Author: Kevin Drum

Here's an interesting demonstration of the power of black and white. The top photo is a picture of the Green Church, near Mammoth Lakes, with the White Mountains in the background. It's a so-so image, and mostly radiates a sense of calmness and silence.

Then I decided to render it in high-contrast black and white. Now it looks more like a church you might find in a Stephen King novel, producing mostly a sense that some kind of festering evil is lurking within ready to tear anyone who enters into tiny little shreds. Fascinating, no?

This ought to be pretty obvious, but I feel like maybe I should point it out in plain language. It's common to claim that today's Republican Party is "anti-democracy," but if you've been conned into believing that Democrats stole the 2020 election—that is, if you really, truly believe it—then it's Democrats who are anti-democracy and Republicans who are fighting to restore democracy.

Needless to say, I don't believe this and there's no evidence that it's true. But a small number of conservative leaders from Donald Trump down have convinced millions of rank-and-file Republicans that it's true. These leaders may themselves be anti-democracy, but the rank-and-file almost certainly isn't.

This is not a trivial point. As with so many other things, we should continue fighting the conservative elites who push this stuff but we shouldn't assume that Republican voters in general are beyond redemption. They aren't. They're just in the grip of a media-political complex that uses them for its own cynical ends. With the right message and a little bit of empathy many of them can be persuaded to abandon the right-wing grifters who are using them.

Here's a headline from today's Wall Street Journal:

Is Inflation a Risk? Not Now, but Some See Danger Ahead

You've probably seen variations of this dozens of times in the past few months even though all the evidence suggests that inflation is well under control. But here's a headline you'll never see:

Is Unemployment a Risk? Not Now, but Some See Danger Ahead

Here's a question for the class: Why is the top headline so common but the bottom one so rare? Hmmm?

It has become right-wing conventional wisdom that the January 6 insurrection was not the work of Trump supporters but of antifa and BLM agitators. The New York Times reports that this all started with a tweet from a right-wing radio host named Michael Brown:

Only 13,000 people follow Mr. Brown on Twitter, but his tweet caught the attention of another conservative pundit: Todd Herman, who was guest-hosting Rush Limbaugh’s national radio program. Minutes later, he repeated Mr. Brown’s baseless claim to Mr. Limbaugh’s throngs of listeners: “It’s probably not Trump supporters who would do that. Antifa, BLM, that’s what they do. Right?”

....By day’s end, Laura Ingraham and Sarah Palin had shared it with millions of Fox News viewers, and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters “were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”

This is a good example of how social media works. Its direct reach in this case was tiny: 13,000 followers is nothing, and they probably shared the tweet mostly with other true believers who are already so far down the rabbit hole that they hardly matter.

But social media also acts as a kind of laboratory for more conventional media. Most of the really outrageous stuff stays buried in the nether regions of Facebook and Reddit, but occasionally one of the big guns decides to amplify a likely looking conspiracy theory. This time it was Rush Limbaugh's program, followed quickly by Fox News. From there it took on a life of its own.

That's how this stuff works. There are exceptions here and there, but for the most part there's surprisingly little evidence that social media has very much real-world impact on political views. It becomes important only when something that's swirling around the fever swamps gets picked up by media figures with truly vast audiences. This usually means Fox News, where it reaches millions of people and acquires the patina of reliability. After all, a news program wouldn't lie about something like this, would it?

By itself, social media isn't generally all that harmful. Its conspiracy theories mostly get shared within a bubble of other true believers and never make it to the outside world. It's only when something gets picked up by Fox News that it takes on a life of its own. This is why we should worry less about Facebook and more about the real threat to democracy. That's Fox News, and it always has been.

This weekend brought good news. Vaccination rates still haven't returned to the old trendline—which just goes to show the danger of drawing a trendline from early data—but they have recovered from last week's dismal performance. In all, we had three consecutive days above 2 million shots and a record 2.45 million shots on Sunday.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 28. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Let's break down the $15 minimum wage fight to its tactical basics so that we understand exactly why it went down to defeat:

• As part of the coronavirus bill it could have passed with 50 votes in the Senate, but it failed because it attracted only 48 votes. This had nothing to do with the parliamentarian's ruling. It was because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema opposed raising the minimum wage to $15.
• As a compromise standalone bill (at, say, $11 per hour) it might get Manchin and Sinema's votes, but Republicans would filibuster it and it would lose.
• If Democrats had been willing to compromise in the first place, it might have passed as part of the coronavirus bill. The parliamentarian still would have ruled against it, but Kamala Harris could overrule her and then it could have passed with 50 votes. Maybe.

Any other questions?

Here's a headline on the front page of the Washington Post today:

I'm not interested in the story itself. It's just the usual glop. But when I saw this headline it suddenly occurred to me how common it is—but only among Republicans. Every few months or so there seems to be a new "rising star" of the conservative movement, and it's always someone just a little more right wing than the previous rising star.

This doesn't seem to be a thing among liberals. There are profiles here and there of ambitious young Democrats, but hardly ever a breakout star who's gathered a huge fan following seemingly overnight.

I don't have anything particularly insightful to offer about this. I just happened to notice it and began wondering what it means. Ideas?

UPDATE: I have been offered a couple of counterexamples on the left: AOC and Beto O'Rourke. Fair enough, though I'm not sure I'd count O'Rourke. There are always people on both sides who get their 15 minutes during a presidential primary. It's not really the same thing as a "rising star of progressivism."

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 27. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 26. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.