Over the weekend the CDC changed its guidance for COVID-19 testing. Previously, they advised that if you’ve been in close contact with someone who’s infected you should get tested. Now they say there’s no need for a test unless you have symptoms.

This took everyone by surprise. Even if you have no symptoms, you might still be infected and you might be able to infect others. Common sense says you should get tested. So why the U-turn?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was instructed by higher-ups in the Trump administration to modify its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus, according to two federal health officials. One official said the directive came from the top down. Another said the guidelines were not written by the C.D.C. but were imposed, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports for The Times.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. Donald Trump is on record as saying that he doesn’t like testing because it just makes our confirmed case count go up. He’s also on record as saying no, he wasn’t kidding about this. He really doesn’t like testing and wants to do less of it.

The result of all this is almost certainly that more people will die than needed to. All because Trump doesn’t like facing reality:

This looks to me like a scene from Texas or somewhere similar, but it’s actually a picture of the Los Angeles River. Perhaps you remember it from watching Chinatown? Anyway, it’s not much of a river, but it sure does inspire lots of visionary “revitalization” plans that never seem to happen. Maybe the 2020s are the decade when it will finally all come together.

Anti-abortion marchers and abortion-rights supporters at the U.S. Supreme Court on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade in January 2005.Pete Souza/TNS via ZUMA Wire

Over at New York, Eric Levitz makes a familiar case: the Republican Party is crazy and the system is rigged in their favor:

Every elected branch of the U.S. government structurally overrepresents low-density areas. And since America’s two parties are now polarized along urban-rural lines, the GOP has ballots to burn.

….Biden has no plausible answer to the problem that the conservative movement poses. But it’s not clear that anyone else does either. Some segments of the left preach economic populism as a panacea for polarization: Provide working-class voters with a robust, social-democratic alternative to cultural conservatism, and the Democratic Party just might regain its New Deal–era dominance. I favor this strategy on its substantive merits. And it may well be the best hope our Republic’s got. But there is little empirical evidence to support a “just world” theory of American politics in which Democrats are reliably rewarded for taking on plutocratic power or reliably punished for appeasing it.

This is all true. But here’s what I don’t get: this has all been obviously true ever since the Moral Majority powered Ronald Reagan to victory in 1980. Over the following 40 years liberals griped incessantly about the electoral advantage that conservatives enjoy and wondered aloud what the problem is with Kansas. Why, oh why, do conservative voters keep supporting the GOP even though it’s the party of Social Security “reform” and tax cuts for millionaires?

The answer is equally obvious: these voters don’t really care much about economic policy and we can’t make them. They care about social issues. Translated into non-apocalyptic language, here’s what the world looks like from their point of view:

• Liberals have removed prayer from schools; banned Bible studies; refused to fund Christian schools; and tried to force Christian businesses to pay for birth control.
• They have supported homosexuals in our schools and in our textbooks; they push homosexuality on the rest of us via TV and movies; and they think gay marriage is perfectly normal.
• They have handcuffed the police via things like the exclusionary rule and Miranda warnings; they opposed the death penalty even when crime was skyrocketing and they continue to oppose it to this day; they looked on benignly as riots and looting broke out in cities this year; and now they want to literally defund the police.
• They have tried to ban handguns—failing only thanks to the NRA—and succeeded in banning so-called assault weapons; and they want to register all gun owners in a central FBI registry.
• Their friends in Hollywood have turned TV and movies into rivers of filth.
• They’re eager to legalize marijuana and they treat the use of hard drugs as mere “medical problems.”
• They support the murder of unborn children, seemingly with no restrictions at all.
• They refuse to support effective border control, allowing Mexican immigrants to flood the country; take away our jobs; and invade our culture.

The thing is, all of this is more or less true. We liberals do want to separate church and state; we do support gay rights; we do support abortion rights; etc. And this strikes a lot of rural conservatives as basically depraved. Conservative politicians and conservative media turn all this stuff into a caricature, but it’s not as if it isn’t grounded in reality.

