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Friday Cat Blogging: Kevin Drum - Ave Atque Vale [1]

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Date: 2025-04-04

I was greatly saddened upon learning of the death of Kevin Drum not quite a month ago. There have been several tributes to him posted here at Daily Kos. I thought I’d put one up as well.

Kevin Drum with one of his Friday stars.

I had been following his work for years, first at Cal Pundit, then at Mother Jones and then later when he began blogging on his own. He was famous for having originated the custom of Friday cat blogging, when he would post pictures of the cats who shared their lives with him over the years.

I enjoyed his writing — and his penchant for digging into the numbers behind stories and and graphing them out. Drum had a knack for data-driven stories, and making a case for conclusions based on where the data led him.

I also enjoyed the other things he shared with his readers — his love of travel, photography (including astrophotography), and his reasoned approach to the issues of the day. I also was struck by the way he did his best to pursue his life while battling the cancer that eventually overcame him.

There are a number of tributes to Drum on the internet. I thought I’d like to add my own by linking to work he did that I found particularly on point.

Artificial Intelligence

If you’ve been thinking that Artificial Intelligence suddenly seems to be coming into its own, and that there are doubts and concerns about it and where it’s going, Drum did a series of commentaries and articles, raising points that others only seem to be catching up with now. Check out the following:

Smart machines probably won’t kill us all—but they’ll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.

Lead and Crime

One of the more important stories Drum wrote about in my opinion is the research into just how dangerous the effects of lead are, the lead-crime hypothesis that goes a long way towards explaining the rise of violent crime in this country and its decline . There are still laws and policies based on the theories about super criminals, violent crime, and incarceration that have shaped the political debate for decades, ideas that are increasingly out of touch with where we are now. Drum’s initial article and followups need to be more widely known.

The hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and maybe even the ADHD epidemic.

You may have seen the episode of the Neil deGrasse Tyson remake of Cosmos “The Clean Room” that covered how a scientist trying to measure the age of the universe came to find just how pervasive lead had become in our world because of its use in gasoline.

The Rise of Division: Tearing America Apart for Power and Profit

It may have come to your attention that there seems to be a lot of rage driving division in America these days. In 2021 Kevin Drum put his finger on one of the key factors tearing the country apart.

The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage

We are at war with ourselves, but not for the reasons you think.

..Finally, academic research confirms what these polls tell us. Last year a team of The fuse was lit long ago. We’re now living in the blast zone. researchers published an international study that estimated what’s called “affective polarization,” or the way we feel about the opposite political party. In 1978, we rated people who belonged to our party 27 points higher than people who belonged to the other party. That stayed roughly the same for the next two decades, but then began to spike in the year 2000. By 2016 it had gone up to 46 points—by far the highest of any of the countries surveyed—and that’s before everything that has enraged us for the last four years.

Drum considers a number of explanations, looking at how they square with events, and points out where they fall short. He then makes a strong case for what seems to be a key factor.

The Answer: It’s All About Fox News As we all know, Donald Trump isn’t the cause of the Republican Party’s descent into madness. He’s merely the result of decades of evolution that started when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, Rush Limbaugh picked up a microphone, and Newt Gingrich reinvented modern conservatism. But these were just warm-up acts. It wasn’t until Fox News was up and running that we started to see permanent changes in the electorate.

Drum traces how Fox News changed, and what followed from that change:

..The Fox pipeline is pretty simple. Fox News stokes a constant sense of outrage among its base of viewers, largely by highlighting narratives of white resentment and threats to Christianity. This in turn forces Republican politicians to follow suit. It’s a positive feedback loop that has no obvious braking system, and it’s already radicalized the conservative base so much that most Republicans literally believe that elections are being stolen and democracy is all but dead if they don’t take extreme action. I understand that this is not an exciting conclusion. Liberals have been fighting Fox News for years with little to show for it. It’s more interesting to go after something new, like social media or lunatic conspiracy theories. But the evidence is pretty clear: Those things act as fuel on the fire—and they deserve our opposition—but it’s Fox News that’s set the country ablaze. For the past 20 years the fight between liberals and conservatives has been razor close, with neither side making more than minor and temporary progress in what’s been essentially trench warfare. We can only break free of this by staying clear-eyed about what really sustains this war. It is Fox News that has torched the American political system over the past two decades, and it is Fox News that we have to continue to fight.

Yes, Fox News is not quite the dominant factor it used to be in terms of creating division and destroying trust in government — but it still plays a key role. How much of the Trump administration is shaped by people who came from Fox News? How much of it is shaped by the way Fox News spins things? How much of it is the narratives that get promoted in feedback between them?

READ THE WHOLE THING — then ask where we’d be if Fox News had gone out of business in 2000.

The Last Word

If there is one commentary by Kevin Drum that stands as an example of his powers of analysis and willingness to be blunt about the conclusions he reached, this is the one I keep going back to. Written in August 2018, Drum looked at the political landscape in America and came to a conclusion that too many people still can’t embrace.

The Republican Party needs to be destroyed.

In a relatively short essay, Drum looks at what the modern Republican Party has become, how it works, and what motivates it. In light of where we now are in the dystopian world of Trump II, it’s impossible in my opinion for any rational person to disagree with his conclusion:

The title is a play on the words of Cato the Elder: Carthago delenda est.

I strongly suggest reading the whole thing. Imagine where the Democratic Party would be today if the party leadership had taken Drum’s conclusions to heart and acted on them.

Here’s the conclusion, and the words ring even truer today than they did back in 2018.

..So this is where we are. The Republican Party can’t win using ordinary methods. On the process side, they can win only by inflating the white vote via gerrymandering, cracked-and-packed districts, and ruthless black voter suppression. On the policy side, they can win only with heavy dollops of strident and outright bigotry against Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and anyone else who comes along. Even Canadians will do in a pinch. Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons. Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place. This new party should be conservative; brash; ruthless when it needs to be; as simpleminded as any major party usually is; and absolutely dedicated to making Democrats look like idiots. There should be no holds barred except for one: no appeals to racism. None. Not loud ones, not subtle ones. Whatever else it is, it should be a conservative party genuinely open to any person of any color.

Given what we are now seeing, I find it extremely difficult to picture any viable future for America in which a Fox News continues to operate as it does, and the GOP is still treated as a legitimate political party. The continued operation of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society are just two of the existential threats behind the Republican Party — how can we go forward with them still spreading their poison?

America’s standing in the world has now been trashed beyond recovery. We had damn well better figure out how to go on from here.

We need more people like Kevin Drum. Ave atque vale.

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