The first steps to fixing Democrats’ disconnect from working people come in identifying the problem: Policy deployed as a substitute for politics makes for bad policy and worse politics.
(@samrosenfeld.bsky.social and @daschloz.bsky.social, NYT-unlocked)
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/o...
In the NYT today, @daschloz.bsky.social and I write about how Democrats became policy-pilled and why policy can't substitute for organizational connections to ordinary people.
the modern professor's feeling of warm relief and gratitude at encountering artisanal, human-crafted bad writing while grading papers
There is an “emerging sense that Trump’s centrality to right-wing politics has an endpoint in the not-so-distant future,” @samrosenfeld.bsky.social tells @willoremus.com. “That all serves to loosen Trump’s symbolic grip on the right’s discourse.”
Before Trump created a personalist regime, the modern presidency used to center on trying to pass legislation.
New explainer from me, on understanding ICE as a paramilitary force, in more than one sense of the term 👇
theconversation.com/ice-not-only...
Meanwhile my undergrad thesis students have to dutifully fill out IRB applications for permission to do interview research. www.statnews.com/2026/01/22/v...
the question to ask about this is, okay, he wants to cancel the midterms. how does he get the VA state board of elections to cancel the midterms? how does he get the georgia board of elections to do it? how does he convince republican house members to quit their jobs and give up their paychecks?
RIP to Jim Hunt, chairman of a Democratic Party commission that bequeathed us the instantly unloved, now all-but-dead, but in fact praiseworthy and sensible institution we call the superdelegates. www.ibtimes.com/political-ca...
Same with Home Alone 2: Home Aloner.
Fun to see Susan Wiles unload a million dishy quotes about the admin, but seeing this take mixed in w/ the others is so jarring. This move has already killed hundreds of thousands of people! The moral vacancy of acknowledging its pointlessness while continuing to serve as CoS is hard to fathom.
I've moved from despairing exasperation at students referring to nonfiction works as "novels" in their essays to affectionate relief at this emblem of non-AI organic human error.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory was rooted in organizations that took up the base-building and mobilization functions that once fell to parties. dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...
Gather round the table tomorrow for a Thanksgiving reading with your loved ones!
You see an ideological range of people, lefties to mods, in and out of the Senate, who have no such reverence for the ridiculous, outlier institution of the filibuster and are reacting with incredulity at the sight of copartisans folding amidst visible Republican flailing. /end
Key Democrats, to their discredit, preferred to blow a winning hand than to risk the GOP actually having to *take* that responsibility.
Trump was absolutely right to see the proper endgame of the shutdown as the GOP ending this farce by finally going nuclear on approps and taking actual responsibility for governing. And Senate Republicans didn't *want* that responsibility.
In its limited, cabined, semi-nuked-and-therefore-always-potentially-further-nukable contemporary state, the filibuster has become the Senate's dark matter, at once powering and obscuring behavior on both sides.
Here’s another example illustrating the shortcomings of the moderation thesis: An independent candidate named Dan Osborn ran for Senate against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in Nebraska in 2024. He came within 5 points of winning, in a state that voted for Trump by 20 points. He ran on an anti-swamp, pro-Trump, pro-border wall agenda. Setting aside that a Democrat would never have been nominated with that agenda, I am confident that a Democrat would not have come as close as Osborn close even if they took those same issue positions. That’s because Republican voters attach stereotypes and baggage to Democratic candidates simply because of their party label. If you’re a Democrat interested in breaking the Republican stranglehold on the Senate, the way you do that is to decrease the number of Republican Senators in the Senate. You can try to accomplish that by running a bunch of pro-Trump “Democrats” in red states like Nebraska. Or you can support institutional reforms to increase the likelihood that the anti-Democrat voters of Nebraska elect someone from a party other than the Republican Party.
I think this passage is the crux of my disagreement with Drutman and @gelliottmorris.com on moderation: this reasoning is circular. The party labels and levels of polarization are not exogenous to choices made by both parties.
www.gelliottmorris.com/p/democrats-...
The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld. A major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico) at the center of America’s political parties
Now in #paperback with a new preface by the authors, The Hollow Parties by @daschloz.bsky.social & @samrosenfeld.bsky.social is a major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico).
Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
www.reuters.com/legal/govern...
ActBlue, Open Society, Indivisible—terrorists all.
Note how slipshod, confused, and ramshackle this project sounds even from quoted behind-the-scenes insiders. Miller WANTS it to sound maximally ominous and intimidating. The targets should hold their heads high and carry on.
Cringy 2017 protest-brunch energy matters a lot right now. Trump has used deployment in four cities as a provocation of violence & further crackdown. With protestors largely staying disciplined, he's been failing. A day of nationally distributed, localized, peaceful protests drives the failure home.
Henry's writing about about institutional actors more than the mass public, but the basic collective-action point relates to mass protests as well--a means of signaling the scope of opposition, unafraid and peaceful. Put me in mind of the No Kings day planned for 10/18, which can't come soon enough.
