On Democrats fighting the last war Trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks sometimes seems pointless. With few exceptions, Democrats always seem to be fighting the last war because that’s the one they learned on. Brian Beutler sees it too. Beutler perceives that social media has fundamentally shifted our political ground: When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the strength of a media feeding frenzy over emails, it dawned on me that either my intuitions about partisan politics had been wrong, or something fundamental had changed. With the benefit of hindsight, I soon came to see the 2014 midterm campaign as a precursor. Republicans back then turned a closely fought election into a blowout in the final stretch by fanning a different media feeding frenzy—this one over a far-off outbreak of Ebola. […] All of this happened because Republicans situated themselves to win an information war in 2014, then situated themselves to win another information war in 2016. I had simply been underestimating the effectiveness of their antics. What allowed Democrats to win in 2018 and 2020 were not material conditions but “contagious ideas.” We could use some about now. “A huge recession in 2008 drove the incumbent party from power,” Beutler writes, and the slow recovery precipitated the 2010 backlash. All fitting predictive models. Then social media took off. The media once measured the economy by a standard set of metrics, whatever “gloom and doom” Republicans spread. But the right had fewer tools for spreading them. Today…