Author: Kevin Drum

The Wall Street Journal reports on a strange corner of the current market frenzy:

Dogecoin, a speculative coin backed by nothing, shot up after Trump revealed plans to create a government-efficiency department called DOGE, to be co-led by Elon Musk, a dogecoin evangelist. Its $55 billion market cap now tops that of Ford Motor.

Not quite. The part about dogecoin being explicitly based on nothing is true. But the part about it shooting up in price after Trump announced DOGE isn't:

Dogecoin more than doubled after the election, shooting up from 16¢ to 38¢ by November 12. That evening Trump announced DOGE. The next day dogecoin rose by 2¢ and then immediately gave it back the day after.

So what's the real deal with dogecoin? As usual with this idiocy, I suppose we'll never know.

As we continue to argue about why Kamala Harris lost, I want to remind everyone that only about 3% of the electorate switched from D to R this year—less in swing states. So regardless of whether you think the culprit was cultural issues or the economy or misogyny or Latino defections or a bad campaign—no matter which it is, it only had to influence 2-3% of the voting public. You can make a plausible argument for practically anything doing that.

UPDATE: But wait! What about lower turnout? If you account for that you get to about 4%. Still a very small number.

I was browsing around on an unrelated subject and happened to notice something about the nicknames of famous women who have led big countries:

• Golda Meir: Iron Lady
• Indira Gandhi: Iron Lady
• Margaret Thatcher: Iron Lady
• Benazir Bhutto: Iron Lady
• Angela Merkel: Iron Chancellor

Is the United States ready for a woman president? Maybe we first need an Iron ______.

Have liberals moved too far to the left culturally? Is that why we lost in 2024?

This is hardly a new dispute. Thomas Frank wrote his seminal exploration of the question, What's the Matter With Kansas? in 2004, back when Democrats were considerably more moderate than they are now. But it seems newly relevant in the wake of an election where the American public seemingly decided that even a lunatic right was better than leaving liberals in power.

These things tend to be thermostatic. After a few years people get tired of whichever ideology is ascendant and switch to the other one for a while. Still, why switch to Trumpism, which most liberals view as wildly beyond the pale?

A lot of it has to do with the nature of extremism. Which extreme are you more afraid of? As an example, consider the question of puberty blockers in trans children. A moderate view might be something like Sometimes they make sense, but the evidence suggests we should be a lot more careful about prescribing them. What are the two extreme views on either side of this?

• Conservatives: Ban hormonal treatments for minors.
• Liberals: Twelve-year-olds know what they're doing. Transition away.

Which is scarier? As in many things, the conservative view is essentially Stop. Let's go back to the way things were a few years ago. And this is not very scary. The liberal view, conversely, is inherently a little disturbing if you're not already a confirmed lefty.

This isn't always the case. The moderate view on abortion, for example, would be I support Roe v. Wade. The two extremes are:

• Conservatives: Ban abortion completely.
• Liberals: Just let women and their doctors decide.

In this case, partly because abortion is a well-worn issue, it's the conservative position that seems scarier to most people. Republicans have discovered this to their dismay ever since Dobbs forced them to put their money where their mouths are.

But for most cultural hot buttons, especially fairly new ones, the conservative extreme is the less scary. After all, Stop doing it has a natural limit of zero. And since zero was often the normal position only a few years in the past, how scary can it be? By contrast, the sky's the limit for lefties. We can compete for ever more extreme positions almost without limit.

This is meant as an explanation, not an endorsement. I have my own views, of course, but they don't matter. I'm nowhere near the median voter, and the question is how they feel. The answer, I believe, is that they often find liberal extremes scarier than conservative extremes, so when the extreme left gains influence they'll gravitate naturally toward conservatism even if it's also (or more) extreme.

Not always, but often. And it's mostly related to the mere existence of influential liberal extremes, not whether Democratic politicians actively endorse them. If they don't actively condemn them—yes, the dreaded Sister Souljah moment—then they're implicated and conservatives win. This is what happened in 2024.

Lefty discourse has suddenly been filled with talk about The Groups—nonprofit organizations that apparently wield enormous veto power over Democratic politicians. Ezra Klein discussed this a couple of days ago with Michael Lind, starting off with an observation about routine opposition to big solar power projects from highly focused groups on the left:

KLEIN: When I would talk to the people working on it, I was just stunned by the power of small groups, environmental justice groups, and so on, that didn’t really represent anybody, or at least not any large numbers of people.

They would just explain to me that if you couldn’t get them on board, they couldn’t move forward with this at all. And I would say, “Well, what is the power of these groups — like, what is their leverage on you?” And there was never an answer. It was just a coalitional decision that had been made in the culture of the way the Democratic Party now made policy.

....A culture of how you make policy had emerged, a culture of who you listen to had emerged. And it couldn’t be broken, even if that meant a genuinely smaller chance of achieving a goal that you believed and had told everybody else was existentially important: the speed of decarbonization in the coming 10 years.

