Types of Bad-Faith Actors

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

We have a tendency to accuse anyone who disagrees with us as being a "bad faith actor." That is usually not the case. They, rather, are people who disagree with us, but they do so for good reasons (that differ from our reasons for believing or acting differently), and they are acting in good faith if their reasons are taken into account.  

The people who we define as "bad faith actors" are those who, for selfish reasons, and without regard to the welfare of the larger society, act to deliberately undermine compromise-based solutions and the system of collaborative, democratic governance, more broadly.The term "bad-faith actors" came out of the labor-management field in the United States where labor-management mediators long ago realized that the whole process just doesn't work if either the union or the management is refusing to negotiate in good faith. So organizations like the National Labor Relations Board have written into their rules procedures for dealing with bad-faith actors. On the peacebuilding side, the focus has been on "spoilers"-- folks who block peace agreements that would move the society away from violent confrontation and war and toward some sort of system of governance based on the rule of law and democratic principles.

Bad faith actors have many different types including 

• Power grabbers — people who try to amass as much power as possible for themselves, while disempowering everybody else (including, often, people on "their side,")
• "True Believers" — people who are so sure that they are right that they refuse to listen to or consider alternative views,
• "Spoilers" — a peacebuilding term referring to people or groups who try to "spoil" peace agreements (often through violence), because they believe they will get more out of continued violent conflict,
• "Conflict Profiteers" (such as gun makers and arms dealers) that profit from exacerbating conflict and selling their wares to fearful people who think that buying guns will keep them safe,
• Inflammatory Media —  a subset of conflict profiteers which profit by boosting interest in the conflict with overly inflammatory coverage and then using their coverage of the conflict to build an audience and the revenue that goes with it.
• Alienated Nihilists —  people who so alienated from and hostile toward the larger society that they have given up hope of finding a desirable place for themselves. Their goal simply becomes destroying whatever they can.
• Geopolitical Rivals —  who work to weaken adversaries by inflaming internal tensions.

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A key to a successful democracy is its ability to discredit, and to the extent possible block, the actions of “bad-faith actors” – people and organizations who try to subvert or destroy democratic institutions and processes to advance their own selfish goals. Although it seems very clear to most Democrats in the United States that Donald Trump is one such “bad-faith actor,” (an assertion that is hard to dispute, given his hate mongering tactics, continual lying, and repeated vows to act autocratically), there are more such actors on both sides of the political divide (although most others are less flagrantly extreme). For example, there are social and traditional media outlets that intentionally spin and falsify stories in ways that inflame tensions, in an effort to build their audiences and thus their profit. So, too, are there politicians on both the right and the left who are primarily interested in gaining power, prestige, and money, and are less (or not at all) interested in working to advance their constituents’ interests. This behavior needs to be exposed and denounced, not ignored because those doing it are “on your side.”