politics

The Dogs Continue To Dunk On Us

It’s well past time for Democrats to lead a national mourning of the norms that will never return.

The idea that the United States will one day return to 20th century norms, through sheer force of will or perhaps through magic, is a nice idea, one to which I've clung on and off for the entirety of the Trump era.

This strain of thought – that Trump was an anomaly in the body politick who would one day go away and allow a return to what we knew as political normalcy – dominated in the early days of his ascent to the presidency and the world’s main character. He was a blip, many liberals thought, an accident that would be quickly corrected. We would look back and wonder what happened in 2016, that funny little year when a racist game show host accidentally won the White House. We would recall that disorienting four years from the perch of normalcy we had re-established – again, through magic, or maybe time travel via hot tub.

Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!

A return to norms has been the centerpiece of the past three Democratic presidential campaigns, two of which failed and one of which barely sneaked into power thanks largely to a once-in-a-century pandemic that the norms-breaker bungled to an obscene degree. The Democrats, hall monitors of our collapsing political system, have waved the rulebook furiously in the face of voters and Republican officials alike over this past hideous decade, reminding anyone and everyone who will listen that dogs aren’t allowed to play basketball while fascist AirBud dunks on the left again and again. And the crowd goes wild.

This is why Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son, Hunter, has created such a public meltdown. Biden ran for the presidency in 2020 based on little else but restoring political norms to the executive branch. Kamala Harris took the norms-loving baton from Biden in 2024 and promised her administration would continue acting what Americans largely consider normally. Americans gave a hesitant nod to that vision in 2020; they said absolutely not four years later.

The pardoning of Hunter Biden is couched as a major political scandal by Republican activists and officials – soaked to the bone in bad faith politics – along with the political press, who willingly pretend as if Democrats are the only ones with agency, and those who wish (hope) (pray) enough good-faith politics might open an avenue, however narrow, to a world ruled by our precious, dearly departed norms.

The worry, I gather, is that Biden’s pardoning of his son will lay the groundwork for Republicans – namely Trump – to abuse their power while feeding the bad faith machine that tells voters good and bad things are exactly the same. Now Trump can take office, immediately pardon the January 6 insurrections, and point to Hunter Biden’s pardon for legitimacy. Joe Biden said his son was unfairly targeted for prosecution, just like Republicans believe the insurrectionists – who tried and failed to kill members of Congress and overthrow the U.S. government – were unfairly targeted by overzealous prosecutors. Hunter Biden illegally owned a gun and did not pay taxes. The insurrectionists tried to hang elected officials and end the American government. These things are exactly the same.

The right wing’s bad faith knows no bounds. Not one. We should know this after decades of having to pretend conservatives mean what they say: Money equals speech, the left is destroying free speech, abortion is unsafe, only more guns can solve our national gun crisis, tax cuts for the sickeningly wealthy benefit everyone, the insidious Democratic Party is shipping loyal voters from foreign nations into swing states (this doesn’t seem to work so well). They don’t believe any of this shit. They don’t believe in anything. This only gives them an excuse to act how they want to act, to create problems that require solutions favored by the most feverish right wingers alive.

The right’s weaponization of bad faith is the foundation of Bad Faith Times because this has come to define how politics are done in the third decade of the 21st century. As a reluctant connoisseur of bad faith politics, I promise you this was never going to fade away. The use of bad faith to roll back basic constitutional rights and make American less fair and less free was only going to accelerate.

Pardoning Hunter Biden will have no effect on this acceleration of bad faith. Republicans were not going to stop their incessant whataboutism if the president had simply let his son remain in legal hell. Trump was going to pardon every malignant force in the country anyway. We know this because he pardoned some of the most evil Americans in the country’s history last time around, including literal war criminals and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who created concentration camps (his words) for migrants near the Arizona border and lorded over a system of shocking dehumanization. The Hunter Biden pardon makes no difference at all. More pardons were coming for the worst living Americans. The bad faith machine was going to continue to hum along at full speed and trick the political press into treating both major political parties as equally scornful of the so-called norms.

