When Did It Become Clear that One Side of the US Political Debate Consists of Bad-Faith Actors?
Volodymyr Zelensky's clothes? Seriously? As weird as that is, this is in fact not the first time that a foreign leader's fashion choices became a big deal to Republicans in Washington. Back in the 1980's, the leader of an avowedly leftist political movement in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, traveled to the US in the face of Cold Warriors' fierce opposition to the upstart lefty. (They need not have worried: "Despite the left-wing revolutionary rhetoric of the party, Ortega has allied with the business class and enacted what scholars characterize as crony capitalism.") While he was in D.C., Ortega was ridiculed by the right-wing press for having purchased "designer sunglasses," which was of course said to be horribly out of touch with his "man of the people" stance. How dare he! It turned out, however, that the glasses were expensive because they were bulletproof, which made sense in so, so many ways.
My point is that the "Zelensky isn't even wearing a suit!" cries from Donald Trump and his supporters are obviously pretextual, and we can be certain that if in fact the leader of a war-torn country had decided to show up at the White House in a business suit, the response would have been that he has lost touch with his citizens. This is similar to the rightwing attacks on n-words "DEI candidates," who are being told that they must prove that they did not get ahead in life because of unearned advantage -- yet nothing that they say is good enough to satisfy the bigots.
How does that work? As I pointed out last week, a New York Times reporter correctly described Vice-Vice President JD Vance as a classic DEI admission at Yale Law School. After all, he rose to fame as a self-described hillbilly, and America's elite universities love to give special attention to such underrepresented groups. Using the logic of Trump and his followers, it is simply "common sense" that Vance took a spot in the entering class away from an actually qualified applicant who could not diversify Yale's class, could not bring economic equity to it, and who could not add to the inclusive profile of that elite educational institution.
Can Vance disprove that presumption? Not at all, because every answer leads to other challenges. If he were to release his law school transcripts and they (hypothetically) showed that he had done reasonably well, we could object that he was receiving unmerited grades from people who were committed to DEI. If he were to release his undergraduate grades, we could assert that other applicants had better grades. If he were to publish his LSAT and SAT scores, anyone could claim that someone else took his exams for him. And if, say, he were to show his birth certificate from the State of Hawai'i, that would never quiet Trump. (Sorry, that last one was not about Vance. What was I thinking?)
Henceforth, I will therefore assert that it is simply common sense that Vance got ahead because he was a poor rural White kid, that Trump got into Penn because of wealth-based affirmative action, that Marco Rubio used political connections to get into better schools than his record would merit, and so on. I defy them to prove otherwise. By their own rules of engagement, they can never do so.
All of these thoughts bubbled up after I attended a faculty discussion yesterday at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, where I am currently a Visiting Professor. The event was an unusual panel discussion titled "When & How I Changed my Mind." Because it was a private event, I will not reveal anything more about the event than its title, which of course invited people who were not scheduled speakers to think about their own experiences with changing their minds. We scholars are in the notable position of being both committed to our ideas yet at the same time committed to updating our views when circumstances justify doing so. The stereotype of many professors (especially in law), however, is that we dig in and never change our minds.
That is not true, but because we do defend our views vigorously, it sometimes seems that we are in a to-the-death argument in which we will deflect or reject even the most constructive criticism. For some scholars, that definitely seems to be true, but it is good to step back at times and think about whether we have been open to updating or even completely changing our points of view.
As I began to imagine what I would have said if I had been on the panel, my first thought was an easy one, but it was also very narrow (and kinda boring, so please stay with me while I briefly summarize it). What turned out to be my second law review article began as an energetic brief in favor of "income averaging," which would transform the income tax system to measure people's incomes not year-by-year but over their entire lives. There is thankfully no need to get into any details here, because the bottom line is that the article ended up being titled "The Case Against Income Averaging" (italics added). If that is not a 180, what is?
While I was trying to decide whether to join the Q&A, I had a second thought: I could explain when and how I changed my mind about living in the United States! That would have been a bit playful as a framing device, but it would have been spot-on as an example of how someone makes a truly enormous decision (certainly a decision of more personal import than one's preferences regarding the mechanics of a country's tax system). And because I reached my conclusion about the US long before the 2024 US elections, the "when" would be especially important in discussing a major change of mind.