So this leaves liberals with two alternatives. First, we can figure out a way to retain our views on social issues but convince conservative voters that they aren’t a big deal and don’t represent the fall of Western civilization. Second, we can tone down our social views to make them more acceptable to moderate conservatives. Those are our two choices, but among the activist wing of the left we’re not really willing to pursue either one of them. We mostly ignore or mock the rural conservatives, and we certainly refuse to soften our views on social issues for them. They’re just bigots, right? Then we wonder why they vote for Republicans.

All of this used to be fairly obvious to anyone interested in politics, but it gets surprisingly little attention these days because we spend so much time acting goggle-eyed at the lunatics. But the lunatics have always been around: the John Birch Society, the Moral Majority, the Mena airport clowns, the tea party, and today QAnon and assorted other crackpots. So forget them for the moment. The real question is: How can liberals appeal to folks who are just normal conservatives?

One way or another, the answer is that we have to make our views on social issues acceptable to them. Everything else is just so much fluff. So how do we do it?

Via Tyler Cowen, here’s a remarkable finding from a team of researchers at Stockholm University. The authors looked at COVID-19 mortality data by occupational type to see how much difference it made to work in an “essential” job that required a lot of contact with the public. Here’s the result:

On the left are occupations with only modest exposure to the public. On the right are those with high exposure. The range of 40-100 contains 97 percent of all occupations.

The authors say the red line is the most meaningful one, and it’s essentially flat from 40 through 70, meaning that mortality didn’t change at all within that range. From 80-100, which includes a lot of health care workers, mortality actually goes down:

The red line shows that the association between mortality and exposure is relatively flat, with a slight increase around a score of 60 on the exposure index (e.g., construction worker) when adjusting for socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. A more marked decrease is observed at the highest exposures of 80-100, which is where the majority of occupations in health care are located. Despite what might be expected, we find very little difference in COVID-19 mortality risk by occupational exposure and the differences that do exist are in the opposite direction to expectations at the highest exposures.

On a more granular level, the study finds that bus and taxi drivers are at higher risk, while schoolteachers are at low risk even though Swedish schools were open at the time. It’s worth noting, however, that this study probably deserves even more skepticism than usual. The sample size is fine, and I assume that the controls are reasonable too. However, the data goes only through May 8 and the study was done in Sweden, where their mild response to the virus means that everyone, regardless of occupation, was exposed fairly heavily. The results might have been different in, say, Germany, where non-essential workers had very low exposure to the virus.

That said, this is certainly an intriguing result that begs for some confirming studies. We’ve taken it for granted that workers in essential industries are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19, but this study suggests that might not be true. This is, obviously, very counterintuitive, and difficult to explain.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 25 The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Just a quick reminder: presidential candidates often get poll bounces after their conventions. Sometimes it’s small, sometimes it’s a little better than that. But in virtually every case, the bounces go away a couple of weeks after both conventions have been held. So don’t get either excited or worried if either Trump or Biden go either up or down by the end of this week. By September it will all be gone.

Will Smith has big feet.

Democratic National Convention V/CNP via ZUMA

With the Democratic virtual convention now finished, I feel like sharing a mini-essay on American politics in the Trump era. Don’t worry. I’ll keep it short and the navel gazing to a minimum.

One of the key questions raised by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory has been whether he represents a new turn in American politics or merely a blip who will be quickly forgotten if he loses in 2020. Over the past four years I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing the evidence about this, and the conclusion I’ve come to is pretty simple: Trump is a blip.

Let’s back up a bit. For a very long time Democrats have believed that demographics were on their side. Republicans are acutely dependent on white voters, and every election cycle the share of white voters declines by a percent or two. Since voters of color largely support Democrats, this would someday make it all but impossible for Republicans to win the presidency.

