On Bad Faith
On Bad Faith
Here is an example of the “both sides” variety of bad faith discussion. In particular, this Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan titled How Trump Could Re-Boot on Immigration.
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Sullivan reasonably takes issue with the authoritarian practices of the Trump Administration in how it is carrying out its immigration policies. He can’t resist some “both sides” bad faith jabbing at the Biden Administration, however. In one part he writes:
There is a reason for this over-reach, of course. The Biden administration was so negligent in enforcement of immigration law and so intent on expediting mass migration, they allowed in far more people than the immigration system could possibly handle, and effectively encouraged even more people to flock here.
This is bullshit on many levels. First off, there’s zero evidence (not counting idiot rightwing conspiracy-mongering) the Biden Administration was “intent on expediting mass migration.” Both Biden and Harris repeatedly said “don’t come” to migrants. The folks yelling “open borders” were Republicans, and primarily MAGA Republicans who support Trump. Third, Congress wrote the asylum laws, and if those laws lead to “far more people than the immigration system could possibly handle,” there’s a limit to what an Administration can do unless, like both Trump Administrations, it doesn’t care about the law.
The other factor is that deportation numbers were bound to seem much higher when the border was insecure — because many were simply turned back right away at the border itself. So Trump now sees his deportation numbers as lower than Obama’s and can’t psychologically tolerate that. So instead of explaining this (which he easily could), he flails around with ugly, authoritarian tactics, discrediting the entire project.
Many were turned back right away at the border under Biden, as well. Those encountered by Border Patrol agents who didn’t make a credible claim for asylum were deported. CBP’s numbers show hundreds of thousands of such deportations each year under Biden. Trump hasn’t made the border more secure: there are fewer people trying to cross to claim asylum than there was under Biden. The two things are not the same. The drop started during Biden’s last year in office, down to 58,000 in Biden’s last August, but it’s dramatically less under Trump. Which stands to reason. Republicans aren’t announcing over and over again that the border is open, and the last time Trump was in office he created a humanitarian crisis on the southern Border by refusing to follow our asylum laws. That humanitarian crisis started the border crisis under Biden as those hundreds of thousands in camps along Mexico’s northern border tried to finish their journey to the U.S. to claim asylum.
I don’t know if Biden made any efforts to expand the resources for processing asylum claims. If he did, he didn’t make a public show of it. Trump has no interest in expanding the resources currently enforcing these laws. In another part of the email Sullivan notes the GOP proposal “increases funding for detention by 364 percent to $45 billion, and leaves a measly $1.25 billion for judges over five years (up by just 30 percent).”
Later in the piece, Sullivan publishes part of a response to an earlier “Dissent” email. The dissent took issue with Sullivan’s writing about an Covid-19 origin conspiracy theory (Sullivan seems generally supportive). In an earlier Weekly Dish, Sullivan had published an email criticizing the authors of the book Viral, and in this one he provides a response from one of the authors. The authors are the two people who wrote a 2024 NYTimes opinion piece “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.” Their response has the hallmarks of bad faith, as well. The later-named author of the email criticized them for editing their book between editions to reflect new information, which is fine, but, according to him, they didn’t make the changes clear. The response doesn’t address his criticism. The author says they made it clear to the readers they had updated because of new information, but his criticism is they didn’t make clear what they’d changed. I don’t know if his criticism is accurate, but the fact remains they didn’t substantively respond to the criticism.
I haven’t read Sullivan in quite a while. I was never a regular reader of his, either. So I can’t say if this is normal Sullivan or not. My recollection is he wasn’t given to making bad faith arguments. Hopefully this is an exception and not the norm.
