Look, if you're not reading/listening to Heather Cox Richardson, I don't know what to say.
Today, she makes explicit the resurrection of Gilded Age ideas about wealth and health care, two things we should understand as being intrinsically linked. No need to summarize it; read it yourself.
One of the nice things about the trip we were on was that I didn't feel compelled to read my writers every day. I didn't need to process all the hot takes and sage musings that I usually do. Driving through the Colorado high country, I could just take it all in and enjoy the company of friends and family.
It strikes me that this is how most Americans live and it must be nice. Sure, there are times when things seem really bad, and you don't have the cognitive architecture to process and understand it, but most of the time, a certain amount of ignorance really is blissful.
I did peek in on Krugman's shorter pieces, and it was interesting the theme of the past week has been just how damaging ignorance can be when it typifies the people in charge of government. Two examples that Krugman cites are the willful ignorance (or more like obstinate refusal to acknowledge facts) around climate change and the lying ignorance around the Iran war.
Of course, you can't have any of this without the signature fact of the age: Donald Trump is a deeply stupid and damaged man. He has then surrounded himself with other deeply stupid people and smart people who make themselves stupid to twist themselves into courtiers to sate the omnivorous ego of this awful fucking man.
The bizarre spectacle of the Fauci obsession is another brick in this towering edifice of stupidity. Anthony Fauci - and really the whole communicable disease community - were groping in the dark in the early days of Covid. They erred on the side of caution, but the stupidity and lack of leadership of Donald Trump and the fever swamps of right wing and woo woo conspiracy sites made Covid something it wasn't. "It's just the flu."
In the end, over a million Americans died earlier than they otherwise would have because of Covid. If things like masking where taken seriously, that number would be lower. If people took the vaccine, that number would be lower. America had one of the worst records during Covid, because we were led by deeply stupid people in the early days of the pandemic, and because right wingers politicized it.
People will point to the closing of schools as being a mistake, because kids rarely died from Covid (How many dead kids would have been too many?). This neglects that teachers - many of them older - were also part of school communities.
All Fauci did was try and save lives. His caution and the desperate need for Covid to be a "lab leak" made him out to be a villain. Six years later, he's being dragged before Rand Paul because RFK, Jr. searched every file to find his personal diary - a diary that does nothing to discredit his decision making.
One of the conversations we had in Colorado was with an old friend who works in the tech sector. He said he read a definition of intelligence that was basically: the ability to make predictions. I have been thinking about intelligence as a concept, and I came up with four different levels of intelligence.
The first is "Training" or simply the ability to be trained. A dog can be house trained, and a kid can be trained in spelling. The second is "Knowledge." This is the ability to recall information. Again, a dog can remember where her favorite plushie toy is, and a kid can remember the French word for toy. The third level is - with a nod to my friend - "Prediction" or "Analysis". Can you use knowledge and your mental training to predict things or draw meaningful connections? The final level is "Wisdom". Do you know the true value of things - not its price, its value?
When I think about the Trumpist movement - extending beyond Trump himself to his whole movement - I can see some Training, but when it comes to Knowledge they are so warped in what they "know" because they just don't want to understand the complexity of the world. They don't value complexity.
This is how you get the Iran War. This is how you get inflationary tariffs. This is how you get a tariff on Canada for not raking their forests.
The root of populism is that any person is as good as any other person and therefore rule by elites - especially cognitive elites or experts - is disdained in favor of putting loyalists into positions of authority and even in the implementation of policy.
It's stupid and it's degrading this country a little bit every single day.
Yglesias writes a decent column about Trump's war on government competence, best exemplified by DOGE. He notes how cuts to various agricultural and public health programs are running into real world consequences, notably screwworm, measles and Ebola. Yet, he then says that some of this isn't "Trump's fault." His argument is that - unlike the disastrous war against Iran - these are not direct policy consequences. Trump didn't CAUSE screwworm or measles or Ebola to exist.
I honestly don't even know how you get yourself into that rhetorical space.
Krugman - famously called "shrill" by his editors - tends to lean the other way. He makes a much more expansive case for things like the problems farmers are having because of Trump's trade policies and that same war in Iran. Of course, many of those deep rural voters are both upset with Trump's policies that have actively immiserated them, but they are also unlikely to vote for Democrats.
