Kevin Drum

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 13. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is a cute little bushtit about to launch itself off a rose stem in our front yard. The bushtit is not an especially impressive bird, but I was happy to get this exciting action shot to share with you.

A few days ago I wrote a post called "If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals." As you can imagine with a provocative headline like that, conservatives loved it. Liberals were a little, um, less enthusiastic.

But my argument was pretty straightforward: survey data over the past 20 years makes it clear that liberals have moved to the left more than conservatives have moved to the right. This has pushed us far enough to the left that even moderates find some of our positions scary, and with centrist states largely out of play it's become very hard to win congressional majorities.

Over at the Bulwark, Tim Miller has taken on the task of rebutting me. He starts out by saying that my analysis is "absolutely correct":

But when it comes to the actions of politicians, the aggressive, top down Culture War is being driven overwhelmingly from the right. And the shift rightward among Republican politicians on culture war issues is as dramatic—if not more so—than the leftward shift among Democratic voters on policy.

I deliberately focused on rank-and-file voters because they are, ultimately, what matters. Still, it's true that the political ecosystem also includes influencers, primarily politicians and the press, and those work differently.

Miller points out that, rhetorically, conservative politicians have moved far more right than liberal politicians have moved left. I agree that this is obviously true even if I don't have hard evidence for it. However, politicians are symptoms not causes, followers not leaders, so the bluster of politicians means less than most people think. I addressed this a bit in my original post, but it's worth doing it in more detail here. Here we go:

• In a political debate, it's entirely natural for the losing side to be much more vocal than the side that's winning something. In the case of culture war issues, it's generally liberals who are pushing to gain something (civil rights, gay rights, etc.) and conservatives who are at risk of losing something (customs and hierarchies that they've long lived with). So no one should be surprised that conservative politicians are louder and more hysterical about culture war issues than liberal politicians. That doesn't mean much.
• Because we've moved so far left, conservative politicians are free to attack us good and hard. Liberal politicians, by contrast, tend to be more judicious. But this is not a difference between liberal and conservative. It's just that a strong leftward shift gives conservative politicians a lot of room to scare moderate voters while liberal politicians are hesitant to fight back because they know they'll lose even more voters if they do. Always remember: there are more conservatives than liberals in the United States.
• By pushing so far left, we have given the conservative press an easy job. It's popular among certain liberals to say that this doesn't matter because conservatives will attack us no matter what, but that's sophistry. Of course both sides are always attacking each other. But conservative attacks are a lot more effective when we liberals provide them with a big fat target—and we do.
• The liberal press—and here I'm mostly talking about MSNBC—shouldn't be underestimated. They are less thuggish than Fox News, but they press the extreme progressive agenda pretty hard, and not always honestly.
• That said, there's no question that Fox News plays a special role in all this. After a relatively moderate start, they moved to the hard right starting around the year 2000 and they've been uniquely destructive ever since. It's not just that they fight back against progressives, it's that they demagogue and misrepresent and just outright lie with a casual abandon.

Miller's basic case is that social change is constant and, sure, "the scores of millions of people who create cultural change in the daily comings and goings of their lives should be more forbearing with everyone else." Still, he says, it's the "inflamers" who are responsible for turning a normal level of disagreement into a war.

But this is just not the way things work. It's easy for liberals to say "social change, eh, no big deal," but it is a big deal to those who are scared by it. To suggest that the elite conservative fight against lefty change is nothing more than a ruse for the rubes is not just backward, it betrays a deep misunderstanding of how H. sapiens tribalism work. Noise level aside, liberals are every bit as invested in pushing change as conservatives are in resisting it, and the farther left we go the stronger the resistance becomes. This should surprise no one.

However, there is one particular place where I agree with Miller: the deep, dark cesspool that is Fox News. The basic political dynamic here is simple: progressives have made themselves into an easy target and Fox News is largely responsible for using that target as a way of not just attacking us, but of making its audience believe that liberals are scary, unpatriotic, and deliberately trying to ruin America. This has had a big impact on rank-and-file voters, and it's no surprise that conservative politicians have followed along like lapdogs. Without Fox News conservatives would still be naturally louder than liberals in this fight, but with Fox News they've been turned into maniacs.

It's still the case that liberals are fundamentally the ones who pushed first and pushed hardest on social issues over the past 20 years. And it's only natural that this sparked a strong response from conservatives. Beyond that, though, it's Fox News that's turned things truly toxic. So if you're looking for a conservative target, forget the politicians, who just follow public sentiment. Look instead to Fox News, which eagerly accepted its 30 pieces of silver and cold-bloodedly stoked that toxic public sentiment in the first place. They're the ones who turbocharged a fairly normal dynamic and made it into the hellscape it is today.

POSTSCRIPT: I want to make clear yet again that nothing I've said is meant to suggest that progressives are wrong. Generally speaking, I'm all on board with most progressive change. But my personal opinion doesn't mean anything, and it's simply a fact that liberals have moved very far to the left in recent years. This has placed them a long way away from the median voter and made it very difficult to win in centrist states.

