The Weekly Sift

Being basically a hermit by nature, I’m enduring lockdown fairly well. (It also helps that I’m doing OK financially, I don’t have small children to keep occupied, and my major activity — this blog — can proceed more-or-less undisturbed.) Even my week in solitary, when I thought I might be infected, passed fairly pleasantly.

But I’m starting to notice more and more signs of depression in my social-media universe. Occasionally I hear someone try to say something uplifting, but even that comes out depressing. It’s sort of like when a soldier tries to raise his companions’ courage, but really just reminds everybody how scary the situation is. (“We may not have anything that penetrates their tanks’ armor, and poison gas is indeed a terrible way to die, but are we afraid? No, we are not! We may be running out of food and bullets, but we have as much spirit as we ever did!”)

So I’m wondering if I’ve been underestimating the toll this experience is taking on people in general. If you have observations on this that you’re willing to put out on the internet, please leave a comment.

As I’ve pointed out before, news keeps going into reruns: more people are dead, Trump said something stupid, yada yada yada. It would be easy to put out the same weekly summary week after week, just updating the links to the current instances of the continuing narratives. (Although Trump really outdid himself this week with the injecting-disinfectants comment. Try as I might to let that go, I ended up writing about it.) So it’s a challenge to approach the news with a what-did-we-learn-this-week attitude.

This week, the featured post looks at the question: Why isn’t the rally-round-the-flag effect working for Trump? During a crisis, presidents generally see their popularity rise — even if the bad news could just as easily be blamed on them. For example, FDR’s navy suffered a crushing defeat at Pearl Harbor, but the next month he had an 84% approval rating. The current crisis gave Trump’s approval a bit of a blip — from the low 40s to the high 40s — but it dissipated in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, governors of both parties are seeing a more typical rise: Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Republicans like Mike DeWine have scored numbers in the 80s. What’s up with that?

That post still needs some work, but it should be out by 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary looks at a few states starting to reopen, and a lot of states starting to announce reopening plans. As always, I’ll update the numbers on cases and deaths. (The models that predicted 60,000 total deaths are looking way too optimistic now. We should blow through that number in a few days.) As I said, I can’t ignore the disinfectants controversy, but I’ll approach it from the why-didn’t-anybody-jump-up-and-correct-him angle rather than rage for the Nth time at how ignorant Trump is. Stupidity at the top is old news, but the corruption of the supposedly apolitical parts of the government is the ongoing story.

Some really funny song parodies are going around, and come out amazingly quickly.

And then there are stories that either have nothing to do with the virus, or are tangential to it: The Senate Intelligence Committee validated the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference to help Trump in 2016; Stephen Miller finally got his immigration ban; nobody knows what’s going on with Kim Jong Un; the big department store chains might not reopen; and a few other things. And I’ll close with a virtual choir of Canadian women doctors singing an inspiring song. Let’s say that appears by 1.

Some days I wonder if they’re re-running news from some previous day. You know: the death numbers have increased; health workers don’t have what they need; Trump said something stupid or offensive at the daily briefing; some idiot minister is defying the no-large-gathering order, as if the whole pandemic were a satanic plot to shut down his particular church; more people lost their jobs; and so on.

And now I’m part of it, because the weekly summary will (once again) have all that stuff in it.

With the same outrageous stuff happening week after week, it can be hard to notice when something happens that is outrageous even by our newly elevated standards of outrage. But Tuesday’s Wisconsin state elections (and incidentally, the presidential primary) was such an event. The Republican legislature (which is only Republican because of gerrymandering) used the threat of the virus as a voter-suppression technique. And then the supreme courts of both Wisconsin and the United States backed them up. So Wisconsinites were out there in face masks and garbage bags, standing as far apart as the long lines (to get into drastically fewer polling places) allowed.

Usually, the “I Voted” sticker is a mark of civic responsibility. Tuesday it was a badge of courage.

The vote still hasn’t been announced (more on that later), so we don’t know yet whether this bit of election tampering achieved the results the Republicans wanted: holding a seat on the very state supreme court that said all this was OK.