Leaving aside the fact that they won't switch parties, let's look at how they won't hold Trump accountable. Elections are how you hold elected officials and indeed all the organs of government accountable. It is precisely this accountability that makes democracies more functional in the long run - even if they short run is messy as hell.
If farmers are pissed about Trump's policies, then they should vote for Democrats to force a course correction. However, if you start adopting Yglesias' framing of Trump not being responsible for shit that happens even though he gutted the institutions designed to keep that shit from happening on to your head, then you can make the easy walk to "both sides are to blame, I guess I'll just keep voting Republican."
I realize Yglesias is not a partisan propagandist, but technically neither is Krugman. They both purport to be part of the "reality based community." At school, we are urged to practice scrupulous non-partisanship, but Donald Trump IS a felon, and pointing that out - or that tariffs and wars are inflationary - is not being partisan.
We have a measles and screwworm outbreak in this country, because Donald Trump and the Republican Party have waged war on technical expertise and government capacity. Yes, he didn't actively infect kids with measles or cows with screwworm, but his policies are making this a growing health and economic crisis.
There is simply something very strange about how Yglesias frames his political discussions, and excusing Trump for the destruction of public health measures because he didn't cause the illness is top of the list in strangeness.
The hantavirus outbreak is unlikely to bloom into a full grown pandemic. However, as Yglesias rightly notes, we are likely living in a world where the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if. Connectivity has exploded and that allows a virus to travel around the world quickly. This hantavirus outbreak could be tricky, because it takes a while to develop symptoms.
Of course, the real issue is that literally the absolute worst people in the world are in charge of American health care right now. The anti-vax movement has largely captured American health institutions and they are actively working to undermine both pandemic response and vaccine development.
We are seeing in the Iran conflict how the idiocy of this administration can put even a military superpower into a losing situation against a third rate military power. It's bad, but it's not pandemic bad.
So much of modern life has coasted along on expertise that has largely been operating outside of the public eye. Trump's wholesale assault on competent governance, very much including DOGE, has led to some seriously bad results, but if we get to pandemic territory again...
The sheer amount of damage that Trump and Republicans are doing to the world is tough to keep track of. Certainly, millions of people - many of them children - are going to die because they killed USAID. Other outrages - putting his name on the Kennedy Center - are easily fixed. Reversing his budgets are done in 2029 (presuming we still have a democracy by then). He is increasingly toxic, and as Minnesota demonstrated, when the people stand against him, he loses.
There are two areas that were especially galling yesterday.
Trump basically went all in in dragging the power grid back to 1947. By repealing every single piece of constraint on emitting greenhouse gases, he is paving the way for massive amounts of pollution. The question, though, is really whether companies will actively move backwards on this. Yes, the massive open coal pits of Wyoming will continue to feed the data centers being built there. However, some tech companies are more eager to build small scale nuclear plants, because they have to know that once Trump is gone, coal will no longer be viable. It's not viable now, due to cost, not "woke."
Why is he doing this? To pwn the libs? In return for payoffs from hydrocarbon companies? However, if you're Ford or GM, do you really want to fall behind the rest of the world as they spring towards more hybrids and EVs?
We also have the baffling (but not baffling) decision to simply not review the efficacy of mRNA flu vaccines. This is RFK, Jr's war on vaccines that everyone with half a brain saw coming. The US already takes longer than Europe to approve new drugs and treatments. Now, we have a really promising new form of vaccine and it's being killed to placate the roughly 20% of Americans who are skeptical of vaccines, a 20% that resides overwhelmingly now in the Republican Party.
Europe will no doubt plow ahead with medical advances, but the US is ceding that ground and it has been the US that has usually been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs, which is really the only possible defense for our expensive health care system. Our medical care costs too much in order to fund medical research and treatments. Now, we are destroying that, too.
All of this is just an inconceivably stupid catering to unbelievably stupid people.
Providing Democrats win in November, businesses will have to evaluate what the end of Trump and Trumpism might mean for them. I can't imagine the executive that will greenlight a coal burning power plant, knowing that it will never be profitable and won't even come online before Trump is out of office. Hopefully, medical research will simply relocate overseas so that science can progress during our sojourn in the America where race science is more popular with the government than actual science.
So much awfulness everywhere you look.
