June 2021

This blog post started out as a short (14-minute) youtube video. What follows is an edited transcription. The video is here. What follows is an [edited] transcription. The historical background, and ideas for how to weaken the strongman cult, comes from this book by New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The question of the hour […]

This post draws from this Op-Ed I wrote a few days ago for NBC and a fourteen-minute video (I’ll add the link here shortly.) Last week Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, said that it’s “highly unlikely” that he would allow President Joe Biden to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2024 if he becomes Senate

Before I talk about Susan B. Anthony, I want to talk a little about reactionary (or regressive) v. progressive politics. Make America Great Again is an expression of reactionary politics. Reactionaries seek to return back to a bygone era. They feel a “forceful desire” to return to the [mythic] past. Conservatives want to maintain the

As usual, this post started out as a 15-minute video. You can see it here. Harvard Prof. Daniel Ziblatt, one of the authors of How Democracies Die, talks about what he calls the “conservative dilemma” which is this: How can conservatives win national elections with unpopular economic policies? Turns out American conservatives have been quite