Murc’s Law is an endlessly forgiving mistress (if her partner is a Republican)
By 
The “what if Democrats try to steal the election” guy is back to blame conservatives who refuse to take the vaccine on…liberals:
If we leave aside the “endless COVID restrictions” strawman, there’s nothing incoherent about believing the vaccines work and believing that additional COVID mitigation measures are appropriate as long as a substantial fraction of the population is unvaccinated. We can argue about what measures are justified, but the logical inconsistency is imaginary.
The larger problem here, of course, is the perpetual refusal to grant any agency to Republicans, even as other liberals are derided as smug. And the specific messaging argument here makes no sense — since anti-vaxx people are disproportionately located in jurisdictions in which everything has been open with little to no restrictions since spring or early summer 2020, how exactly would more libertarian messaging encourage them to take the vaccine? And why would we blame this on liberals as opposed to the people they actually take cues from?
Last I do think it’s worth saying that pre-2020 there was no partisan polarization of flu vaccines but uptake of them was unreasonably low anyway.
There’s no guarantee that non-polarization will lead to a good result — most people are selfish and many people are dumb.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 26, 2021
It’s also worth noting that if the core of the anti-vaxx movement was New Age suburban wine moms rather than MAGA cementheads pundits would not be doing endless logical backflips to explain why they bear no responsibility for their actions:
Again the grasping for excuses is entirely because this site refuses to ever hold Trump voters responsible for their actions and in the alternate universe where Rachel Maddow viewers are the ones deliberately prolonging a pandemic there are viral threads about guillotining them.— Syndicalist Weedle Collective (@Weedledouble) December 26, 2021
But holding Republican voters responsible for anything would tear the fabric of the entire pundit universe!