Outside the Beltway

Although it is still on life support.

The former Defense Secretary and Vice President is gone at 84.

Lee Drutman does the math.

How party change actually works in the US. Plus more on messaging and organzing.

Grumpy old man grumps about democracy.

We need to be focused on the system, not fantasies about messages and organization.

Lack of understanding and poor institutional design=bad political outcomes.

Millions turned out in support of basic ideals.

Thoughts and photos from downtown Montgomery, AL.

The second round of No Kings rallies will take place today. Will they matter?

Senator Mike Lee helps us understand what he means by “a republic, not a democracy.”

The public is much less concerned than you are.

Some limits on Democratic pushback

This time: North Carolina

Why is reporting on objective reality so hard?

Trump exploits our mistaken beliefs about crime to consolidate his power.

By law enforcement.

And why I think future presidents will use the powers that Trump has demonstrated exist.

A four-pronged test.

The reality is, I can’t say no.

Serious abuses of power alongside an almost cartoonish set of behaviors.

What democratic backsliding looks like.

More on the conflict of alleged beliefs and who one follows.

Twenty-Second Amendment edition.

Our current round of speech repression may prove worse than McCarthyism.

When empathy goes too far.

Naturalized citizens advance and vivify the American experiment. 

“He that spits against the Wind, spits in his own Face.”

We’re not alone in dysfunctional politics.

On politics, guns, and people killing people

Birds of a feather and all that.

To be fully human requires living with and in sometimes unresolvable contradictions

A shocking, but not surprising, event. I fear it’s a harbinger rather than an outlier.

Trump’s response to the Kirk assassination is to try and further divide us.

A student, her cell phone, and yet more authoritarianism in contemporary America.

Trump’s lack of focus may spare us the worst outcomes in this one instance.

If President Trump sends unwanted military force into American cities, the one thing we should not act is surprised.

Town hall meetings are a relic of a different age.

Wildly unpopular policies in hyperpolarized times.

Are Democrats triggering voters by pushing the Overton Window on language, thereby subverting norms and creating barriers to participation?

The disconnect between perception and reality about elections.

None of this is good for the quality of our democracy (not that it was great to begin with).

Elections, the states, and the presidency edition.

Politicizing the military is legal, but dangerous.

Authoritarianism is popular.

We are observing an effort to embed democratically questionable sectarian norms into the day-to-day life of federal workplaces. 

Thinking about the evolution (or is it devolution) of the GOP since the 1990s.

A window into White Christian Nationalism (as endorsed by Pete Hegseth!).

Here we go again.