Bret Devereaux

North Carolina has a pretty strong mask mandate for instance, but outside of the triangle-bubble, my impression is that it is regularly flouted or left unenforced.

That's because conservative North Carolinians are responding to signals from other elites, both national and local, instead of the governor et al. It's not a sign that resistance to lockdowns flows organically from the demos. Come on.

The well for broader public safety measures was poisoned very early on, by trusted elites, both in their direct messaging and in their refusal to countenance serious financial support for the public at large. It's not reversible now but that's their fault and in their interest.

Except that a good chunk of congress was trying to get broader financial support for the public at large. They just couldn't get it done because 1/2 of 1 branch of government isn't enough. It isn't that they didn't try

And there's no part of 'fighting harder' that's going to enable a party without the presidency or a senate majority to pass things. It isn't an issue of zeal, but of numbers and seats.

And I think here counting the demos out of the whole thing is also a mistake. The guy largely responsible for poisoning the well was selected by the red-team demos against the advice of the red-team elites. Those elites were, in 2016, really clear they didn't want him.

Look at say, Newsmax, which is up to something like 1m viewers (a 20-fold increase) after the election and I am not so sure that red-team elites are in the driver's seat here. The red-team demos is willing to migrate to new leaders/news sources that flatter their assumptions.

In the end, I think a class-based analysis of the situation has substantially less explanatory power than a red-vs-blue tribalism model with the added caveat that leadership failures always hurt those with the least the most.