The Importance of Acting in Good Faith

I’ve never quite nailed the pronunciation. Is it bo-nah feed-ays, or bah-nah fieds? The phrase bona fides always trips me up. Yet the idea itself remains vital, so I keep trying. You could say I’m making…a sincere effort.

To argue in good faith—the literal sense of the Latin phrase—means presuming that the person across the table is expressing what they truly believe and that disagreement is not in itself a sign of corruption, cowardice, or deceit. And the same goes in reverse.

This assumption and practice of good faith underpins meaningful intellectual dialogue. And yet it feels increasingly scarce.

Tell someone you back free trade and you quickly learn that you’re supposed to be advancing the interests of multinational corporations. Defend immigration and you’re accused of importing voters. Oppose a war and you’re said to be carrying water for the enemy.

Politics, in particular, seems to evoke this slippery line of reasoning. Money becomes a universal explanation for everything. A politician adopts a stance because donors paid them to do so. A writer swears by a position because readers reward her for believing it. A think tanker arrives at the exact conclusion his funders hoped for.

This certainly happens. But more often the causal relation is inverted. Money tends to follow beliefs rather than create them. People donate to politicians they already support. Readers subscribe to writers whose ideas strike a chord. Foundations fund groups whose missions they already back. An established conviction can become financially rewarding without having been bought in the first place. (Ask me how I know, as the editor of a libertarian magazine!)

This distinction shouldn’t be difficult to grasp. Yet we increasingly treat incentives as definitive proof of insincerity. If someone benefits from voicing a claim, the claim must be untrue.

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The original English sense of bona fides was rooted in law and commerce, where good faith meant honest dealing: acting without fraud or deception, honoring the terms and purposes of an agreement. That notion still anchors American commercial law. The Uniform Commercial Code imposes a duty of good faith in performing and enforcing contracts and defines it in terms of honesty and fair dealing.

Contracts matter precisely because strangers do not have to love one another, share a faith, vote the same way, or agree on much of anything in order to cooperate. But even a world thick with lawyers relies on a baseline assumption of honesty. You cannot anticipate every conceivable trick; at some point, one party has to trust that the other will try to meet their obligations.

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Over time, bona fides acquired another familiar English usage. A person’s bona fides became proof that they were genuine—the evidence of who they were, what they had accomplished, and why they deserved to be taken seriously. Eventually the term came to denote the credentials or qualifications themselves. We speak of a politician’s conservative bona fides, a scholar’s academic bona fides, a candidate’s foreign-policy bona fides.

J.D. Vance possesses unusually solid bona fides for the argument he once advanced about America’s working class. He grew up in the Rust Belt town of Middletown, Ohio. He knew the people he described in Hillbilly Elegy. He watched his own family make prudent choices and reckless ones. And he formed a worldview: the troubles of the white working class could not be blamed solely on corporations, government, globalization, or distant elites.

“These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else,” he concluded. The lesson his grandmother pressed on him was even clearer: never become one of those people who believes the deck is stacked against them.

Then he changed his mind.

People do that! Any intellectual culture worth its salt must leave room for conversion without treating it as prima facie fraud. Demanding unwavering ideological consistency across a lifetime would itself amount to bad faith.

I’d like to begin with that charitable take on Vance’s reversal as well.

But Stephanie Slade’s cover feature this month—an excerpt from her newly published book, Fusionism—makes that generous interpretation harder to sustain.

J.D. Vance and the Politics of Victimhood

The Vance who entered electoral politics began telling a story that was almost the reverse of the one that had made him famous. Middletown had been “devastated by the policies of the Democrats.” Washington had decided that America should stop producing things and sent jobs overseas to Mexico and China. Working-class Americans were less people seeking agency and more victims of powerful outsiders who had done this to them.

That shift happened at a particularly convenient moment. During his 2021 Senate run, as he sought Trump’s endorsement after previously criticizing him, Vance proposed using federal power to confiscate the Ford Foundation’s assets and redistribute them to people whose lives, in his view, had been wrecked by its “radical open-borders agenda.” Slade shows how this aggressive pivot helped Vance fashion new political bona fides within Trump’s movement.

Again: people change their minds. Political ambition does not prove that a change of heart is inauthentic. An incentive is not proof enough.

But there comes a point when good faith also requires something from the other side. During the 2024 campaign, confronted with false claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Vance spoke with striking candor about his method: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he said, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Bona fides must be both freely assumed and rigorously earned.

Reason has no interest in policing ideological apostasy. We are, if anything, unusually sympathetic to people who rethink the orthodoxies of their tribes. And we will continue to offer the assumption of good faith while doing our best to prove our bona fides—however it’s pronounced—to our readers.

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