IRL friends or long time readers may know that I had a very serious case of Covid during the Delta wave. I was hospitalized, then went home, then re-hospitalized, then airlifted to Mass General, then nearly sent to the ICU before I spent three days laying prone to avoid being intubated. For whatever reason, when I got the Pfizer vaccine I did not have the typical reaction of feeling like shit for a few days as my immune system adapted. Since then, I've had a few cases that have responded well to Paxlovid, but today I got my booster because Covid sucks and because it has a serious impact on my colleagues when I'm out of work for a week.
When I went in, I had to have an "existing medical condition" in order to qualify, since I'm not 65. I guess luckily I have borderline high cholesterol, so they gave me the shot.
As we know, Florida has ended required vaccines for school children; RFK has crippled the CDC and attacked the idea of vaccines in general. All of this was, of course, predictable. RFK is a vaccine skeptic who lied to the Senate in his confirmation hearing and then did exactly what he always wanted to do: eviscerate arguably the most successful health measure in human history - rivalled only by antibiotics.
(Let's pour one out for irony, as Florida is saying that people shouldn't have vaccine mandates because "their body, their choice" as they strip abortion rights away from people.)
This extends beyond Covid. Childhood vaccines - a literal health care miracle - will be reduced in uptake in red states like Florida. This will lead to a return in measles and many older people have declining immunity from their own childhood vaccines, so they will be vulnerable. Measles, mumps, rubella will all spread from Florida to other states as herd immunity declines. It would be just if this was simply a case of FAFO, but people who can't take vaccines or people with compromised immunity or people with reduced immunity because it's been decades since they were vaccinated are all at risk.
I'd like to believe that there will be consequences for people like RFK but the best I can hope for is that he dies of a treatable disease, because he won't face consequences in our corrupted court system.
Trump is not dead. He appeared (late) to a press avail flanked by his minions in the Oval. Given his atypical disappearance, there was perhaps more parsing of his words and actions than usual. He was not drooling, but it was still deeply unhinged. Of course, most of his public utterances are just...nuts. He sounds like a fourth grader who was called on in class, but who didn't do the reading. The absolute blathering stupidity is just breathtaking for those with eyes to see. Trump's feral grip on his supporters and the presumption of expertise he has as a "business man" has hidden the fact that two-thirds of what he says is either false or bonkers or both.
On policy, we already have one state compact on vaccines on the Pacific Coast (and I hope soon in the Northeast). Richardson notes the fact that Courts are starting to be heard on a lot of his lawless actions and it's going poorly for Stephen Miller's plans for a fully fascist America. Epstein stuff exploded in the House today.
I try to live in a guarded hope for the future. My gut and experience tells me that there is a reckoning coming for the corruption and incompetence. I was watching the Spike Lee documentary on Hurricane Katrina, and it just feels like we are ripe for some catastrophe that will be made worse by the idiots running our government.
What seems especially clear is that Trump's diminished physically and cognitively. Maybe the media won't report on it, but it sure seems apparent to the naked eye. As that happens, it empowers people like Miller and Russell Vought. And they truly are odious creatures whose ideas are toxic. This past week suggests that Trump - whose one skill is "dominating the discourse" - could be losing that ability as he declines.
Yglesias looks at vaccines, especially in light of the fact that a child died of measles yesterday. I had my flu shot, but we had a terrible flu season, I coach wrestling which makes it easy to vector and sometimes a vaccine is imperfect.
In order for vaccines to work most effectively, we need as many people as possible to take them. Vaccines - arguably the greatest advance in the history of medical science alongside antibiotics - work both by reducing your vulnerability and by preventing spread. If 95% of people are vaccinated, then a disease can't get momentum or mutate as easily.
Left unsaid in Yglesias' analysis is the fact that the anti-vax movement has now taken up residence in the political right in this country. This is part of the broader ideological sorting of certain groups. Gone are the heterodox parties of the mid-20th century, instead every single anti-government crank now has a home in the GOP.
What's more, we can see in this antigovernmental movement a rejection of common cause. We get vaccinated to protect ourselves, but we also do it to protect others. The selfish, self-centeredness of the political right that has always been a part of their DNA was then catalyzed by the Covid measures taken to keep people alive.
Selfishness is not considered a virtue in any culture and in some it's the gravest sin. It makes sense that it would find a home in the GOP.
