When Is it OK to Conclude Your Political Opponents are Suffering from Mental Illness?

[This is Part Two of a three-part series: Part One, Part Three]

So last week I wrote about how the GOP's leadership is increasingly either captured by or accommodating towards wild conspiracy theories detached from reality. I wondered how sustainable of a pattern this would be, especially when some beliefs (e.g. election officials were bribed by China to cover-up ballot fraud) were patently self-defeating at the ballot box.

I called out Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as an example, and since then she's been on the news after some of her old posts have resurfaced. "Jewish Space Laser" trended on Twitter because of her hypothesis on what caused the California wildfires of 2018. There's a whole lot more, including believing that the Parkland school shooting may have been a false-flag operation, and also believing there is video evidence of Hillary Clinton flaying the skin off a child's face:

the video is supposed to show Clinton filleting the young girl’s face, and then taking turns with Abedin to wear the girl’s face as a mask in order to purposefully terrify the child so that her blood would be flooded with adrenochrome. The girl then bleeds out before Clinton and Abedin drink the blood during a Satanic ritual sacrifice.

Meanwhile, Lin Wood has been threatened with disbarment over his social media comments. He has been one of the loudest and most prominent proponents that the election was literally stolen from Trump (and coincidentally, also was Greene's lawyer previously), and he had accused Chief Justice Roberts of being blackmailed by a video of him raping a child. Wood appears to have been mentally unstable for a while now, according to a lawsuit by his former colleagues. He would summon them to his house in the middle of the night during what appeared to be mental health crisis, and also appear to be talking to god during phone calls, and also call his coworker's wife and tell her he loved her, etc etc.

When Sidney Powell released her Kraken lawsuit, I wrote about the lawsuit and gave my reasons why I believed she was suffering from psychosis, because no other explanation made sense. (Note: this was an issue in last week's post but I am using "psychosis" and "psychotic" strictly in the medical sense of the term, i.e. "During a period of psychosis, a person’s thoughts and perceptions are disturbed and the individual may have difficulty understanding what is real and what is not.")

It's often important to try and discern the motivations of an idea's proponents, if only as a heuristic to discern whether they're acting in good faith. But, the part that I struggle with, and one which Jacob Sullum of Reason also writes about, is that it is liable to be used as an ad hominem baton.

Psychiatry routinely treats weird things people say as evidence of mental illness. But if believing wild claims about election fraud were enough to qualify for a psychiatric label, most Republicans would be diagnosable. That premise is not just condescending and pseudoscientific but morally misleading, since it lets people off the hook for endorsing grave allegations with no basis in fact, whether sincerely or cynically.

It feels too easy to just say Greene, Powell, Wood, and others similarly-situated are just crazy. But, is there a better explanation for why their purported beliefs appear so detached from reality? It seems that part of good epistemological hygiene is to be able to discern the signs of someone suffering from psychosis, but I'm just a stranger on the internet who never interacted with these people and my only professional expertise in this area is asking for competency evaluations for my more disassociated clients.

Overall, I'm having a hard time being charitable when someone's takes are indistinguishable from florid episodes of psychosis. So, first, how relevant do you think public figures' mental state should be in evaluating their claims and arguments? Second, how fair is it to make this type of assessment from a distance?

Third, does examining motivations change anyone's minds? A lot of the election fraud hypothesis was based on an assumption of trust and competence regarding the advocates involved. No one here actually interviewed or deposed eyewitnesses or investigated claims, you just read about what other people have done and to take those claims at face-value, you have to assume some minimum amount of due diligence. Powell, Wood, and Giuliani all collected affidavits and submitted them as evidence to courts to prove there was fraud. If you're a believer that the election was stolen, does their mental state cause you to update your priors regarding their presumed competence? Giuliani not only was paid $20k/day to advance his election fraud claims, but he also set up a fairly steady business hawking cigars, supplements, and gold coins on his election fraud update podcast. It seems fair to say he was in it primarily for the money.

Lastly, the next aspect I wanted to consider is again what this means for the GOP. As a libertarian, I have no political refuge within the establishment parties, and I generally enjoy playing the role of the gadfly. A Biden administration should ostensibly harken back to my Obama-era self where I would have some lukewarm sentiments about the GOP if only as a convenient ally, but this doesn't appear to be the case so far. Namely, I just have no idea what the party is supposed to offer to people like me, not just politically but also intellectually. From what I can observe, the post-Trump GOP is struggling with not angering the nontrivial aspect of their base that is delusionally psychotic, which means elevating its pied-pipers to higher positions of leadership.

When the Oregon GOP issued a resolution claiming the Jan 6th events were a false-flag operation intended to discredit Trump, state legislators had to issue a statement distancing themselves. Between Jan 6th and 24th, 9,292 Arizona Republicans took the time to formally de-registered their party affiliation (note: Biden won the state by 10,457). Polling out of Georgia appears to reflect a trend towards turning it into a Southern blue bastion akin to what happened with Virginia, and Greene appears primed to remain in the middle of it:

“Some people are saying maybe [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi will throw her out” of Congress, Sterling said, referring to the House speaker. “The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They’re gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy.”

There's going to be an obvious selection effect if the trends I outlined will continue. KulakRevolt's argument to my thesis was the base "will vote for crazy over sanity" to ostensibly get what they want. I struggle to see how this is actually a viable path forward if the party is going to continue to bleed supporters and be left with only the folks most floridly unhinged from reality.

Hopefully I’ve laid out the foundation that I am describing a real phenomenon, namely that a portion (#NotAllGOP) appears to be susceptible to wild conspiracy theories. This appears to be uncontroverted. And I'm describing the companion phenomenon that this portion (Again, #NotAllGOP) is not relegated to an inconsequential fringe, but increasingly is being either encouraged or accommodated by the leadership mechanism of the party, and I cited the numerous state GOP orgs who are enjoying dalliances with conspiracy theories. This too also appears to be uncontroverted.

If I had to summarize the pushback I received on this and last week's post, it's largely along the lines of "What about the Democrat's obsession with Russia?" or something along the lines of "QAnon might not be literally correct, it's still figuratively correct." (Relevant Babylon Bee article) I find neither responses to be convincing, and I found other people's replies to those claims to be satisfactory and didn't bother supplying my own (e.g. this comment about how much effort is put in to try and make a "both sides" argument).

I accept that Democrats can be susceptible to baseless conspiracy theories, but 1) I don't see how that's relevant and 2) Even if it was, it's just a breathtaking claim to try and draw a parallel of equivalence between a sitting member of Congress believing that Hillary Clinton and her pal Huma Abedin like to videotape themselves filleting a child's face in order to raise the adrenochrome of the kid's blood when they drink it, and that a piss tape of a politician exists.

I'm unclear if the objections are with the topic writ large or the way I discuss it. I think discussing QAnon (and similarly elaborate conspiracy theories) and the purchase it has gained specifically within the GOP is fair game. Do you disagree? What would you recommend I change about my approach?