In reply to Brett Douville.

Thanks for the book recommendation!

I think you're right about the immigrant caravan fear-mongering, but I think it's overly generous to assign much of that to a misunderstanding of large numbers. Or even a misunderstanding of geography (how are refugees coming from Central America going to be a threat to homes on Lake Michigan?) If I've learned anything in the past week + 4 years, it's that I'm WAY too eager to say "don't assume malice when ignorance/incompetence is a sufficient explanation." It's undeniably racist (I've been over-eager in the past to make a distinction between "racist" and "classist," which I realize now is a pointless and harmful false distinction). It's also incontrovertibly rooted in selfishness. Even if you could convince more people that our economy is more than capable of accommodating tens of thousands of immigrants without even noticing, there would still be an insistence that it's unfair "on principle."

My evidence is how willing so many people were to say that COVID was "just like the flu," as if tens of thousands of Americans dying from the flu every year was no big deal. The difference isn't the number of people; it's that the people dying from the flu aren't perceived as a threat to them or their property.

I think the inability to understand large numbers definitely applies to voters (I want my vote to count!). And it also applies to people like me, who have tried to stay at least somewhat moderate. Even while images from the Capitol riot were coming in, I was still insisting that it was a lunatic fringe of morons, and that it was over-dramatic to call it a "coup" because there was no direction to it. I feel like I've been underestimating how many people you need for a stupid idea to be nonsensical fringe talk and instead turn actively dangerous. I know it's not the same thing as what you describe, but I feel like it's a similar idea -- our idea of who's a representative sample has been twisted and manipulated whenever it's convenient for someone. Sometimes they're a dismissible fringe that you shouldn't DARE associate with the "moderate Republicans," sometimes they are the voice of 74 million people, all depending on who's talking and what they're trying to sell.