How Liberalism Sabotages Itself

Our intentional blindness to bad faith is a loophole fascists use to gain respectability and power.

The progressive journalist

Mehdi Hasan

recently participated in an episode of the popular online series Jubilee, which is a bit like speed-dating, but for public political debate.

One prominent person (often but not always a brash right winger) sits at a table surrounded by opponents, who one-by-one fill the empty chair and argue over whatever the proposition happens to be.

In this episode, the propositions were a) Donald Trump is pro crime and pro criminal; b) Donald Trump is defying the Constitution; c) Immigrants, overall, are good for America; d) Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza is ethnic cleansing—and Hasan, who is a trained debater, would defend them against 20 “far-right conservatives.”

Several exchanges from this debate have made rounds online—when Hasan gets a boy named Connor Estelle to admit he is a fascist, when another says Hasan should “get the hell out” of the country. But, to me, one of the most revealing moments lacked that kind of viral potential. It was when Hasan asked Estelle: if you hate democracy so much, why are you engaged in public debate, a cornerstone of the democratic process?

“It is the means to support an end,” Estelle responded. “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn't mean free speech after we win.”

Thanks to Estelle for his honesty. His means-to-an-end-style of bad faith in discourse is endemic on the right—not just among ascendant fascists—and has been for a long time. It’s just that most conservatives will never break character; to the contrast, they take false umbrage if you question their sincerity. But here Estelle lays out the method plainly: Rightists appeal to whomever they can with whatever false commitments they intend to break, knowing that, once delivered to power, they will pull the rug.

In nonexistential instances, this can look like Trump promising to lower costs, knowing that his tariffs will increase them, and (thus) lying about the incidence of tariffs. But in the final showdown, the promise is freedom, and the ulterior motive is tyranny. When Hasan asked Estelle, What happens when your fantasy autocrat kills your family, Estelle didn’t renounce extrajudicial violence. He replied, “Well, I'm not going to be a part of the group that he kills.”

I mention this exchange for two reasons: First, because it’s important for people to know that this is how right-wing operators pursue their ends. That they view liberal freedoms as loopholes to exploit in their pursuit of power. Second, because it reveals a weakness in liberalism-as-practiced.

The liberal commitment to free speech is inviolable. But it does not follow that liberals must extend the presumption of good faith to everyone engaged in free speech. Right-wing operators in particular are groomed and trained to embrace bad-faith argument as a tactic. And yet even in the Trump era, when the bad faith is so thinly veiled, liberals remain reluctant to treat it as disqualifying. Even when their counterparties have established long track records of bad faith.

ATWATER UNDER THE BRIDGE

I’m not referring here to competitive debaters like Mehdi Hasan. Competitive debate can be a breeding ground for bad faith, but it can also be a useful format for exposing bad faith. And, if you watch, you’ll see Hasan plainly didn’t realize he’d be debating unapologetic fascists.

No, the suckers here are liberal journalists and intellectuals who maintain that facts and reason are the only rightful tools of discourse. That liberalism’s great strength is its capacity to depersonalize arguments. To ignore evidence of bad faith and deal with text. To steelman instrumental arguments and refute them. Win the battle of ideas.

But this is wrong. It’s wrong in the cliched sense that lies travel faster than truth—because concocting nonsense is much easier than reciting truths carefully, or using precise logic. And it’s wrong in that it widens the loophole for unscrupulous actors. If liberals are committed to the presumption of good faith, how can they object when news outlets recruit liars and propagandists to offer up the conservative “perspective” on the issues of the day? This is how a shabby propagandist like Byron York remained a fixture on NPR well into the Trump era, and why CNN offered contributor contracts to vile liars like Cory Lewandowski and Jeffrey Lord. Why it still reserves a seat at the table for an odious position-taker like Scott Jennings.

These operatives may not be outright fascists like Connor Estelle. But it’s actually hard to say for certain, because they lack Estelle’s candor. They would never confess to viewing deception as fair means to their political ends. That they’ve been trained to shed all compunction about saying things they know to be false, or that they don’t believe, or that they can’t support.

The intentionality of it all only becomes evident on those rare occasions when their fellow travelers let the mask slip: When, for instance, a Republican operative believed to be Karl Rove derided the “reality-based community” to the journalist Ron Suskind.

Perhaps the most famous confession came from the Republican consultant Lee Atwater, who once told an interviewer, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”

To this canon we can add Estelle, who said, “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn't mean free speech after we win.”

SLICING THE SALAM-I

It occurred to me to spell this all out when I saw the great New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie address critics:

Bouie was referring specifically to the right-wing think-tank executive Reihan Salam, who specializes in means-to-endism, but would never confess to it. And it brought me back to my first days in Washington, my introduction to the ways of elite liberal discourse.

Where conservatives are trained in means-ends, I was trained to ignore bylines and personal animus and engage with raw text. To never presume bad faith and just intellectually out-muscle people who make deceptive arguments. It was in these circles that I met Salam socially, and got to see up close how chummy he was with liberal eminences, young and old. Need a rigorous case for some uncouth Republican position? Ask Reihan! Meanwhile it was plain to me on first contact that Salam was a preening, ambitious little fanatic who cloaked bad-faith arguments in the argot of liberal intellectualism—like Ben Shapiro, just a bit more genteel. I knew right away to suspect his professional work would be slippery and instrumental. That there might be some value in debunking his arguments, but not in soliciting them in the first place.

Yet at the time it did not occur to me to draw an inference—that the liberal call to presume good faith, while correct sight unseen, should have limits.

Many years later, the liberals who prize the good-faith presumption would become tribunes in a war against progressive “cancel culture”—not the idea that it’s fair game to examine the character of people making dubious arguments, but that there should be social and material consequences for expressing offensive or malicious views.

When those debates raged, I tried not to call it cancel culture. I called it “the boycott method” because that’s how it works in practice. Person A says something that offends Group B; Group B makes a stink until Person A feels consequences.

This can go wrong in obvious ways. It certainly went too far in a number of cases at the time, and even progressives knew at some level that the method could be abused. It had been just over a decade since Republicans wielded the boycott method—cancel culture—against the Dixie Chicks, for the sin of criticizing George W. Bush and his impending invasion of Iraq.

But it’s not always wrong. And my point, then as now, is that we were just fighting over what constituted messages and messengers that deserved boycotting.

Now back to present day. Estelle, the proud fascist who wants to end free speech, claims he lost his job as a result of his remarks on Jubilee. Perhaps in the euphoria of fascist ascendance, Estelle deluded himself into assuming the right had eliminated all consequences. Or perhaps he was just lying.

In either case, I don’t see any liberal cancel culture foes calling for him to be reinstated, or saying that it’s wrong to fire someone who brags about his fascism in public. At some level they know there is a place for shunning. It exists on a spectrum just as the presumption of good faith exists on a spectrum. We should presume good faith, but the presumption should fall quickly as contrary evidence mounts, and it should be hard to earn back. The boycott method should be used sparingly, but then ruthlessly when needed. And we should make peace with judging character, even if in the Trump era it just means there aren’t many self-described conservatives worth taking seriously.

I wish we could do the last 20 years over again, under these terms. If only we all knew then what I know now.