A Sociological Eye

I'd like to show you a fascinating graph. In fact, I'll show it to you a few times! It shows the number of people in the U.S. who died each day from Covid-19, since the pandemic took hold here in April 2020 until today. And it breaks them down by political party. Have a look:   I want to talk about the partisan gap in Covid-19 death rates in the U.S.. It has a wild history of flips, spikes, growth and shrinkage. At the moment I write, the gap remains significant, but is much reduced from where it was in 2021. Why is that? And will it swell again, or disappear? Is partisanship literally killing people? And could it be that a reduction in partisanship over Covid responses is, counter to expectations, leading to more deaths, not fewer? The graph above comes from an article published in February of 2022 in the NY Times , written by David Leonhardt. I've color coded the multiple Covid waves for clarity.  A quick overview shows this: during the first wave, when the world went i...

[This post was written as protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police were spreading around the U.S.. Curfews were beginning to be set in major cities and National Guard being mobilized. Major media outlets were alternating clips from the video of officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for nearly 9 minutes with stories about looting and scenes of flames. The Minneapolis mayor had declared the uprising "domestic terrorism," and Trump had just threatened to send the U.S. military into cities without consent of their governors to force order on the populace. It seemed to many that the U.S. might descend into chaos, military occupation, or civil war. Yet every day, despite threats and negative media portrayals, more and more people were taking up Black Lives Matter signs and heading out into the streets.] _________________________________________________________________________________ I hear a lot of people asking that question Marvin G...