Thread by @jholbo1

This sort of Dale Carnegie 101 point is reasonable in the abstract but hard to know what to do with in practice. It seems like public health officials and Dems are doing - well, not the best they can, but they are trying to reach persuadables. (There have been slips, sure.) 1/

https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1416573105531768834

But that leaves a large basket of right-wing anti-vaxxers who are unpersuadable by Dems and public health officials, due to FOX news (and OAN & etc.) and negative partisanship. @michaelbd and McLaughlin taking the 'feelings are facts' line, with regard to this lot, is - bad. 2/

Blaming the left for not reaching out actually makes things worse because it doesn't afford the left useful Dale Carnegie tips but does give the unpersuadables a feeling that it's the left's fault that they are unpersuaded - and feelings are facts (but only on the right). 3/

This contributes to learned epistemic helplessness, on the right, even an extra irrational "You Did Not PERSUADE Me" Last King of Scotland self-pity madness. It's mad to aportion epistemic burdens in such a way that the Dem's play Idi Amin's doctor, the GOP is Idi Amin. 4/

That's not how the 'Two great parties - a party of progress and a party of conservation' is supposed to work. The right has to take responsibility for its own epistemology and anger management. It can't pitch fits and count on D's to come in as grown-ups to clean up. 5/

It's worth mentioning that no one would even dream of flipping the script. Democrats would never go to the GOP and say: 'we know our left-wing is dangerously crazy but we need you to pretend their feelings are facts, for the sake of the country.' 6/

Anti-anti-Trumpers, like McLaughlin (less so MBD), are playing a double game. On the one hand, they really wish the GOP would go sane. On the other hand, they're like the guy in the "Annie Hall" joke: "I would, but I need the eggs." There are advantages to Trump madness. 7/

Namely, by credibly going insane - Nixon's Madman Theory, but applied to normal domestic politics, not the extremes of nuclear deterrent - you hope to extract concessions from the Dems. But this is a bad way to run US politics. 8/

What US politics needs now, rather than anti-anti-Trumpers lecturing the left about the need to treat Trumpish feelings as facts, for the good of the country, is for anti-anti-Trumpers to think for once of the good of the country and go anti-Trump. The GOP has gone nuts. 9/

The sane right shouldn't lecture the sane left about how to jolly along the insane right, for the safety of the republic. The sane right should lecture the insane right. That's its job. If it can't do it, what good is it? If it can't do it, it should just say so, to warn us. 10/

Final thought: I expect MBD will - if he sees this - roll his eyes. But it really seems to me that Biden and the public health officials are mostly leaning backwards to be as persuasive as possible, mostly by ignoring the craziness, which is Biden's go-to trick, and I approve.