Ultimately, I decided not to jump into the discussion yesterday, which is probably for the best, because it was not until I was leaving the room that I thought of the best example of changing my mind: At some point, I stopped believing that the political right in the US is engaged in the good-faith arguments necessary to sustain a healthy political system. For much of my life, I wanted to believe (and I was generally successful in that regard) that the "reasonable minds can disagree" default in political debate was more or less adhered to on all sides of American political debates. That is, even though there were reasons based in partisanship and ideological rigidity for people to ignore evidence and even to argue dishonestly, it was for a long time possible for me to cling to the belief that there were ways to converge with one's political opponents toward at least grudging agreement on some issues.
All of which is to say that I believed that, in the larger scheme of things, facts and logic could move the political system forward. I have changed my mind about that. When and how did I do that?
There were plenty of milestones along the way, including the small example above about Nicaragua's leader wearing "designer sunglasses," but no example seemed to be important enough on it own to make me question whether the American right had more generally withdrawn from honest dialogue. As bad as the Reagan years were, however, things started to add up (in a very bad way) during the first George Bush's time as his party's leader, beginning with his use in the 1988 presidential campaign of the infamous "Willie Horton ad."
That campaign spot was not only blatantly racist fearmongering, but it was also impervious to evidence and logic. Among other things, Reagan had instituted a prison furlough program as governor of California that was more permissive than the program in Massachusetts that Republicans were using to attack Michael Dukakis. But that was merely the beginning. Once he became President, Bush nominated a manifestly unqualified man (who was thus an obvious example of Republicans' cartoon version of affirmative action) to be on the Supreme Court, a man who claimed never to have thought about Roe or to have much of a view about anything. That was not enough to cause the Bush people to withdraw the nomination in embarrassment, nor was the ensuing scandal involving sexual harassment and Anita Hill. When the vote in the Senate went in Thomas's favor, it became much more difficult to believe that there had been a genuine attempt to find the truth, because the Yea votes could not be explained other than by ignoring what we had all seen and heard.
The Clinton Administration put a nonpartisan spin on what had become an ideological split between those who relied on evidence and logic and those who did not. Clinton rammed through NAFTA based on lies and distortions, and he pushed through his plan to "end welfare as we know it" even when his own economic advisors had estimated that the plan would put two million additional children into poverty. Did the right-leaning Clintonites refute that estimate? No, they simply blew past it.
We need not say much about the second Bush's rush to war, which was a conclusion in desperate search of a justification. But the moment that finally broke me was nowhere near as famous as the examples above. In 2012, I published columns both on Verdict and here on Dorf on Law in which I took the aggressive step of saying that the Republicans had revealed themselves to be sociopaths. In particular, I noted that the debt-ceiling confrontation had included a line in the sand from the Republicans' House leadership requiring cuts in spending for children's nutrition and other supports for poor people.
By 2015, I found myself writing a column asking "What would it take?" for any remaining Republican to defect from their party. They had continued to lie about budgets (including former House Speaker Paul Ryan's infamous "magic asterisks"), to hold the world economy hostage via additional rounds of debt ceiling insanity, and to abandon even the pose of justifying their policies with arguments that can withstand scrutiny.
That is why I have been one of the people least surprised by the party's embrace of Trump's content-free non-arguments, which in the end are differences in degree (at most) with what the party had been willing to embrace pre-Trump. Now, the world wonders how Trump and his chorus can say that Zelensky is a dictator and an ingrate -- or that he is disrespectful because he dresses like the wartime president that he is. Vance, meanwhile, is the perfect example of how his side of the aisle is perfectly willing to countenance everything that they decry among Democrats. Even before now, back when the two elder Trump boys were attacking Hunter Biden for being a spoiled nepo-baby, irony's death rattle finally ended.
I want to believe that there is still a way to engage with people on the other side of the political divide. I truly do. But at some point, wanting something must give way to seeing things clearly.