I think I can relate to yesterday’s piece from Charlie Warzel — and I also find it remarkably unhelpful. Equally unhelpful to me is Alan Jacobs’ response to it. I get the horror show that Jacobs is talking about, but I’m skeptical about the goal, and even the practice, of professor-splaining about “Rorty’s bastard children” and how the occupiers of MAGAworld “don’t actually believe” what they say they believe.

Jacobs is commenting on the first paragraph, but Warzel goes on to make the same point Jacobs makes and, as far as I’m concerned, the same mistake as well. Warzel simply replaces “the truth” with “reality” — MAGA people are “people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality.”

Of course there is a problem with partisan blindness and confirmation bias and propaganda and bullshit. And no matter how many times I say “it’s worse on the right than I’ve ever seen it,” it doesn’t do justice to just how fucking bad it is. I’ve been trying to have sane conversations and to understand the “why” of it all for the last decade. As I recently tried to get at in this post, there is a memory problem on the right. (And yes, there’s a Rortian pragmatism problem, too.) But saying “the truth ain’t got a damn thing to do with it because they clearly don’t believe their reinforcing news feeds” isn’t any more helpful than it is accurate.

To say “they don’t care about the truth the way they think they do” is very different from saying “the concepts of truth and falsehood never enter here because… Rorty.”

Facts may have a small role here, and feelings a very large role — but the truth is still very much in play, even for Trump supporters.