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It's evidence of bad faith on the part of the Dems of 40 years ago. I think @Chrisprattalpharaptr 's point re: "legislation from 40 years ago" is that the people at issue are dead (or at any rate no longer relevant), and you can't read the minds of people today based on dirty tricks pulled - consciously or otherwise - by their geriatric forebears half a century prior, even if the current scions are nominally waving the same flag.
I guess the question becomes whether you can meaningfully talk about "a movement" behaving in bad faith in the sense you describe. I guess you can gloss the internal turnover as just what it looks like when "the movement" "changes its mind", and still analogize to the bad Newcomb solution. But I don't think it creates much light to try to talk about "bad faith" when describing the external behavior of a movement without any reference to the conscious experiences of anybody in the movement, whether sincere or otherwise.
From upthread, just in case you missed it:
Also
Does that mean we can put any discussion of reparation to rest too because there's no such thing as group responsibility for past sins so long as you run the clock long enough?
I did mention the "geriatric forebears"! Three out of these four people are in their 80s. The sole exception is a sprightly 74. These are no longer the people on whose trustworthiness the party's long- or even mid-term trustworthiness depends. They will be dead or in care homes long before they get the chance to recant on any deals made in the 2020s. This is what I meant by "no longer relevant".
Well, that doesn't follow. I wasn't talking about holding the son accountable for the sins of the father, but about the pragmatic question of whether the son is or isn't committing the same sins as his father today. The thread was discussing Republicans' ability to trust Democrats as a practical issue - that's not the same thing as granting that Democrats may be sincere today, but refusing to negotiate as punishment for past defections.
All of which said, yes, I do in fact believe there's no such things as group responsibility for the sins of past generations, and that "reparations" are a bad idea. (If some groups today are more disadvantaged than others, they should receive help proportionate to the extent to which they are disadvantaged. But there's no reason the distant descendants of their oppressors should be uniquely responsible for providing that help, and it shouldn't be regarded as something "owed" to the disadvantaged descendants of the oppressed, except insofar as all citizens are collectively responsible for the welfare of all other citizens - which applies just as well to someone whose family was ruined by a freak meteor crash twenty years ago as by slavery or segregation. I really dislike the justice-based/"punitive" framing.)
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I'd think that if the movement has changed enough that the bad faith from 40 years ago isn't relevant, then people in the present-day movement who are acting in good faith would say "I admit that happened 40 years ago, but we no longer want to do that." If they don't say that, then either they are acting in bad faith today or they have to appease people in the movement who are acting in bad faith today.
Ideally they should also add "... and here's what we're doing to make sure it doesn't happen again". But they haven't even gotten to the first step of admitting that it's a concern.
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From within the movement, it sure doesn't feel like it. I did say that it only counts by the outgroup-definition of bad faith, and called it a "third option".
From without, as someone who wants to know ideal behaviour for dealing with the group, the game-theoretic incentives are identical: "don't make deals with things that aren't going to honour those deals". For the outgroup, the rest is gravy; this question of "will X honour deals" is 99% of what it wants to know, because it determines whether it should make terms (and avoid a needless civil war) or fight (and avoid exploitation). That answer rests solely on the result, not the process. The rest is interesting anthropological information, but they're your outgroup; it's not like you matter to them as people and they don't care about all of the same things as you.
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They've already demonstrated bad faith by maliciously not enforcing the law in just the prior administration. We would need some kind of signal that they were serious about departing from this practice, or any statutory promises about future enforcement are worthless.
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The right-wing in this case need not be emotionally attached to the language of "good-faith." Put simply, if today's movement quacks like yesterday's movement, then it's yesterday's movement. Today's movement must distinguish themselves from yesterday's movement if they wish the right-wing to compromise with them. An unwillingness to distinguish themselves is an admission that they are, in fact, yesterday's movement. Personally, I think "good-faith" is simply the name given to this concept, since as a show of good faith is the standard English phrase for what I am calling "distinguish."
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