Today Jonah Goldberg writes about the right-wing eruption over the idea of going door to door to offer COVID-19 vaccinations to everyone:

This triggered a geyser of paranoia and asininity from much of the American right. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said this amounted to “illegal” intrusions into American privacy. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who called it a “gross abuse of power,” said: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, ‘The federal government shall go door to door pushing Americans into vaccine trials.” And these were the sober critics.

....It’s also bewildering. When Donald Trump was president, Operation Warp Speed was an own-the-libs triumph. On Nov. 20, Laura Ingraham of Fox News asked: “The stunning success of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed caught team apocalypse totally off guard. Don’t you love it?” Now she and many other right-wing media figures are engaged in fearmongering over the alleged dangers of vaccines we wouldn’t have were it not for Trump.

I don't want to pick on Goldberg, who's been consistently disgusted with the excesses of the modern Trumpian right, but even he remains unwilling to point a finger at the real cause of this behavior: Fox News. He flicks at it slightly when he mentions Laura Ingraham's U-turn, but that's all.

The Republican Party has always had a dozen or three looney bins on their extreme end, people who are willing to say just about anything as long as it's stupid enough. But they're not the problem. The problem is that Fox News has taken their schtick and nationalized it. As recently as 20 years ago, Massie and Roy and their ilk wouldn't even have gotten a page A23 blurb in the national media. Today, Fox News blasts out this kind of idiocy to the entire country several times a day and it soon becomes all but a part of the GOP platform.

It's one thing to be anti-Trump. But if we really want sanity back in our politics, conservatives need to become anti-Fox News. That's a lot harder since it's not clear if Republicans can win elections reliably without them, but it's the only answer. As long as Fox remains the primary source of news on the right, our country will continue to slide downhill.

As long as we're having fun with inflation today—and we are, aren't we?—let's take a dive into everyone's favorite category, the weekly trip to the supermarket. Here's the inflation rate for a random selection of food items:

This shows you how the game is played. If you want to run a scare story about people having seizures over the high price of food, just run some B-roll of a cash register ringing up the items on the right. Bacon is up 6.1%! Apples are up 6.5%! And whole milk is up a wallet-busting 7.5%!

Naturally you have to ignore the fact that hamburger is down 8.4%, hot dogs are down 3.8%, and bread is up only 1.3%. That would ruin the narrative, after all.

Anyway, when you add it all up, food in supermarkets is up 0.9% from last year. That's not busting anyone's wallet unless they eat bacon and apples for every meal.

Just for fun, here's an updated chart that shows the inflation rate for various categories of goods and services:

Used cars and trucks are up 45.2%! What the hell is going on?

This time I've included figures for Drum household personal hobbies. Photo equipment is up 5.9%, which is tolerable. However, sewing machines are up 13.3%. I hope Marian isn't planning to buy a new sewing machine any time soon.¹

¹Anyway, what we really need is the world's best buttonholer, even if the price is high. Buttonholes are the big challenge around here.

Exciting news today! The June inflation numbers are out. I won't keep you in suspense:

That's pretty high! However, if you use Kevin's Handy Inflation Calculator, which adjusts for base effects (that's the dip in mid-2020) the real-world rate is more like 4.4%. And if you eliminate the distortion of used cars, the inflation rate for everything else is probably less than 3%.¹

I know, I know, that's a lot of adjustments. Take 'em for what they're worth. The only adjustment that really matters is to go forward in time and see if inflation settles down once the economy adjusts to its grand reopening. But that's one adjustment we're just going to have to wait for.

¹According to the BLS, the inflation rate of used cars "accounted for more than one-third of the seasonally adjusted all items increase."

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 12. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

How effective is preschool? There is, to put it plainly, much research has been dedicated to this question and we still don't know for sure. One constant, however, is that every discussion of pre-K includes a reference to the Perry Preschool Project, a smallish study done in 1962 that provided high-quality preschool to poor Black students beginning at age three. But it's frankly tiresome to keep hearing about it, since it's now 60 years in the past and included only about 60 kids in the treatment group. If we haven't come up with better studies by now, we should just give up the whole thing.

However, the PPP does have one advantage over other studies: It took place 60 years in the past. This means that it provides a unique look at participants throughout their entire lives without any guesswork about things like expected future income or criminal activity. By now, that information is all available directly. A team of researchers has done just that and their conclusion is pretty simple:

The authors present benefits in terms of present value dollars, and they find that the effect of PPP on education is minimal. Ditto for health care. However, the impact on income and crime is considerable. Graduates of PPP ended up earning substantially more than the control group and engaged in substantially less crime. Nearly all of these benefits came between the ages of 16 and 40.

This is consistent with other studies of pre-K, which generally find that preschool doesn't make you smarter or better in the classroom. Rather, preschool seems to improve life outcomes by instilling good cognitive habits in other areas.

This is progress, and it makes a good case for universal pre-K. However, it still leaves the basic Black-white education gap in place, with Black kids graduating from high school with an average 9th-10th grade reading level compared to 12th grade for white kids. Until we figure out what to do about this, our education problems in the Black community are very far from solved.

This looks like a model, but it's not. It's just a big ol' BNSF freight train on its way to the BNSF switching yard in Barstow.