I don’t care about this pardon. I’ve tried to get worked up about it and I just can’t. True believers on the right have urged Trump and his people to continue the pursuit of Hunter and the entire Biden family. The right-wing ratfuck of Hunter Biden was far from over; he was going to face at least four more years of nonstop bad-faith legal attacks from elected officials and federal hatchetmen doing the hard work of delivering Trump’s vengeance against those who made a half-assed effort to hold him accountable for his myriad crimes. It made sense for Joe Biden to protect his kid from political persecution. I would have done the same.

American presidents have always abused their unchecked pardon powers and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Every modern president on their way out the door has granted pardons to their various country club criminal friends and cronies and family members. Jimmy Carter pardoned Jefferson Davis, the president of the fucking Confederacy. It’s enough to make one question whether presidents should have this wildly undemocratic power in their back pocket.

The Tragedy Of The Fragile Party

No one, not even the norms-adoring Democrats watching red-pilled Air Bud deliver vicious dunks over their collective head, has any incentive to operate in good faith anymore. Norms and rules only work when two sides agree on those norms and rules. They become a two-ton anchor around the neck of whoever continues abiding by the rules after the other side says no, we won’t be abiding by those pesky little things anymore.

The Democratic Party has been loath to mourn the death of our political norms. It’s a funeral they refuse to attend almost ten years after the body was buried. People at every level of the party over this decade of ascendant worldwide fascism have whistled while they work to bring back the Sorkin-esque political norms that dominated when only nerds paid attention to the machinery of government and the agonizing minutiae of everyday politics (Zoomers probably don’t remember a time when every Cabinet appointment didn’t induce panic attacks in tens of millions of Americans).

This is why the Democratic Party is the fragile party, hyper-sensitive to cultural and political stressors and prone to collapse with rapid and unexpected changes. Trump’s Republican Party, meanwhile, is the ultimate in antifragility: It benefits from disorder and chaos, it gets stronger as norms are shredded to ribbons and tossed aside. In an age of fragmentation in which the postwar order is being held together with Scotch tape and fraying string, the antifragile party has an edge so big it may be unquantifiable. Arrangements we assumed to be permanent are falling apart every day and everyone exists in their own curated online reality. Nothing makes sense anymore and the international fascist movement is thriving, living its best life at the cost of political stability.

It’s well past time for leading Democrats to lead a national mourning of the norms that will never return. This isn’t to say we have no hope of having a functional democracy – there are ways to have a robust democratic republic without being chained to the corpses of the Founding Fathers – but to try to cobble together the political norms of the postwar era are a fool’s errand. It’s worse than a fool’s errand, actually, because as Democrats try and fail to piece together the norms that have been run through a paper shredder, Republicans are out here benefiting from the ensuing disorder and chaos. Air Bud continues to dunk in cooler and more inventive ways.

This is not a structurally difficult spot for Democrats. It is an impossible spot, one in which they are destined to fail at every turn while the most radical elements of the Republican Party get stronger and bolder with every new wrinkle of chaos in the nation’s deteriorating politics. But being the norms-defending institutionalist party is a choice. No one is making Democrats take this strategically disastrous role. No one forced the Harris campaign to cobble together a disparate team of norms respecters who might appeal to a nonexistent part of the American electorate. They can (and should) simply ditch the bit and move on.

Pardoning Hunter Biden is a violation of our long-dead political norms. I think this can be a positive development if Democrats are willing to embrace the antifragility that has made Republicans so unstoppable whether they’re in or out of power (if this is the only norms-violating move Biden makes on his way out, it was, at best, a massive miscalculation).

Not all norm-breaking is bad; there’s a viable argument that the only way out of this shit is for the left to utterly disregard all long-standing norms. In fact, ignoring norms is likely the only way left to beat back the anti-democracy forces running roughshod over every institution in sight. You know what would have been a massive violation of political norms? Appointing a handful of justices to the Supreme Court, a captured institution. A new liberal Court majority would have given the green light to every policy on the progressive wishlist and created a new and white-hot political hell for the American right, which would no longer have a backstop of fascist judges to stop any and all progress.

It’s high time to stop complaining about Air Bud dunking and to go out and get your own dog to dunk on some Republican asses. If that includes a pardon for the president’s kid, so be it.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social