# A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments

## by Aaron Huertas


Bad faith arguments are common in politics. And while they’ve always been part
of political culture, they’re much more rampant on social media. It’s easy to
fall prey to bad faith arguments and waste time engaging someone on points that
obscure rather than shed light on how we’re all affected by policy and
politics.

So with that in mind, here’s a field guide for spotting and responding to bad
faith arguments and staying focused on the real-world issues that matter.

### What’s a bad faith argument?

The hallmark of a bad-faith argument is that it disguises the core point of a
debate rather than addressing issues, beliefs, and values head-on.

Bad faith arguments aren’t “real” positions; they’re proxy positions people
take for rhetorical purposes. In some cases, a bad faith position can be
intentional. For instance, Sen. Mitch McConnell [made up a “Biden rule”][1]
to justify stealing a Supreme Court seat. Instead of arguing about the merits
of refusing to hold a vote on President Barack Obama’s justice nominee Merrick
Garland, McConnell made a proxy argument about Democrats being hypocrites for
complaining about his power grab.  And indeed, many Republicans and
independents came to believe that the “Biden rule” was real and that McConnell
was simply playing hardball politics just like the Democrats.

But most bad faith arguments aren’t from wily, professional politicians like
McConnell. They simply come from a place of not wanting to confront the actual
arguments someone else is making.

For instance, climate policy advocates point to scientific evidence that
burning fossil fuels and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere is causing seas to rise, more wildfires, and disruptions to rainfall
patterns on which we rely. They argue these risks are severe enough to warrant
dramatically reducing fossil fuel use and switching to clean energy.

But anti-climate-action groups will often say the science is not certain enough
to justify action. Climate advocates will respond by citing more and more
scientific evidence demonstrating climate risks. But there’s a problem: The
advocates are responding to a bad faith argument because anti-climate action
groups never say what level of scientific certainty would be necessary to
justify climate policy.

Indeed, if you ask them to name the level of certainty they need or the type of
evidence that would win them over, they’ll never do it. Although their argument
is premised on the idea that more science could justify climate action, they
can’t actually define a world where that’s true.  Instead, they tend to oppose
climate policy for ideological reasons—including an ideological commitment to
exploiting fossil fuels—but they choose to fight policy in bad faith on
scientific grounds.

Similarly, many anti-climate action groups have evolved from outright climate
denial to acknowledging that climate change is real and a problem but say
they’re against “climate alarmism” and don’t believe in “catastrophic global
warming.” But what do these terms mean? Again, they never say. If I think
business as usual means the Earth is going to warm 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the
end of the century, am I an alarmist? How about 10 degrees?

> Don’t waste time responding to these arguments on their own merits — they
> have none.

Their actual operating definition is that “catastrophic global warming” is the
precise amount needed to justify policy action, and, by definition, we will
always fall short of it. An alarmist, meanwhile, is anyone who says we need to
act on climate change.

There’s an important distinction between types of bad faith arguments worth
making here: Not all anti-climate action advocates are making these arguments
intentionally. They’re not consciously thinking, “I’m going to pretend to say
one thing but really mean another.” Indeed, many sincerely believe that climate
alarmism is terrible and must be combatted even though they have not bothered
to form a coherent definition of what the term means.

In this case, these bad faith arguments are often best described as a form of
“agnotology,” a term historian Robert Proctor has popularized to describe the
cultivation of ignorance. Proctor studied how tobacco companies spread doubt
about the link between smoking and cancer. Rather than directly criticizing the
science, they spread messages about uncertainty and doubt to cloud
policymakers’ judgment. They say maybe something else was causing the cancer…
or maybe the scientific links were there but weren’t, uh, direct enough… or
maybe people who are more likely to get cancer are actually more likely to
smoke.

Agnotology—and the popularization of political ignorance—cuts across a variety
of issues, not just scientific ones. Indeed, I’ve come to see it as the most
common form of bad faith argument in political debates.