LIND: Well, it’s not new. Back in the 1990s, I was having a conversation with a Democratic staffer about some sensible educational reform — I don’t remember what it was — and he worked for Senator Ted Kennedy at the time. And he said, “Well, we’ll have to run it past the Groups.”

That was the first time I had heard of “the Groups” — clearly with a capital G.

So who are these Groups? In general they seem to fall into a few categories:

• Black
• Trans
• Green
• Environmental justice
• Immigration
• Gay
• Indigenous

But which ones? Can we name names? My sense is that although this list includes some big, well-known groups—the ACLU, NAACP, NRDC, etc.—the bulk of The Groups are mostly smallish organizations that are, in practice, run by young staffers with an incentive to move steadily left and steadily more hardline.

But who are they? I don't think it's a secret; it's just that no one has ever bothered to make a list. But maybe it's time for someone to do this?

Apparently Wall Street is having second thoughts about how wonderful another four years of Donald Trump will be:

The Trump rally was never much of a rally in the first place, but it's all gone now. On the other hand, Bitcoin is staying strong:

Wall Street might be having second thoughts, but the crypto bros aren't. They still plan to rock and roll with their buddy Donald.

Here is Charlie a couple of months ago enjoying the front yard garden at the tail end of summer. Whenever we can't find him, it turns out he's snoozing somewhere in the underbrush here. In fact, just last night that's where we found him, ignoring our calls for hours until he finally got hungry and decided to come in. But the flowers are all gone.

I've been reading lately that we might have passed Peak Woke. For example:

Fine, but Science™ requires data, not anecdotes. We need evidence that wokeness is on the decline.

Well, have I got something for you! It might seem that if we can't even define wokeness we can't measure it either, but that's not so. Behold the WI, the Woke Index:

The WI is an index composed of woke-adjacent words on Google Trends. The exact words remain a trade secret, but the result, measuring wokeness on a scale of 0-100, is above.

And believe it or not, it's interesting. Even though none of the words are race related, the raw index correctly places peak wokeness in June 2020, the month George Floyd was killed and progressive wokesters went crazy.

However, wokeness, like any cultural phenomenon, has inertia. For this reason the official index is the smoothed trendline. It places peak wokeness in January 2022 and suggests it's declined by about a quarter since then.

You might think this is moronic, but I say it's no worse than a hundred other indexes concocted by think tanks around the world (freedom, happiness, sustainability, etc. etc.). Maybe a little better, even. After all, even though the inputs were chosen with no knowledge of the outcome, curiosity about woke terms really does seem to correspond with widespread perceptions. I shall update it periodically.

Here is Elon again:

Good work! Except for one thing: $895 billion of his $900 billion is for two items. The first is interest on the debt, which Elon can't change. The second is government overpayments, which are a legit problem but not one that Elon has any idea how to fix. In other words, there's literally nothing here.

But it also highlights one of my pet peeves about these lists, pioneered decades ago by William Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" awards: They mostly mock trivial science projects with funny names like "Dr. Fauci's Transgender Monkey Study" that nearly always turn out to be perfectly sensible if you actually read them.

This particular one is a longtime conservative favorite sparked by PETA—strange bedfellows indeed. The actual study is simple and straightforward: trans women have high rates of HIV, so a Scripps researcher got a small grant to inject female hormones into male rhesus macaques to see if it made them more vulnerable to the HIV virus. It follows a well-established line of research going back years and there's nothing even remotely crazy about it.

If this is the kind of thing we can expect from Elon, his government efficiency project will turn out to be even stupider than it first seemed. But although it will likely accomplish nothing, I'm sure we can look forward to lots of dumb tweets and press releases along the way.

Today the Washington Post presents us with the Top Ten RFK Jr. Conspiracy Theories. This is great service journalism, but it's too damn long for those of us with busy lives. So as a further service, here is Shorter RFK Jr, a brief compilation of just the conspiracy theories themselves:

1. Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism
2. Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’
3. Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments
4. Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public
5. Kennedy has falsely linked antidepressants to mass shootings
6. Kennedy incorrectly suggests AIDS may not be caused by HIV
7. Kennedy falsely argues children’s gender identity can be impacted by water
8. Kennedy has falsely touted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as effective covid treatments
9. Kennedy argued that covid-19 was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people
10. Kennedy claims 5G high-speed wireless network is used to ‘control our behavior’

The only one I wish they'd left off is the raw milk thing. It's true that raw milk has no benefits, but it's not really true that it's dangerous. Well, not very dangerous. It causes occasional illness and, according to the FDA, three deaths over 20 years. You're better off with pasteurized milk, which has all the same nutrients and no danger at all. But raw milk is safe enough that people should probably be left alone to drink it if they want to.¹

¹I welcome frenzied pushback on this point.