Yesterday, I wrote about the overt death threats that have started in Trumpistan. There will be people who are killed by political violence. Trump's pardons will exacerbate that.
There are other ways Trump will get Americans killed. The first is related to the pardons. On the one hand, when you remove the consequences for political violence - on behalf of Trump - you incentivize his worst cultists to commit more violence on his behalf. Yes, there are probably a few insurrectionists who don't want any more part of that circus. There are others who are simply violent people. Some of them will come home and commit domestic violence against those who may or may not have talked to the police.
I feel pretty certain that within the next few months, at least one of the people Trump pardoned will be arrested for a crime that is not explicitly political in nature. Democrats need to Willie Horton the shit out of that person.
We also have Trump's bizarre pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who facilitated drug trafficking. Given how Trump leveraged the fentanyl crisis to win votes, pardoning a guy who helped move drugs around seems odd. I doubt Ulbricht recreates Silk Road, but some sort of imitator will crop up, again because Trump has seemingly decided that drug dealers are OK, as long as they are white.
Finally, Paul Krugman notes that what is happening in the broad field of public health is incredibly alarming. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization is "bad" but we are going to see measles come back, notably in Red States, as national guidelines are abandoned. Kids die of measles. And this is before RFK Jr gets his weird assed claws into the national health apparatus.
Trump has clearly hit the ground running with all the Project 2025 horrors. While we have moments like the judge who ridiculed the Executive Order ending birthright citizenship, the "energy" is entirely with Trump's blitzkrieg on American institutions.
I do think that Josh Marshall is correct that these actions are going to backfire politically. I think Pete Hegseth gets confirmed by a tie-breaking vote by Vance. Then, if anything happens to the American military, his manifest incompetence gets the blame. As soon as one of those January Sixers commits a crime, Democrats need to hammer that story. The first kid who dies of measles has to get the Riley Laken Treatment.
Trump is a fucking idiot, and he's surrounded himself by evil men who know how to cater to his bloated ego to advance their own odious agenda. Things will get worse, but TRUMP IS NOT IMMUNE TO THE POLITICAL LAWS OF GRAVITY. When Americans die because he won the election, that will have consequences.
There are four terrible nominees that Trump has put forward: Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and RFK, Jr. The first three are the most immediately dangerous, as they will have a large voice in national security matters at a time of international unrest.
Yglesias has published his blueprint for Democrats coming off the 2024 loss. He is then elaborating on his points and today he looked at the crime and public disorder issue.
In some ways, this issue really is a perfect distillation of the headwinds facing Democratic politicians. Crime has fallen under the Biden administration after a Covid related spike (more on that in a bit). Democrats did not embrace "defund the police" and they have made a good faith effort to balance public order with civil and legal rights.
However, the "vibes" around crime and disorder (which I think Yglesias helpfully uncouples a bit) were bad. If you want a party that's "tough on crime" you elect Republicans, even though their standard bearer is a convicted felon. The reason is that Republican crimes take place in the C-Suite and Wall Street, which impose a hidden cost on America, as opposed to having homeless people on the street and drug stores locking up their wares. Democrats err on the side of civil liberties, while Republicans rely on the opacity of financial crimes to shield their "constituents". This is leaving aside the numerous alleged instances of sexual assault committed by Trump and his Cabinet nominees.
The idea of "Back the Blue" where it comes to Blue States improving their daily governance would be part of this solution. When we visited Portland, we certainly saw the homeless issue, but it's just such a normal part of urban life today that it hardly seemed as bad as the people who live three hours east of Portland imagine that it is.
Homelessness is the central issue of public order that cities struggle with. Yglesias actually never really talks about that, but it strikes me that if you were reduce the number of homeless by 50% the overall sense of public order would increase by leaps and bounds. It is also true that there is a segment of progressive politics that seems to prioritize calling them "people experiencing houselessness" rather than ameliorating both the misery of the homeless and the degradation of public spaces that follows.
There is no direct policy solution for murder or rape, crimes that are too common yet not regular occurrences in people's lives. Homeless policy - some combination of voluntary and coercive assistance - would have an immediate impact. Not addressing that has proven to be political malpractice.
There is - and I can only shout this so many times - a huge gaping hole in Yglesias' argument: Covid.