For instance, why are NFL players taking a knee? To protest police violence.
They’ve been absolutely clear about this for years. But here’s Fox News telling
its millions of viewers that no one knows why they’re protesting.

With that in mind, here are some other types of bad faith arguments we run into
every day online and in public policy debates. Don’t waste time responding to
these arguments on their own merits — they have none. They exist to distract
from core policy issues and the actual effect they have on our lives, our
rights, and our planet.

### The cartoon strawmanner

The cartoon strawmanner has no need to ask you what you believe; he already
knows. How does he know? Because he already has a number of counterarguments to
your position. Not your actual position, of course, but the one that his
favorite propaganda outlets have told him you have.

For instance, many scholars have [pointed out][2] that [YouTube’s
recommendation algorithm][3] , which is optimized to push people to more and
more intensive information about consumer products, has the unintended effect
of pushing a minority of conservative viewers further and further down the
rabbit hole to white nationalism. This is a problem because it seems to be
playing a key role in helping a small but committed number of young white men
to become [violent][4] [reactionaries][5]

But conservative YouTubers and their defenders will often make two arguments in
response to this:

   Not everyone who watches these videos becomes a Nazi. *(No one is claiming that they are.)*

   You can’t just call everyone a Nazi. *(No one is doing this.)*

These bad-faith arguments mean to distract from the core point, which is that
bad actors are abusing YouTube’s platform to promote racist ideologies and
encourage political violence.

We can have a debate about how these new platforms and the people who use them
respond. Are companies like YouTube more like utilities or television stations
in what they owe to their audiences? If there’s no such thing as a politically
neutral algorithm, how should companies consider the political consequences of
altering recommendation algorithms? What, if any, role should the government
play in regulating social media platforms? Do conservatives whose videos get
remixed by people even further to their right have a [responsibility to take
them down][6]?  Is debating [a fascist ever useful][7], or does it merely
mainstream their ideas?

But bad faith responses avoid these points entirely by cartoon strawmanning the
people bringing them up instead. The best way to respond to these strawman
arguments is simply to inform someone that no one is making that argument and
point them to a book or long report to read (they will never read it).

Eventually, the cartoon strawmanner evolves, like a shitty, annoying Pokémon,
to become the lie detector.

### The lie detector

The lie detector knows what you really mean. After all, they already know what
your position is. But when you say your actual beliefs are something else
entirely, they have a choice — accept that they have not accounted for the full
spectrum of human belief about a topic or accuse you of lying.

The lie detector knows The Truth. Do not challenge the lie detector on any of
these points: They know more about your beliefs, your life, and your work
history than you ever will. You should ask the lie detector what you’re having
for dinner this evening.

### The freeze peach advocate

The “freeze peach” advocate is a fake free speech advocate. They confuse
disagreement with silencing, delegitimization, and censorship. While they
believe in “free speech,” it turns out what that really means in practice is
promoting their speech ** and ** the speech of people they agree with.

Jordan Peterson, who came to fame for [picking an imaginary free speech
fight][8] over transgender pronouns in Canada, for instance, recently [sued two
professors][9] for criticizing him and his views and even sued another university to boot.

Additionally, climate deniers might say they’re shut out of the debate because
scientists won’t sit around discussing their ideas with them for hours and
hours. But flat-Earthers are shut out of debates with geologists, too. The
truth is that you don’t have to meet someone in an online or IRL structured
debate to grapple with their arguments. Indeed, scientists have [cataloged and
numbered][10] bad climate denial arguments for easy reference.

Further, free speech and platforming arguments are often used as proxies for
actual arguments. “These cowards won’t debate me!” is an easier sell than “Let
me tell you about why I think 200 years of science is wrong even though I can’t
get my ideas published in a scientific journal.”

