The “Bad Faith” Fallacy

My least favorite thing that people do in this day and age is thinking that my political thoughts are some isolated form of crazy or unacceptable.

It has always been an inevitability that people don’t think alike, and we all have different political views. What is different about today is that more people have views that someone else can’t tolerate than ever. We can easily blame Trumpism for dividing the country like that, and the right for electing political leaders whose entire M.O.s are based on division. The right is electing leaders in complete ignorance of how this country actually works: There is no way the legislative process works without reaching across the aisle and getting deals done. This isn’t a philosophy I’m preaching: It’s literally how bills are authored.

It used to be a curious colloquialism about US politics that people campaigned on Washington being broken and you’re the outsider to fix it. Nowadays, the Right is so dangerously extreme that they’ve perverted this campaign tactic to sell some version of the Beltway outsider that is inconsistent with reality and the constitution they are professing to save.

Still, the left is plenty guilty of intellectual dogmatism these days.

As my writing shows, I’m not on board wokeness and am critical of anti-racism in its current form. As my voting patterns show and my work for the Democratic party shows, my support for Democratic causes stands on its own merits. Bottom line: I’m an ally to Democrats whether they like it or not.