The underreported story of 2021-2024 has been how we emerged from the acute crisis of Covid into a fractured, fractious world of politicized public health, denigration of experts, and most importantly an unexplored and underappreciated state of trauma from those years.
March 2020 was intensely scary and disorienting. We were sequestered in our homes, hoping that we left our groceries outside long enough to kill whatever germs threatened to enter our homes. We were denied the segmentation of our lives into "work" and "home" while our children were stripped of their schooling. This isn't an argument about policy, which did the best it could. It's the fact that all the old rules and norms - rules and norms that Trump had already eroded - seemed moot. Throw in the George Floyd movement and a "rules-based" society seemed obsolete.
That moment was a period when some of us were following myriad rules about masking and distancing and struggling to make a normal world in an abnormal time. Meanwhile, people started drag racing on the nearly empty interstates. Police pulled back from the streets in the face of protests to let people see what "defund the police" might look like. For one set of Americans, rules were for suckers. For another, they were tyranny.
We are about to enter a smorgasbord of corruption under Trump. He is going to sell government functions like his shitty gold sneakers. What's more, I think the idea that Republicans are soft on White Collar Crime is the sort of "brand" that people instinctively understand, in the same way they brand the Democrats as coddling petty crime.
So, my response to Yglesias' road map on public disorder would be for Democratic cities to directly address homelessness to alleviate the sense of overall disorder. Meanwhile, national Dems need to hammer and hammer and hammer on the coming instances of corruption. The most inexplicable aspect of Trump's appeal is the idea that he's a "fighter" for the working class. Democrats need to destroy that brand by pointing out Trump's Cabinet of Broligarchs and Billionaires. When the coming Crypto Bubble explodes, they can lay the economic catastrophe at the GOP's feet.
There are going to be a LOT of Hot Takes about why Trump was re-elected after losing four years ago. The simplest explanation - it was the inflation - has a lot of merit to it. We are seeing incumbent parties around the world get smoked in elections since Covid. I honestly think that if Covid had burst forth in the spring of 2019 rather than the spring of 2020, Harris would've won. People forget that he presided over a shitshow of a response and therefore give him a pass on a catastrophic aspect of his presidency.
I also think that his incessant lying actually helps him.
For normie libs like me, lying is bad. It show low character.
For low information voters, "all politicians lie" so they don't register it as such. This - I think - is how you get the wide discrepancies between support for Trump and support for protecting abortion in ballot measures. Trump was the instrument to overturn Roe and has bragged about it, but now he lies about it and there are actual voters who think he will protect abortion rights.
There read on him is that he's a libertine and wouldn't ban access to abortion. And he might not! Who the fuck knows?
It also gets you this.
In Michigan, Trump currently has 2,795,917 votes. Harris has 2,714,167
In the Michigan Senate race, Mike Rogers (R) has 2,672,303; Slotkin has 2,690,332.
You actually see more third party votes at the Senate level than the presidential. Add all the votes up and you have about 80,000 votes for president that don't vote for the Senate at all. There's an almost 100,000 vote gap between Trump and Rogers, as opposed to the 25,000 vote gap between Harris and Slotkin.
I think the past eight years has made a compelling case that Trump is sui generis. He's unique - for whatever reason that might be unfathomable - in that those normal rules don't apply to him. He's getting votes that normal Republicans won't.
And I think that is linked to the fact that exactly those sort of Trump voters simply don't take his words at face value.
Now that he's won, he's dusting off Agenda 2025, which many of his voters will be surprised to discover what they have voted for. I fear that we won't flip the House, which could be disastrous for things like the Affordable Care Act. He's going to loose RFK, Jr on public health and Elon Musk on the federal bureaucracy. He told us he would, and those with ears to hear and eyes to see believed him.
Many of his voters didn't, and we will all live with the consequences. Well, those of us who survive.
Paul Campos links to an Economist study of excess deaths during Covid. Excess deaths are the spike away from the "normal" number of deaths in a given population in a given time period. If an elderly person dies of Covid at home, they might not show up as a Covid statistic, but their death was still caused by Covid. Similarly, if they had a heart attack but couldn't access health care, because ERs were overwhelmed...same difference.