Freeze peach advocates think that they and their peers deserve a platform, but
they never recognize that platform space is actually limited and contested. In
fighting for airtime or seats at congressional hearings, they shut out other
voices just as their voices can get shut out, too. The truth is that no one is
entitled to a stage, a TV spot, or a book deal.

Or as Alex Pareene hilariously said in response to the *New York Times*
covering another stop on the freeze peach college campus moral panic tour: “[If
You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally
Call You a Dipshit][11].”

Even when supposed free speech and civil debate advocates go on to run their
own platforms, they rarely talk to people to their left. Instead, free speech
and fears of suppression are used as marketing tactics, not core moral values.
That’s why you never hear them advocate for lefty protestors who are unjustly
jailed, students who face expulsion penalties for their free speech, or
government scientists who face routine censorship of their research.

(As an aside, there are plenty of civil libertarian groups that do [a ton of
great work][12] on actual free speech and [academic freedom issues][13].  When
fake free speech advocates don’t show up to these fights, they show that
they’re in it for their speech, not anyone else’s.)

The freeze peach advocate should be reminded that no one is entitled to a
platform and no one is actually preventing them from speaking. More
importantly, their attention should be refocused to the actual policy debates
at hand.

### The purity tester

The purity tester would like you to know that Al Gore [uses airplanes][14] (*so
troubling for an environmentalist!*) and that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wore a
[nice outfit][15] for a photo shoot once (*what kind of socialism is that?!*).
The purity tester isn’t here to tell you a policy agenda is wrong; they’re here
to tell you those are bad spokespeople for their cause.

If Gore swore off flying, would the Koch brothers suddenly come to Jesus on
climate policy? Nope. And if Ocasio Cortez pledged to only wear thrift store
chic on the House floor, would people like Charlie Kirk finally accept the need
for universal health care? No way.

These are goofy bad faith arguments that attempt to take the focus off policy
and put it on advocates instead. They’re a form of concern trolling that should
be dismissed out of hand, although asking the purity tester to name an advocate
whose arguments they’d be willing to listen to can be amusing. It’s rare that
they’ve ever considered the idea of a good advocate before, which demonstrates
that it’s just agnotology at work.

### The logic nerd

The logic nerd has a very clear argument. The argument has multiple parts, each
of which is impeccable and internally consistent. The logic nerd has his facts
straight, too, and has a number of counterarguments ready to deploy should you
try to poke holes. In fact, the logic nerd has three rhetorical questions ready
to go to expose your fallacious reasoning and will ask them, in turn,
regardless of what you say or do.

I have some love for the logic nerd. If I had less empathy and less of a sense
of just how much damage shitty public policy does to people, I too could have
grown up to be a logic nerd, dear reader.

But I came to realize that politics isn’t a dispute over which facts are true
or whether your logic is valid. It’s a dispute over which facts are the most
relevant to a debate and what logic we should follow when setting and enforcing
laws.

> Responding to the logic nerd is a joy because if you fail to play along with
> their game, they will ad hominem the shit out of you.

For instance, a logic nerd would love to debate you about the pay gap: *Are
women really paid less than men? If so, by how much, and in which industries?
But what about this industry where some women are paid more?  Should we not
examine the data? Okay, look at my data! Do you deny my data, sir? It is the
best and only data! Sir, by your own logic…*

What the logic nerd fails to realize is that equal pay laws give people the
right to sue individual companies and institutions for pay discrimination. You
can make all the societal-level arguments about the pay gap you want, but the
actual law (and lawsuits) exist alongside that discussion, which is much closer
to the reality that people live with every day when fighting discrimination.

Responding to the logic nerd is a joy because if you fail to play along with
their game, they will ad hominem the shit out of you. Failure to answer
rhetorical questions, even by pointing out why the questions are not relevant,
will result in persistent
[sea-lioning][16].

There’s only one way to truly defeat the logic nerd. [You must introduce him to
the Fallacy Man][17]. (Read the whole thing, please.)

