The biggest political contests of 2017 were defined by their asymmetries: in funding, in ideology and, most viscerally, in strategy. On one side were those who saw everything as a battle and sought whatever advantage they could find. On the other were those devoted to what they thought were shared systems, norms and language, who spent most of the year increasingly beleaguered and struggling to find words.

The month before he lost his state’s special Senate election, the Alabama theocrat Roy Moore was accused by multiple women of extensive sexual misconduct. The day after The Washington Post published its initial article on the allegations, another woman reached out to the paper asking for a meeting. She had been a young teenager, she would claim, when Moore approached her; he got her pregnant, and she had an abortion at age 15. The allegations were stunning. But Post reporters quickly deduced that they were also false — fabricated by an operative for Project Veritas, an organization led by the right-wing activist James O’Keefe, in an effort to trick the paper into publishing false claims, thereby discrediting its earlier reporting. When the paper later detailed its interactions with the operative, its executive editor, Martin Baron, explained that any agreements she had made to remain off the record were invalid, entered into by a fraud acting in “maliciously bad faith.”

To many, “bad faith” is the phrase that seems to capture our entire moment, in all its mendacity and duplicitousness and engineered confusion. In December, when MSNBC dropped the contract of a contributor, Sam Seder, over a crude joke he made on Twitter in 2009, bad faith provided the most concise explanation. The joke was, by any credible reading, intended to mock people in Hollywood who continued to work with Roman Polanski after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. But another right-wing personality, Mike Cernovich, had excavated it and claimed, with disingenuous concern and abundantly clear ill will, that it meant the opposite, summoning a waiting, in-on-the-game audience to perform outrage and concern to MSNBC’s parent company and sponsors. The phrase captured this familiar process: the willful misreading being wielded as a threat; the vexing figure pretending to care about something important in order to accomplish something vengeful or petty; the galling attempts to play dumb; the sneering claim that, well, I didn’t make the rules. When a social-media countercampaign was mounted in Seder’s defense, it consisted largely of accusations and descriptions of “bad faith.” Seder’s contract was eventually reinstated.

This version of bad faith falls somewhere among a lawyer’s claim of intentional dishonesty (This contract was entered into in bad faith), Sartre’s critique of inauthenticity (Do you even believe what you’re saying?) and a broad, satisfying, barbed insult (You! Bad!). For liberals and centrists and dispossessed conservatives, it can feel like a way to reclaim power. To simply note the facts in a tone of disbelief — say, that multiple government agencies were now being run by people who had recently considered those agencies illegitimate — has gotten exhausting. “Bad faith” goes beyond these symptoms to diagnose an underlying pathology.