The basic idea was that during Covid public health officials were either overwhelmed or forbidden from keeping accurate tallies of the dead. The US, despite efforts by people like Ron DeSantis to screw with the numbers, actually kept reasonably accurate tallies of the Covid dead. The official death toll was 1,170,000 (consider that number for a moment), when the the "excess death number" was 1,400,000.
You can look at the numbers in the Economist, but it's striking how some countries' numbers are just ridiculously skewed. It should come as no surprise that Russia and China lead the way with fake numbers, but India's inclusion is likely simply a lack of capacity in their public health department.
For everyone who said and still says "It's just the flu", please do me a favor and fuck off. There is no doubt that masking and distancing were incredibly traumatic, but so are a million and a half deaths. Oh, and Covid still kills about a 1,000 people a week in the US. That's a Vietnam War's worth of deaths every year.
Josh Marshall echoes what I've been saying for a couple of years now: we, as a society, underwent a shocking series of traumas from March of 2020-January of 2021, and we have never truly processed them in a way that has allowed us to move on. The great unspoken mover of politics right now is this lingering sense of doom and trauma. Incumbent governments everywhere are unpopular; in fact, Biden is reasonably popular on the global scale. The reason this is happening in contradiction of some pretty good objective metrics is because we have never been able to process the events of the annus horribilus.
It began four years ago this month. Things shut down ominously, I will not forget driving home from Georgia down the Jersey Turnpike and it was ghostly empty at 8:30 at night. We lived in fear of every delivery, every chance encounter. They were stacking bodies like cordwood in New York.
Then we had the eruption of anger over George Floyd, which folded into the simmering anger over Trump's rank unfitness for office and the blind devotion of his cult. I remember getting a text from a wrestler who asked if anything ever got better.
Then, of course, there was January 6th, an event whose only closest predecessor was secession in 1860. When Trump was not convicted in his second impeachment, we were faced with the very real possibility that we would be faced with the exact situation we are faced with today: a Trump re-election with dire consequences for America and the world.
Since then, we also had the Delta and Omicron waves. The Delta wave nearly killed me and during the Omicron wave, we made the decision to keep the school open without testing, risking the lives of the faculty in the process. The entire period from March of 2020 through roughly January of 2022 was a period that alternated between fear and anger. That's almost two years of living through a prism of trauma.
If the Biden team are not working to tie the worst of the pandemic to Trump, they are guilty of malpractice. However, the problem runs deeper, because Biden was president during the second half of the pandemic - the half where people began to resent the precautions being taken and the inflationary costs of the pandemic and then the war.
When it comes to inflation, there is no scenario where Trump becomes president and makes inflation better. His preferred policies - tariffs and deportations combined with deficit funded tax cuts - will increase inflation. This should not be a controversial opinion; it's economic fact. However, no one really cares about facts. Some of this is the pervasive effort of Republicans and Trump to destroy the idea of objective truth, but it's also a byproduct of the balkanized media landscape of social media.
I've struggled to understand why young people are so incredibly outraged by events in Gaza. It's not that events in Gaza aren't outrageous; they are. But why do they care? There are worse events happening right now in Myanmar and there are comparable events happening all the time in Africa. Haiti is on fire. This sort of human horror show happens all the time. Why Gaza?
Some of it is that anti-American elements in Russia, China, Iran and Iran's proxies see a perfect opportunity to exploit this very real tragedy to create a new fissure in America's culture wars. That wouldn't work, though, if there wasn't a real sense of displaced anger among America's youth that has no place to land.
The fact that the Biden Administration is doing more than any other administration ever by a country mile on climate and pollution is objectively true. The vibes of climate doomerism are real, though.
If the vibes change, I think Biden wins Texas, Florida and North Carolina. If they don't, America could see a dictatorial strongman seize power - or not depending on distressingly thin margins.
Finding a peace solution in Gaza will only go so far to bring young voter back into Biden's column. I just don't know what else will.
UPDATE: I forgot about everyone freaking out about crime. Crime absolutely spiked and it has absolutely declined and we only feel the increase.
I woke up with a scratchy throat and a cough, which pre-2020 would've been just another late November day. Ya get colds! Whaddya gonna do 'bout it?
However, Covid is still out there and still lethal - albeit in much reduced numbers. Balloon Juice's Anne Laurie puts together a weekly update. The CDC keeps reporting data, too. The reality is that Covid is still killing about 1,000 a week. That's striking for two reasons. The first is that red states are almost certainly fudging their numbers for the stupidest possible reason: To pwn the libtards. The second is that we have a new 9/11's worth of deaths every three weeks and no one gives a shit.