### The tone police and persuasion pundits

When people have truly bad positions to defend, they often attempt to make a
meta-argument about tone and persuasive power instead. This is endemic in
Washington.

For instance, a Daily Caller editor [went to a progressive rally][18] and was
shocked — shocked — to find that people there were angry about politics. Well,
yeah, a lot of people who show up to political events are upset about something
and want to change and fix it. But instead of responding to what they were
upset about (sinking wages and crappy health care), the editor focused on their
tone.

Not surprisingly, the same publication would never be shocked at right-wing
anger, such as Tea Party rallies condemning Obama. That’s because their anger
is always justified, but yours never is.

Similarly, conservatives will routinely criticize NFL players for how they’re
protesting police brutality by [kneeling during the national
anthem][19].
But they’ll never suggest an alternative means of protesting. No tone is the
only tone they want to hear.

Meanwhile, many \#NeverTrump conservatives are often trapped in persuasion
punditry when they argue with liberals. “Medicare for all?  Don’t you know
Midwesterners are skeptical of big government? That’s not gonna play well in
Trump country,” they say.

> When people are really making an argument about persuading someone, they
> actually try to persuade them. If not, it’s just more bad faith.

Well, that’s certainly an easier argument to make than saying millions of
people should suffer from a lack of health care and that you’re fundamentally
okay with that. But in removing themselves one layer from actual policy,
pundits can appear savvy without actually committing themselves to a real
position, even as they justify the status quo.

Bret Stephens, a conservative *New York Times* writer, wrote a column about how
climate advocates should be more persuasive to him and other conservatives by
not being so strident and certain about climate change being bad. But when
another writer asked him which climate policies he might ever support, [he
couldn’t
say][20].
When people are really making an argument about persuading someone, they
actually try to persuade them. If not, it’s just more bad faith.

The solution to tone policing and bad punditry is just focusing on the issues.
If someone wants to keep distracting from that with what’s fundamentally a
political tactics discussion, ask them to help get your preferred policy
passed. If they say no, congrats: You’ve found their real position.

### The both siderist

The both siderist is very reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that people who
care about politics actually look very unreasonable by comparison: *Did you
hear about the bad thing Republicans did? Well, Democrats did a bad thing too
once, and it’s all quite unfortunate that everyone can’t be as reasonable as
me.*

Has the both siderist ever taken any actions to try to improve the political
system? Well, it’s funny that you ask; no, they haven’t. What they have done is
ask everyone, very nicely, to be civil and take it easy and not get too
political with all that politics.

But in insisting on being the most reasonable person in the room, the both
siderist has failed to *read* the room. Their postured reasonableness obscures
the political realities we’re dealing with: rampant Republican gerrymandering,
voter suppression, human rights abuses, and anti-democratic power grabs from
people like McConnell and Trump.

 Nearly all the Republican moderates have been voted out of office.
Redefining “moderate” doesn’t make them more moderate, it just drags the debate
to the right. **Chart:** [The Washington
Post][21]

The both siderist has a lot of political opinions, but their most important
opinion is that both sides are bad — even if one side is doing objectively
terrible shit to millions of people. It’s because the both siderist desperately
wants to be off the hook for having to actually do anything to improve our
political system. (The both siderist, coincidentally, also has a book to sell
and needs to get on as many media outlets as possible to sell it. But they
can’t afford to alienate anyone by being — gasp — partisan.)

As the Republican Party has gone off the rails in the Obama era, this has led
to a deeper and deeper stretch of both siderism logic. For instance, [Amy
Chua][22], [writing in *The Atlantic*][23] about the decline of democracy,
equates Trump threatening to revoke people’s citizenship and strip them of
their voting rights with college students asking a university to stop
venerating a slave-owning Founding Father. But one of these fundamentally
alters the realities of American political life for decades; the other is a
campus debate over a statue.

The committed both siderist must never admit that one party or one side in a
debate is worse than the other. If they did, they might have to do something
about it.

