Kevin Drum
Mother Jones
Irvine, CA, United States
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Past articles by Kevin:
The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage
We are at war with ourselves, but not for the reasons you think. → Read More
So Long, And Thanks For All the Pixels
After 12½ years at Mother Jones, this is finally it: my last blog post. This has, literally, been a dream job, getting paid to do something I’d be happy to do for free. (Which I’m about to prove by continuing to do it for free now that I can afford to.) It’s been a blast […] → Read More
New CDC Study Says Schools Are Mostly Safe to Reopen
Here’s some good news: Schools operating in person have seen scant transmission of the coronavirus, particularly when masks and distancing are employed, but some indoor athletics have led to infections and should be curtailed if schools want to operate safely, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in papers published Tuesday….The review, […] → Read More
Is Democracy Really in Danger in the US?
How is democracy faring these days? The conventional wisdom is that it’s doing pretty poorly, and not just in the US. Look at Hungary and Poland. Or Brazil. On the flip side, there’s the ascendancy and relative success of China. I don’t want to take on the whole world today, but as far as the […] → Read More
The Senate Filibuster Has Already Been Abolished
At the risk of saying the obvious, isn’t it true that the legislative filibuster has already been abolished? Sure, there hasn’t been an official announcement or anything, but everyone agrees that the majority party can pass a piece of legislation with 51 votes anytime they feel like it.¹ It just takes a simple point of […] → Read More
America Is in Better Shape Than Everyone Seems to Think
It is rare for me to disagree with Ezra Klein quite so vigorously, but this is just wrong, wrong, wrong: Democrats mocked [Donald Trump’s] “I alone can fix it” message for its braggadocio and feared its authoritarianism, but they did not take seriously the deep soil in which it was rooted: The American system of […] → Read More
Another Look at Vaccinations
I’ve posted before about vaccination rates in the US and Europe, but here’s the same thing charted in a somewhat different way: This is a log chart, which means that a straight line indicates exponential growth. As long as the line for the US remains straight, it means that every day we’re vaccinating more people […] → Read More
Behold My Daring Prediction for 2021
I have been browsing many articles over the past few days that ponder the question of whether Joe Biden will be able to get his legislative agenda through Congress. They are all nuanced and carefully written, which means they are all wrong. Here is the answer: No. Republicans in the Senate will block just about […] → Read More
Coronavirus Growth in Western Countries: January 21 Update
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 21. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. → Read More
Raw Data: The Minimum Wage Around the World
According to the OECD, here is the minimum wage in most of the developed countries of the world: The United States currently has the lowest minimum wage by a big margin. If it were raised to $15, it would be among the highest. → Read More
The US Is Doing OK on COVID-19 Vaccinations
Here, yet again, is the vaccination rate for the United States and a bunch of its peer countries: Why do I keep posting charts like this? Because we’ve spent way too much time on doom and gloom about how incompetently we’ve rolled out the COVID-19 vaccine. With the well-known exception of Israel, we’re doing as […] → Read More
Do You Remember What Conservatives Feared About Hillary?
Do you remember “The Flight 93 Election”? It was an essay written in 2016 by Michael Anton, a sometime speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, and George W. Bush, who also had a bit of Wall Street experience salted in over the years. It was printed in the Claremont Review of Books and it—oh hell, […] → Read More
Tucker: Joe Biden Wants to Lock Us All Up
Out of Joe Biden’s entire inaugural speech, Tucker Carlson is dedicating tonight’s program to attacking this sentence: And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. Seriously, this is the part he objects to. Apparently Tucker took the mention of white supremacy personally, and even […] → Read More
The Tea Party Morphed Into the Cult of Trump. What Will It Become Next?
Ten years ago I wrote a short essay for the magazine about the tea party phenomenon. The gist was that it was nothing new: every time Democrats come into power, some sort of conspiracy-minded right-wing movement blossoms. It happened with FDR, it happened with JFK, it happened with Bill Clinton, and at the time it […] → Read More
How I Will Remember the Trump Administration
We all have our favorites, but this is mine. The Trump administration will forever look like this to me: → Read More
Fox News Decides It’s Not Right-Wing Enough
Just when you think Fox News can hardly get any worse . . . Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo: “A new report says that some far-right protesters have discussed posing as members of the National Guard to infiltrate the inauguration — the way Democrats infiltrated two weeks ago and put on MAGA clothing” pic.twitter.com/nWA01TvHbr — […] → Read More
Can We Have Half the Country Vaccinated by the End of March?
Here’s an odd thing. I was looking at the numbers for vaccinations and it turns out that on a log scale they’re rising on a straight line. What this means in semi-English is that the number of vaccinations per day is rising exponentially in both the UK and the United States. Here’s what this looks […] → Read More
McConnell Denounces Trump, But Not Fox News
Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate today: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday pointedly blamed Trump for having “provoked” the violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6….“The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use […] → Read More
Chart of the Day: Why Is COVID-19 Worse In Some Parts of the World and Better in Others?
Here is something tentative but genuinely fascinating. I promise the payoff is worth it, but first it’s going to require a little bit of background about how the immune system works. Human cells all contain proteins called human leukocyte antigens, or HLAs, which swim around and periodically latch on to invading viruses, which they bring […] → Read More
Who’s Rolling Out the COVID-19 Vaccine the Fastest?
You have probably heard that Britain is kicking our butt when it comes to vaccinating their population from COVID-19. And they surely are. But before you think the ghost of Isaac Newton must be helping them along, take a look at this chart: I have placed three large red dots at the point approximately two […] → Read More