Some recent reading on Democratic timidity in the face of bad faith questions that I thought was worth sharing.

Brian Beutler's I Am Going to Lose My F****** Mind from Off Message is about Democratic risk-aversion, the party's reflexive fear of taking the actions that are most obviously called for. Republicans "use the tactics I've advocated for here aggressively — more aggressively than I suspect is optimal — and they still win half of all elections. Trump has won two of three against the party of 'what if doing apposite things backfires?'". What are Democrats scared of? The consequences of that timidity show up vividly in the recent political news. Every prominent Democrat was being buttonholed for a statement on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker's political associations, while JD Vance was at the White House briefing room defending Tucker Carlson – "Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things. And I'm not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus" — even as he called Abdul El-Sayed "very, very evil" for his Piker connection. Simultaneously, Elon Musk, "the Republican Party's ultimate insurance policy," who served as "co-president for the first several months of this administration," was publicly cataloging which Jews have enough Jewish DNA to qualify as Jewish. No press crusade followed. No ADL censure. The same media elites "take it for granted that Republicans hate Muslims," Beutler writes. The evidence is right there; they just don't say it, and yet treat the question of which party harbors more antisemites as genuinely unsettled. This asymmetry isn't just a media failure that Democrats have to live with: it "arises in part because Republicans set those terms in the discourse. They hold Democrats to a high standard, and themselves to no standard at all." Democrats' refusal to push back helps sustain it. As Beutler puts it: "it is impossible to participate in reasoned debate without going insane or abandoning principle if it's all premised on absurdities."

A Familiar Media Failure, also from Off Message, explains the mechanism. "Journalists love controversy. Part of the reason mainstream media yawns at the MAGA entourage is that Democrats tend to studiously avoid whipping up outrage over stuff like this." The material available for outrage is plentiful: the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia employed multiple white supremacists; the candidate in Texas was impeached by his own party for corruption, bribery, and abuse of power; scores of white supremacists and neo-Nazis work in the Trump administration; and the president's most prominent surrogate recently called four Democratic congresswomen and a sitting Supreme Court justice "ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black BITCHES." The press has "decided this isn't terribly interesting". But it isn't interesting partly because Democrats haven't made it interesting. Beutler's proof of concept: when Jon Ossoff did make controversy out of Republican associations earlier in the month, it "kicked off a multiday, still-unfolding media feeding frenzy, and did real damage to Donald Trump." Democrats know this works. "Our political press corps should be better than it is; but until it heals itself, Democrats need to optimize communication for the media we have."

Hamilton Nolan's You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits in How Things Work explains why this dynamic is self-sustaining. Bad-faith arguments derive their power not from their merit but from the obligation to respond to them. Attention is fungible, and prestige misleads people into treating a writer's position as a measure of the work's value. "The more subtle and substantial danger of patronizing idiot pundits is that the accumulated weight of attention that we grant them bestows them with actual influence, which they use to make the world worse." Engaging with a bad-faith frame treats it as legitimate, which produces more bad-faith frames. The prescription is simple: "You can just ignore the bad pundits." Which is easier to say than to do when, as Beutler documents, the same frames are being simultaneously enforced by vice presidents at official briefings.