### Debating in good faith

It’s worth remembering that the people who respond to you online are usually
less than 1 percent of 1 percent, and the reason they’re writing is that they
virulently disagree. In the broader public sphere, it would be good to see
fact-checkers, pundits, magazine editors, and TV hosts actually try to pin
people down on real positions.

As [Matt Bruenig has noted][24], political debates often function in two
different universes. There’s a “take universe” with columns, opinion pieces,
and think tank reports. Some of them are hot takes. Others are lukewarm, and if
you dig into them, they’re just the same circle of people citing themselves as
the source of The Truth on a given topic. Then there’s the real universe of
actual data, actual outcomes for people and actual structures of power in
society. In Bruenig’s case, he introduces hard data about public ownership of
industries and worker control over businesses into fuzzy ideologically rigid
“take universe” debates about capital, labor, and socialism.

I’ve loved working with scientists because reality is real and scientists are
responsive to it. The political class should be too.  We’re drifting further
from that precisely because conservative authoritarians attack sources of
information that help us see reality: an independent press, science and
academia, and public employees who work for all of us. They cultivate ignorance
as surely as the tobacco companies did. It’s the only way they can hold onto
power.

They exploit the proliferation of online media to make the world too hard to
understand. They make agnotology a certainty to obscure obvious realities like
the fact that countries with universal health care have better health outcomes
and the obvious ethical argument that no one has to die from lack of medical
care in the richest country on Earth.

Some of the best writing on arguments deals with the overwhelming amount of
[bullshit][25] and [uninformative information][26] available in the modern
media system. Neil Postman, the author of *Amusing Ourselves to Death*, argued
in his later books that we must become “loving resistance fighters” who focus
on our lived reality and core humanist values rather than media representations
that can never truly stand in for our world.

Even though I work in communications and media, I’ve tried to live up to that.
I go to organizing meetings. I canvass and knock on doors. I show up for
protests and direct actions. I’m a member of two unions. This stuff matters;
real people matter. The real consequences of policy are life and death for
millions of us.

So we should focus on that relentlessly and never get distracted by bullshit,
bad faith arguments.



[1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/24/there_is_no_biden_rule_explained.html
[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en
[3]: https://datasociety.net/output/alternative-influence/
[4]: https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-heather-heyer-profile/index.html
[5]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/18/quebec-city-mosque-shooter-scoured-twitter-for-trump-right-wing-figures-before-attack/?utm_term=.7636891ea394
[6]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hitler-downfall-parodies-removed-from-youtube/
[7]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity
[8]: https://medium.com/s/story/a-field-guide-to-jordan-petersons-political-arguments-312153eac99a
[9]: https://www.thecut.com/2018/09/jordan-peterson-threatened-to-sue-feminist-critic-kate-manne.html
[10]: http://skepticalscience.com/
[11]: https://splinternews.com/if-you-truly-care-about-speech-you-will-invite-me-to-y-1823614969
[12]: https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech
[13]: https://www.thefire.org/
[14]: https://newrepublic.com/article/144199/al-gores-carbon-footprint-doesnt-matter
[15]: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-responds-to-criticism-of-her-posh-photo-shoot-clothes-get-used-to-me-slaying-lewks/
[16]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning
[17]: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9
[18]: https://splinternews.com/the-daily-caller-went-to-an-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-ra-1827826727
[19]: https://extranewsfeed.com/how-to-have-a-real-argument-about-takeaknee-fe14d174997f
[20]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/opinion/paris-climate-accord-carbon-tax.html
[21]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/02/this-astonishing-chart-shows-how-republicans-are-an-endangered-species/
[22]: https://medium.com/s/story/taking-sides-is-good-d5fece550a24
[23]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/the-threat-of-tribalism/568342/
[24]: https://soundcloud.com/ebruenig/nordic-socialism-is-really-real
[25]: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html
[26]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly

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