Thread by @hilzoy

1/ Most people don't know what policies the parties prioritize. RW media actively misleads them, and destroys trust in people who could tell them otherwise. Perhaps if God (omniscient, trusted) told them about GOP/Dem policies, they'd change their minds.

https://twitter.com/pastpunditry/status/1088479729982816258

2/ But absent a trusted source of information, they trust people who lie to them. Thus they will believe that GOP policies are bad only if those policies affect them personally (or are in some other way undeniable. E.g., the response to Katrina could not be explained away, imho.)

3/ What's more important, I think, is that people who listen to RW media have absorbed, for decades, an idea of who liberals are. We're contemptuous, amoral, hell-bent on bringing America down, just dying to feel sympathy for Osama bin Laden but NEVER for ordinary Americans, etc.

4/ I think that a lot of people absorb information not through policy papers, but through characters and narrative. And there's a very powerful narrative on the right about who liberals are and what motivates us.

5/ Again, this narrative has been promulgated for DECADES. And I think that for a lot of people, the idea of allying themselves with people like THAT is unthinkable.

Policies? Much less important in explaining party loyalty, imho. (Much more important to people's lives, obv.)

6/ Postscript: this was one of the ways I used to think about blogging. I actually like to read GAO reports on natural gas pricing for fun, but I've been aware forever that most people don't; that characters engage them, but stuff like GAO reports do not.

7/ At its best, wonky blogging was: here are some characters you might like, and their development will involve their trying to explain all these GAO reports (and similar) in engaging ways.

8/ So that people who follow character and narrative better than GAO reports had an interesting way to find out what was in them.

Or so I sometimes thought. 🤔