2020 was the year of bad faith
My bid to define this stinker before someone else does in December.
Years have personalities, and sometimes they acquire names. Indonesia’s President Sukarno pronounced 1965 tahun vivere pericoloso, an Italian phrase that translates into English as a “year of living dangerously.” Queen Elizabeth declared 1992 to be an annus horribilis. Joan Didion designated 2004 a year of magical thinking. Following this tradition, and reverting to the previous habit of stating these things in foreign tongues, I hereby name 2020 l’année de mauvaise foi, or “the year of bad faith.”
Mauvaise foi has been with us since the dawn of time, but credit for the phrase is typically assigned to Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre defines mauvais foi as a sort of deliberate self-enslavement to the illusion of helplessness, famously citing the examples of a waiter who overplays his servility and a woman who accepts passively a man’s physical advances to buy time while she judges his intentions.
Both examples are a bit dated; in France they no longer address waiters as garçon, or “boy,” and a woman nowadays is expected to decide whether to accept a man’s advances based not on what she thinks he wants but on what she wants. It’s also true these days that lot of people judge Sartre himself to be old hat. But the basic idea that we deceive ourselves into thinking we have no choices in life when we do, however painful they may be, has become a cornerstone of modern psychotherapy, and just about the only analytic tool of any use to describe the Republican Party’s captivity to Donald Trump.
The mauvaise foi that Sartre described was an internalization of the bad faith imposed from without by bad leaders—fascists in Sartre’s time, an orange-faced bully in ours. But perhaps that’s a distinction without much difference, because imposing bad faith on others doesn’t really work unless you can first persuade yourself. That task is made much easier when you’re a narcissist who bends all reality to accommodate your psychological needs. Sound like anybody we know?
Trump has governed in bad faith for four years, but only during his final year in office did his conquest of the GOP, to the point of extreme humiliation, become absolute. His principal propaganda tool, buttressed by a series of Nuremberg-style rallies, was Twitter, which, due to its peculiar combination of brevity, velocity, global reach, and dissociation from lived reality, is the most technologically efficient mauvaise foi delivery system in human history. These rallies and Twitter messages had a cumulative effect on the minds of congressional Republicans that reached its climax in the current year.
January. The House articles of impeachment are delivered to the Senate, which proceeds to hold a trial without subpoenas, witnesses or documents. This is justified on the basis that few in the Senate majority contest that Trump has done what he stands accused of doing—withholding funds from Ukraine to pressure its leader into investigating the family of Joe Biden, his anticipated opponent in the general election—who, as Trump fears, will ultimately defeat him.
"I'm not an impartial juror,” says Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham. It’s all just politics, they insist, and they’re not obliged to judge the charges on their merits. Still, they’d just as soon not have their noses rubbed in the evidence.
Graham will go on to become the mauvaise foi mascot for 2020.
February-March. Trump tweets,
Trump also says: “The 15 [U.S. Covid cases] within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero” (Feb. 26) and “I just wanted [Covid] to stop as it pertains to the United States. And that's what we've done. We've stopped it” (March 12). Meanwhile, he’s telling Bob Woodward, “this is deadly stuff” (Feb. 7) and “I wanted to always play it down, because I don’t want to create a panic” (March 19).
April-May. Congressional Republicans and other Trump allies advance the argument that the largely unchecked spread of Covid across the U.S. is congressional Democrats’ fault because impeachment distracted the president from the pending crisis.
June-July-August. Trump: “It’s fading away. It’s going to fade away” (June 17). “Right now I think it’s under control” (Aug. 3).
Trump votes by mail in Florida even though he’s been denouncing voting by mail as fraudulent. He says he won’t supply more funds to the post office, as sought in a Covid stimulus proposed by House Democrats, because “If we don’t make the deal, that means … they can’t have universal mail-in voting. It just can’t happen.”
There is no Covid stimulus deal. Republican officials urge Trump not to criticize voting by mail because they need Republican voters to deliver their votes by mail. Trump ignores them, with the result that Republican mail-in votes will be depressed in the general election.
September-October. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies. Voting in the 2020 election has already begun. Four years earlier, Senate Republicans opposed considering a replacement for Antonin Scalia when he died in February 2016 on the grounds that it was an election year. They refused even to meet with President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.
"I want you to use my words against me," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said in 2016. “If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination."
But when Ginsburg dies Graham presses ahead with Trump’s hasty nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. A garden party for Barrett at the White House becomes a Covid hot spot, but the White House refuses to conduct contract tracing, presumably because it doesn’t want to reveal precisely when Trump, who contracts Covid shortly thereafter, first had reason to think he’d been exposed to the virus. The White House doesn’t want to do that because it would show that Trump did zippo to protect those around him from getting Covid, setting a mind-bendingly bad public-health example for the nation.
Trump recovers from Covid, and Barrett is confirmed on Oct. 26.
November-December. Joe Biden wins the presidential election. Trump denies he lost. Republican officeholders, after initially affirming that Biden has indeed won, later mostly succumb to pressure from Trump and pretend that the outcome is in doubt. Graham says, "If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again."
Before the election, a group called Republican Voters Against Trump ran a campaign ad quoting Graham, five years earlier, calling Trump “a race baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.” Now, according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is himself a Republican, Graham is trying to pressure him to challenge the validity of absentee ballots that Graham knows were cast legally.
Trump’s insistence that he won gets weirder and crazier as a growing number of his lawyers either get defeated in court or decide the hell with this and quit. On November 16 he tweets,
As 2020 draws to a close, the GOP’s humiliation is complete. Given the choice between defending the democratic process and defending the raging, vengeful, mentally unbalanced head of their party, it has chosen the latter. At this point these poor bastards would back up Trump if he said the moon was made of green cheese.
C’est l’année de mauvaise foi.
On to 2021!