Every respiratory virus explodes during this time of year. It's the nature of how cold weather impacts our nasal membranes and the retreat indoors. Covid is now endemic as opposed to a pandemic, so it's around and killing people. Given the politicization of vaccines, let's hope the viral wrath falls heaviest on those who militantly refuse to get vaccinated, because they are not only risking their own lives but speeding the spread of the virus in general.
Since January 2021, the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown, as Republicans have decided that vaccines are a deep state conspiracy. Be a shame if instant Darwin made a visit to those whose cultish devotion to freedumb risked all our lives.
At any rate, one has to wonder about the electoral impact of Covid. We've seen Democrats outperform expectations since 2020, and I do believe that 1/6 and Dobbs is driving that. However, is there a demographic event under the surface where older Republicans are dying of Covid at a disproportionate rate?
Nothing brings out Bad Yglesias more than Covid Hot Takes. The fact that he's channeling Nate Silver, himself a fountain of Covid Hot Takes, isn't a promising start. His argument seems to be that things like masking and social distancing didn't work, but his argument is muddled, because he often points out that they did work. As he notes, the bans on large gatherings was a good idea, but we had a mess of rules and enforcement for things like masks and dining.
Then he says, and this is his hobby horse, that school closings were bad. How much of this is because he has a school age kid...I don't know. But the argument that banning large indoor gatherings was good, but schools should have been open is nonsensical.
When we opened in the fall of 2020, it was with a LOT of trepidation and precautions. As a boarding school, we could effectively isolate large parts of the population - the boarders. We created "pods" of kids who could be together and we tested every person on campus every week. Many students were remote, as we had to teach in hybrid classes. Now, the broad point that this was "bad schooling" does, I think, hold water. We continue to see gaps and lags in student learning, especially incoming students. So even with a hybrid system, we saw learning loss.
The solution to this was not to open schools, but to build into schooling an additional year for Generation Covid. Some students could navigate independent learning better than others, and maybe they wouldn't need or want that additional year, but you can't argue that banning large gatherings is good...and then argue for packing students into classrooms. Sure, the students would likely be fine if Covid broke out among them, but they would bring the disease home and the teachers would get sick. A lot of teachers are older, frankly, in many public schools.
So, banning large gatherings is good to save lives, but lets reopen schools and if some teachers die, well...whatever.
I've been saying that we have never really gotten over the trauma of Covid. This piece really lays it all out. Please read it, as it's better than any superficial analysis I could offer.
A taste:
These recent large-scale hurts magnify one another because they are so tightly grouped together; they are especially deep because we have come to understand every single one of them as a betrayal: It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The government was supposed to work. The planet shouldn’t turn on us. We are a democracy with an orderly and peaceful transition of power. Children should not be shot at school.
Admittedly, these promises have only spotty integrity over the centuries (some of them were never really true). Today, they are all being broken simultaneously. As we experience betrayals again and again, the breaches of trust become both more impersonal and less coherent. There is no one person to blame, but we also can’t write off our tragedy to a twist of fate. What we have been through couldn’t have happened to just anyone. We cannot exactly follow the chain of causation to a single intelligible event, and yet there is nothing about our experience that’s an accident.
I enjoy when Yglesias pushes back against conventional wisdom in some instances. I think it's helpful to read contrarian voices to challenge what you believe. However, he can be almost willfully blind to the actual realities of the contemporary GOP, and this is not unique to him. Most pundits are pretty comfortable financially and socially. They live in major cities, with all the issues and privileges that accrue to that, and they probably aren't worried about things like abortion rights.
Anyway, Yglesias makes the case for why Ron DeSantis "seems to have stalled". It's kind of willfully obtuse. His argument is that DeSantis was briefly popular because he was very Covid skeptical and that aligned with the GOP base, and now that Covid is gone, he's not as popular.
What a load of horseshit.
DeSantis had his little moment because Trump tried to overthrow the elected government of the United States. He tried desperately to mimic Trump's movements and political instincts - attack, attack, attack - but lacked authenticity and charisma. DeSantis is Scott Walker 2.0. He is a fairly repellent human being with the charm of wet laundry.
