The pundit class are rhetoricians who ultimately have to (1) maintain access, (2) not alienate a bloc of their audience by saying something difficult. Most of them aren’t even journalists, and can’t fucking research: they’re performance artists and ad men, and they (respectively) treat politics as a show and a pitch session. As a consequence, most of them have absolutely no interest in reality, just treating politics as a game of language in which bad faith just yet another tactic.

And to once again invoke the unhealthy marriage metaphor…pundits are people too close to the destructive relationship who have convinced themselves that it couldn’t possibly be that one party is to blame…because if it was one person being the abuser of everyone else’s good faith, then every social connection derived from the assumption that person was also acting in good faith has a broken keel. It’s easier to construct a false synthesis—it’s always like this, they’re both to blame, etc—that maintains the status quo.

The fucked up thing is…this particular self-deception has been maintained for at least a century. The bad faith actors are the oligarchs that have consistently tried to disenfranchise people (mostly nonwhite, mostly poor) and gain personal advantage through office. The oligarchs keep doing their thing…trying to come up with different configurations of law to grant themselves as much license as possible, but also binding everyone else with the law as much as possible. And right now the Republican party is the party of the oligarchs root and branch…not that the Democrats don’t have cronies, they’re just not defined at a basic level by a belief in the right to rule of the high-caste.