Anyway, the featured post will go into the blow-by-blow of all that. I’m aiming to get that out by 10 EDT, but I’m also moving unusually slowly this morning. The weekly summary will have this week’s versions of the news re-runs listed above, as well as a recap on the Democratic nomination race, which seems to be over now that Bernie Sanders has shut down his campaign. Speculation on Biden’s VP choice is rising. Trump’s taxes are going to the Supreme Court. And I’ll close with a John Prine song. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

Following up on last week’s explanation of why some massive government intervention in the economy was necessary, this week I’ll look at how the economy restarts and when that might become possible. Unfortunately, Trump has polluted that conversation with so much misinformation that it’s hard to discuss it properly without doing a long debunk first. So I’ll start there, then go on to list prerequisites for relaxing the lockdown, and from there how a restart might go.

That post will be called “How the Economy Restarts”. It should be out around 10 EDT or so.

The weekly summary again has to be dominated by virus news. (People ask why they never see Joe Biden, and the answer is that without any official role in the virus response, he can’t break into the news cycle.) There’s $2.2 trillion of new government money to discuss, the weekly infection-and-death numbers, the mega-churches that are still gathering their flocks together, and so on. I’ll try to mix in some other things. (If you’re looking for something edifying and hopeful, I’ll link to a Heather Cox Richardson lecture on why the Gilded Age didn’t last forever. In addition to the education, it’s amusing to watch her skate around the role that assassinating McKinley played.)

And whenever the actual news gets too grim, I’ll declare an amusement break and link to a creatively funny virus-response video. The closing is a Statler brothers song from the 60s that suggests activities for people sheltering in place. That should appear sometime around noon.

Somebody (sorry, I don’t remember who) commented on Facebook the other day that “2020 has been a tough couple of years.” Anyway, this week was dominated by the same troika of stories that have been front-and-center for a while now: the virus, the economic collapse, and the presidential race.

Media coverage of the virus bounces between apocalyptic this-is-why-there-will-be-many-megadeaths stories and practical tips like here’s-how-to-wash-your-hands. I assume you’ve seen plenty of both, so the featured post this week will instead focus on the interesting sidebar stories, like “Why exactly are people hoarding toilet paper?” and “What should you binge-watch on TV now that everything is closed?” That post is called “Interesting (but not necessarily important) Questions and Answers about the Pandemic”. It should be out shortly.

If the Fed thought the markets would be encourages to see interest rates go to zero, they’re finding out differently this morning. At the moment, futures on the Dow are down about 4.5%. Personally, I interpreted the Fed’s message as “Holy shit! We just saw some numbers that scared the crap out of us.”

My own governor (Baker of Massachusetts) just closed everything yesterday evening. Governors all over the country are doing the same. (Except in West Virginia, which still hasn’t had its first verified coronavirus case. Apparently no one goes there.) So the weekly summary will talk about the string of cancellations, give the numbers on the virus spread, consider whether the Democratic primary campaign is over yet, and discuss what else might be happening in the world (Hello, President-for-Life Putin!) while our attention has been elsewhere. We all need something cute, so I’ll close with a charming video of puppies  trying to crowd into a basket. I’ll predict the summary posts by noon EDT.

Events conspired to create three featured posts this week.

Super Tuesday is tomorrow, which means it’s time for me to vote in the Massachusetts primary. (I moved from New Hampshire a little over a year ago, so I’m no longer one of the elite first-in-the-nation voters. I mourn my loss of status.) I’ve already promised an article to explain my vote, and I’ll ruin the suspense by telling you now that it’s going to be for Elizabeth Warren. Rather than the usual kind of endorsement column, though, I’ll discuss how to think through a primary vote in general, which might lead you to a different decision in your state than I made in mine.

While I was writing that, one section exploded into so much material that it distracted from my main point of endorsing Warren. That’s the section on electability, which is a way more complicated concept than most pundits would have you believe. Some will tell that it’s all about swing voters, and others that it’s all about raising turnout. A third group claims that the question is unfathomable, so you shouldn’t consider it at all.

I come around to the idea that there is something to think about, but that it’s foolish to be too dogmatic about your conclusions, whatever they are. By anointing one candidate as more electable than the others, you’re placing a bet, not proving a theorem.

So anyway, the second featured article is about electability.

Then there’s the coronavirus, which was taking over the weekly summary. That eventually demanded its own article, which betrays its origin inside the weekly summary: It’s more a collection of notes than a single coherent essay.

I expect the three featured articles to come out in reverse order: the virus article first, by about 9 EST. Then electability, around 11, and the Warren endorsement by noon. The weekly summary should be fairly short and come out by 1.