What Yglesias consistently does is apply his lens to GOP voters. He fancies himself a rational, objective guy (he is, in fact, a walking bundle of his prior convictions) and therefore assumes that GOP voters are as well. There is a frame in economics and political science of the Rational Actor that presumes that everyone acts in their perceived reasoned self-interest. The behavior of GOP voters who seem to vote against their self-interest puzzles them, but they just assume it's a glitch.
To assume that GOP voters are choosing candidates based on a reasoned evaluation of competing policies is to ignore that political devolution of the Republican Party this century. The fact that the GOP did not have a party platform in 2020 is sense a quirk and not a feature of GOP politics. Trump is an aberration and not - as he truly is - the natural endpoint of a party that has become a creature of Fox News Grievance.
DeSantis' boomlet was caused by his anti-Covid Safety politics. Yglesias is puzzled why Covid amelioration measures became a partisan issue, which gives away the game. Anyone to the left of Trump felt that it was in our personal and national interest to save as many lives as possible by using NPIs and vaccines to fight the virus. Precisely because people on the left took the stance of masking, distancing and vaccinating, the right opposed it. It's that simple and that stupid. Even as Republicans began dying in disproportionate numbers because of their refusal to take countermeasures to Covid, they clung to harmful beliefs that flew in the face of all evidence.
Trump has been mildly hurt by boasting about his vaccination record, which was arguably the one good thing he did as president. Even Trump himself cannot escape Cleek's Law.
So, if we understand that the base GOP voter is simply reacting against the cultural and political Left, then policy doesn't really matter. The obvious craving for a dictatorial strong man by vast portions of the Right is about vanquishing their enemies rather than any real concrete goal. If a policy helps "pwn the libtards" then it is good, even if it hurts them, too.
DeSantis spiked by attacking the current bugaboos of the Right - teaching actual American history, letting LGBT people exist, Disney, education as a public good - not because he had any real hold on their loyalties.
As quite a few people have noted, Trump's legal troubles have helped him with the GOP base. He's committed multiple crimes (ok, allegedly, but he's plead guilty to others). He is manifestly unsuited by temperament, ability or experience to be president. That does not matter! In fact, the more he's placed in legal jeopardy, the more his poll numbers rise with the GOP base.
To embrace Cleek's Law is to abandon the bothsides frame of a certain class of punditry. After Trump was elected, the NY Times went on numerous Cleetus Safaris to Ohio Diners to try and understand the average Trump voters' position on capital gains tax cuts.
They haven't learned a goddamned thing.
Recently, the virologists (?) at the Department of Energy have said with "low confidence" that Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan. The "lab leak" hypothesis has been circulating since 2020, and while there are some important points to be made regarding keeping viruses safely behind locked doors, on a fundamental level it doesn't really matter if it was a lab leak or zoonotic crossover in a market. It could conceivably matter if China was engineering a bio-weapon, but there's zero evidence for that. Covid hurt them as much as it hurt anyone, and it would be a pretty crappy weapon at any rate.
While a lab leak could have implications for how secure bioresearch facilities should be, the idea that "liberals" routinely denied that it could have been a lab leak isn't really true. It's always been possible, if less likely than a market crossover. As Yglesias points out, Trump was rhetorically racist in his usual way, but he didn't really call out the Chinese government over a possible lab leak.
The issue isn't whether we should be studying coronaviruses - we obviously should be - but how secure those facilities are. China's steadfast lack of transparency means we won't know and won't know whether they have taken appropriate steps - if it was a lab leak - to correct any lapses.
All of this gets filtered through the puke funnel of conservative PWN THE LIBTARDS nonsense so you get shit like this. Because the DOE says it might have been a lab leak (not "it was definitely a lab leak") we get the usual idiots saying that this means that masks and vaccines were wrong, too. There was a similar meta study about masking being ineffective at stopping the spread of Covid. The study actually said that mask mandates tended not to work in places where they were poorly enforced, like, you know, America.
I mean, in that Campos post, they actually say they were right about ivermectin. They use the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby the possibility of a lab leak being correct means that public health officials were lying about everything else.
The simple truth is that conservative politics has now devolved to a place where their primary position is to oppose whatever "liberals" want. Cleeks Law rules us all.
This inevitably makes their positions stupid and incoherent.
