This blog post started as a Youtube video. You can see it here. Today I plan to talk about a question I often get: “Is it too late to save democracy.” A few weeks ago someone asked me this: I’ve observed what seems to be a state of almost constant panic or despair among people […]

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

As I’ve been doing lately, this blog post started out as a 15-minute video. You can see it here. What follows is an edited transcript. This week Senate Republicans voted to kill a bipartisan commission to look into the January 6th insurrection. They are also trying to outlaw teaching Critical Race Theory in schools. Critical

As with my post last Sunday, this blog post started out as a video. You can see it here. What follows is an [edited] transcript. This week I want to talk about totalitarianism—which is something we don’t talk about enough. There is an aspect to totalitarianism that helps explain a lot of what we are

This blog post started out as a YouTube video. What follows is an [edited] transcription. A few days ago, Republican Senator Ted Cruz published an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal, and Tweeted the conclusion: Social media understood right away this was a stunning admission that Ted Cruz takes corporate money in exchange for

This morning I gave a talk to this group: Here is an [edited] transcription of the talk along with citations and a list of sources at the end. The title of this talk is  “What We Learn from the History of the Second Amendment.” The history of the Second Amendment of course includes the history

I understand why people are saying that Trump got off on a technicality. The idea is to emphasize that most of the Senators who voted to acquit Trump did so even though they thought he was guilty. To be precise, it was a made-up technicality. The “jurisdictional” problem the Republican Senators found was not one

I had a hard time answering this question⬇️ because it brought back an unpleasant memory: The time I tried to explain on Twitter that the voting machines in Georgia were secure. So before I answer this question, let me tell you a story. First, my credentials. I monitored polling places and machine vote tabulation in

Last night two things happened thirteen minutes apart. At 4:30 pm California time, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision in the Wisconsin dispute over whether late-arriving mail-in ballots should be counted. Kavanaugh’s concurrence raised some eyebrows. Exactly thirteen minutes later, Trump tweeted something so inaccurate that Twitter hid it from view

One of my followers on Twitter suggested that Trump supporters don’t understand that he poses a danger to democracy. I disagree. There may be a few Trump supporters who don’t understand the danger posed by a president who openly says that the way for him to stay in power is to “get rid of the