past several days, Trump spearheaded the GOP effort to kill border-security legislation, and leave the issue festering for partisan advantage in the election. Does Dimon support that?
I’m guessing (just guessing) he’d say no. But Musk, the blood-emerald industrialist, is happy Trump killed the bill. We can contort ourselves into imagining Musk is in on the ruse, playing along like a good sport to help Trump get elected. Or we can apply Occam’s razor and stipulate that he’s just a brain poisoned shitposter who’s being conned.
The truth of the matter is important, but not as important as the larger insight that Dimon and Musk are two faces of the same system. It’s a system of bad faith and incitement that has brought the country to the brink of destruction. And the challenge for Democrats is to stop getting sucked into cycles of manufactured outrage and make Republicans suffer politically for the bad faith itself.
Republicans exacerbate race division and manufacture frivolous outrages to advance plutocratic ends. They underwrite and feed a vast propaganda machinery that pumps out slander against the racial underclasses, and drives people to vote for politicians who then prioritize corporate tax cuts and deregulation over (e.g.) border security.
This is morally and ethically outrageous, but the problems run deeper.
One is that many of the Republicans and plutocrats making the machine whir have been sucked into it themselves. Once upon a time most GOP elites understood that Fox News and talk radio was for the hoi polloi, and that they could find real news in, say, the Wall Street Journal. Now many of the right wing haves marinate together with the have-nots in the same stew of toxic agitprop.
Another is that as the radicalization reaches higher into the GOP power elite (the world’s richest man, the former president who’s now trying to become dictator) we become likelier to see the party of plutocrats act on their own propaganda the way its intended targets would want: not with tax cuts and deregulation alone but with internment of immigrants, oppression of dissidents, validating of race science.
This is the world Musk is already building, in microcosm, on the husk of Twitter.
Dimon is a different archetype—more cynical, perhaps more effective, though farther from the tip of the spear of fascism.
Most of GOP officialdom falls somewhere in the middle—aware, like Dimon, of the red-meat strategy, but more theatrical, like Musk, about the lies and manufactured outrage. A handful of members occupy an inscrutable space, where it’s hard to know if they’ve duped themselves or not.
Mike Lee, the MAGA senator from Utah, has convinced many critics that he’s fully brain-poisoned. Nick Catoggio recently made the case at length. But I recall scrumming on Capitol Hill with Lee way back in 2011, when Republicans were holding the debt limit hostage, and he’d lecture reporters in a tone of unctuous fake outrage about Barack Obama’s “threat” to default on the national debt. When Biden tongue-lashed Republicans during last year’s State of the Union address for seeking to phase out Social Security and Medicare, this was Lee’s response.
Perhaps I’m just a rube myself, but I think he’s acting.
Even James Lankford, the suddenly beleaguered Oklahoma Republican who wrote the border-security bill his colleagues just sabotaged, knows how this game is played. During Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, the House’s lead prosecutor Adam Schiff cited a CBS news report about an anonymous Trump associate who warned Senate Republicans Trump would have their “head on a pike,” if they voted to convict him. For this crime (citing a news report) the whole Senate GOP conference pretended to be shook. Lankford rushed out to tell the assembled press corps, “I was visibly upset.”
This is like how soccer players convey to referees that they’ve been grievously injured. Maybe it’s more like an actor accidentally reading the stage direction out loud: Be “visibly upset,” even though you’re not angry, so that the headlines stop blaring about Schiff’s persuasive presentation, and start suggesting he’d lost the room.
It’s fitting that Lankford’s own clumsy method got turned on him.
The whole Republican Party now inhabits this spectrum and it’s made normal politics rooted in addressing real national problems and contesting sincerely held values impossible. They ought to be forced to answer for it.
Back at Davos, Dimon also pretended to believe Democratic condescension to MAGA voters was a pressing problem. “I wish the Democrats would think a little more carefully when they talk about MAGA,” he said. “I think people should be a little more respectful of our fellow citizens.”
This is obviously rich coming from the guy whose bank screwed so many future MAGAns out their houses during the foreclosure crisis of the late aughts. But the real condescension comes from the Republicans who pretend to care about their issues.
That’s what makes it a ripe target for Democratic opposition politics. Many liberals I know and admire are frustrated that Democrats got suckered into a months-long debate over a Republican issue on Republican terms, only for Republicans to once again yank the football away. How can it be any kind of political victory for Dems to lend credence to the most overheated right-wing rhetoric about the migrant “invasion,” concede horribly punitive policies to them, only to come up empty handed?
I share this frustration to an extent—I also understand that Republicans forced the issue by demanding border-security concessions as ransom for aid to Ukraine. In my dreams, Democrats are the kind of party that uses the GOP’s betrayal of Ukraine as a jumping-off point for an aggressive oversight investigation of right-wing money, or that simply bequeaths Ukraine billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets. But we go to war with the army we have. Whether Democrats should have agreed to negotiate with hostage takers in this instance is a close call.
My real bone of contention is with the idea that Democrats can’t capitalize on the GOP’s betrayal. They can. But first they must understand in their bones what they’re capitalizing on. If they cite the GOP bait-and-switch as evidence that Democrats are the real tough-borders party, it will flop just as their efforts to paint Republicans as the real police-defunders have flopped, because “law and order” and “closed borders” appeals are rooted more deeply in race than in technocratic policy priorities.
But “Republicans will sabotage America to help Trump and themselves” is an attack with merit and teeth.
Shortly before the 2020 election, I offered Democrats unheeded guidance on how to exact a toll on Republican bad faith. The essay ends with this warning: “If in the name of unearned and unreciprocated comity we grant Republicans a seat at the table and a voice in governing, they’ll learn only one thing: that cheaters prosper. If we do nothing but elect Joe Biden and close the book on the past, things will only get better until the pendulum inevitably swings back again, and Republicans come roaring back to power unchastened.”
Three-and-a-half years later we sit on the precipice of that unthinkable outcome. But we haven’t toppled over the edge just yet. Democrats still have time to chasten Republicans. Not for being “weak on the border” but for double-crossing the country over and over again to put their self-interest first. For organizing themselves around tricking people into thinking they want to solve problems more pressing than “make Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk and Donald Trump richer.” Most GOP voters will not care—they’ll take the politics of scapegoating over the politics of pluralism. Some, like Musk himself, are too weak-minded to understand the difference between what’s fake and what’s real. But plenty of people will get it, and elections turn on small margins.
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