We may be on the brink of a democratic miracle

Jonathan Chait recently framed a conundrum facing Democrats who are convinced that the Romney campaign is playing the race card: you don't have to be racist to subscribe to conservative positions on spending for the poor, but such positions are attractive to those who envision the "undeserving poor" primarily as minorities. His conclusion: while Romney attack ads alleging that Obama is gutting the work requirements for welfare might not be racist if the charge had any basis in truth, the fact that it was concocted out of thin air points conclusively to a race-based appeal. 

Chait is wary of Democrats overplaying the race card, and so asserts at the end that "the best counterattack against Romney’s welfare gambit is simply to point out that Romney is shamelessly lying." But he's threading a needle here, much like people who acknowledge that while a given hurricane can't be chalked up to global warming, an overall increase in hurricane intensity probably can. His personal conviction is delivered in the conditional:

We now all know that proof won't set us free

This assertion by Joan Walsh triggered an off-center thought:

President Obama is right not to release photographic "proof" that Osama bin Laden is dead. There's absolutely no upside: The lunatic fringe will still doubt the evidence, and gruesome corpse photos run the risk of creating a backlash against bin Laden's killing that doesn't exist so far.

The thought: birtherism has corrupted our collective sense of what constitutes proof.  It's now a near-universal assumption that a vocal minority will reject demonstration of any fact, now matter how definitive by any reasonable standard. (As Gideon Rachman put it, "After the controversy over Obama’s birth certificate, why not have one over Osama’s death certificate?") This has always been true to a degree: I remember my mother telling me that there were people who did not believe that Americans landed on the moon in 1969.  But the size, noisiness and impact of what were once regarded as lunatic fringes has made them impossible to ignore.

An unfortunate association

This is strange. Michael Scherer has a serious point to make about the reactionary paranoia fueling birthirism.  But he seems, in the process, to validate that paranoia.  Of birthers he writes:

They seek an emotionally satisfying outlet for their fury at their country’s decline, the decade-long collapse in the credibility of its institutions, and the rapidly changing demographic makeup of its leadership.

Scherer does not say, and I'm sure does not mean, that "the rapidly changing demographic makeup" of U.S. leadership is causally connected to the country's alleged decline and the "collapsed credibility of its institutions." But grouping the three together as comma-separated items does seem to imply a causal link, or an association of diversity with decline.