But when would that day come? The Census Bureau projects that white voters won’t lose their absolute majority until 2044, but the Republican day of reckoning will come long before that. In fact, my take is that it’s already happened. It came in 2008, and ever since then it’s been close to hopeless for a Republican to win the presidency. This makes Donald Trump not a harbinger of things to come, but a final, feral howl of white reactionary politics as a ticket to the White House. He eked out one last victory for the Fox News set not because racism was broadly on the rise, but because of a string of remarkable happenstances: Russian interference; a backlash against eight years of a Black man as president; a woman as his opponent; a last-minute FBI letter; and an unexpected blurp in the Electoral College that placed him in the Oval Office even though he lost the popular vote by millions of votes.

This was a 100:1 shot, and it’s very unlikely to be duplicated in the near future, regardless of who the Republican and Democratic candidates are. Trump managed to win an improbable victory by squeezing out the very last dregs of white voters in America, but if anything, he’s made it harder than ever for Republicans to pull this off again. It may be difficult to see this through the Trumpian muck right now, but decent people outnumber racists in America in virtually every demographic group. Trump obviously depends on the support of conservative white voters, but even among this group he’ll have a hard time winning because there are simply too many conservative white people who have become disgusted by Trump’s obviously racist appeals.

Two years ago I wrote a piece for the magazine that presented the evidence of a white backlash against eight years of Obama in the White House. It wasn’t a huge backlash, but it was enough to change the course of the 2016 election when you added it to all the other things that happened in that strangest of all years. And it couldn’t survive forever once Obama was out of office, which is good news for both Democrats in particular and racial justice more generally. As I wrote at the time:

There’s every reason to think [Democrats] can take aggressive positions on Trump’s odious racial pronouncements and cruel policies. At the same time, they can take aggressive positions against his widely disliked economic programs and in support of their own increasingly popular ideas—which appeal equally to the working class of all races.

I would say that the events of this year have been the strongest possible test of this thesis. In the wake of the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter protests, Democrats have taken a far more aggressive stand on racial justice issues than anyone would have predicted two years ago. And guess what? It hasn’t hurt them at the polls. It’s too early to tell if it’s actively helped them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has. In the same way that 2016 featured a white backlash against a Black man in the White House, 2020 is almost certain to feature a white backlash against an open racist in the White House.¹ Add that to the usual increase in voters of color that we see every four years and American politics will leave Donald Trump in the ashcan of history within days of the November election.

This is an optimistic view of America, and I understand that a lot of people will have a hard time accepting it after the events of the past few years. Hell, there are whole months at a time when I have a hard time accepting it. But America is truly not the cesspool that Donald Trump makes it look like. It’s fundamentally a decent country with an appalling racial history—but a racial history that we’ve been slowly overcoming for decades. Trump represents the worst of that history, not the future of our country. The arc of American culture may be slow, but it does bend toward racial justice. Donald Trump is only a few weeks from discovering that.

¹This is, needless to say, a different segment of white voters than the ones who were triggered by the Obama presidency to vote for Trump.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 24 The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Election Day is only a couple of months away, and a friend brings to my attention a new poll from Pew Research:

This seems relatively unsurprising except for one thing: violent crime. Why is that #5? A followup chart explains it:

Among Trump voters, violent crime is #2 behind perennial favorite “the economy.” Why? Because Fox News and the rest of the gang have spent the past few months screaming about cities in flame, BLM “riots,” and crime capitals of the world. In fact, though, the best evidence we have suggests that overall crime is down so far this year. So is overall violent crime. The only thing that’s up is homicides. Through the first half of the year, there have been a few hundred more than in 2019.

Now, a spike in murders is no small thing. There’s something going on there, and we don’t know what it is. Still, those few hundred additional homicides are dwarfed by a drop in other violent crimes that measures in the thousands. And property crimes are down by tens of thousands. Generally speaking, you’re likely to be considerably safer in a big city than you were last year.

This is just one example of the broader fact that Democrats and Republicans simply care about different things. Here’s the Pew data arranged by the issues most important to Democrats and Republicans:

Republicans care about crime, immigration, and guns. Democrats barely even notice these issues. Conversely, Dems care about the pandemic, race inequality, and climate change. Republicans could care less about them. We are living in two different worlds.