Thread by @henryfarrell

1. So an important story I've been waiting to see someone write up properly, and haven't, yet: How Fox News Grandpa Got His Jab. The numbers tell us that older Americans are getting vaccinated in high numbers. But lots of them are conservative Republicans. So what gives?

2. First - the numbers According to the CDC - usafacts.org/visualizations… - approx. 83% of Americans between the ages of 65-75 and 80% between 75-85 have gotten at least one shot. That is a thumping majority of a demographic that has tended Republican and has lots of Fox viewers.

3. There are obvious obvious provisos with trying to extrapolate too far. There may be problems with the CDC data. It's trying to capture the overall population, not the voting/politically-engaged/political-tv-watching population. And you can add your own to your heart's content.

4. All that said, the 80%+ of older Americans who have gotten the vaccination almost certainly includes a whole lot of strong Republican partisans and Fox News viewers, who presumably have been exposed to vaccine denialism from politicians and Tucker Carlson types.

5. So why did they get the vaccine? One plausible answer is that if you are older, the stakes are a lot higher - you know that you have a pretty high chance of dying if you catch coronavirus. Therefore, you're less likely to listen to advice that may kill you.

6. This ties in with the arguments of @hugoreasoning who distinguishes in his recent book - amzn.to/3c5NZTN - between "intuitive" beliefs which guide your behavior, and "reflective" beliefs that don't necessarily affect behavior, especially when they can hurt you.

7. Hugo argues that people are less gullible than we think - they may kinda-sorta believe all sorts of mad sounding things but not act on them. This is plausible here - but it would be great to have data (including interviews) on how vaccinated Fox grandpa explains his belief.

8. And the other thing that it would help us to understand are the gaps and fissures in the Fox centered knowledge structure. It's alway easy to see the other side as a monolith - things are always messier in reality, and every ideology has its awkward points.

9. And awkward points can become pressure points. I've spent the last day or two reading Tom Garvin's book on how a particular strand of conservative Catholicism was the glue that held Ireland back from modernity -amzn.to/3eAUBwL. For a long time, it seemed immovable.

10. And suddenly it crumbled overnight, in part because of the perceived hypocrisy of the Catholic establishment (a prominent bishop was discovered to have supported his lover and child with church funds). What made the hypocrisy politically potent ...

11. was that it made publicly salient a universal gap between what people were saying and what they were doing, between the reflective beliefs that people espoused in public and the intuitive beliefs that they lived by.

12. It may be that Fox News conservatives who are getting vaccinated are easily able to insulate their private behavior from their public beliefs. It may also be that they aren't, or that the inconsistencies can be used as a wedge.

13. One of the downsides of extending a political ideology into every aspect of society and behavior is that it creates an ever increasing universal tension between what people say they do and what they actually do. That can ... maybe ... provide leverage.

14. Or shorter version - to the extent that Trumpian conservatism is becoming a totalizing ideology based on Timur Kuran-style preference falsification, it is making itself more fragile to the risk that the whole damn thing might unpredictably unravel. Finis.

[replace "glue" with "barrier" or some other non-mixed metaphor]