Trump is making voters uneasy. Democrats are pushing them away.: Punishing the wealthy might make Democrats feel good, but it won’t convince many voters. [ed. note: shill from libertarian think tank]
Don’t Let Climate Fatalism Become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The idea that it’s “too late” to reduce emissions fuels cynicism and despair, putting us on an even worse trajectory. - "And finally, stress less about the small stuff — recycling, plastic bags and food wrappers, food miles, turning the lights off, leaving devices on standby — especially if it comes at the expense of the big things listed above. This is a concept called 'moral licensing,' in which people feel they’ve contributed to the small stuff and therefore ignore their more carbon-intensive behaviors. People will often feel proud about bringing their plastic bag to a supermarket (which has a tiny carbon footprint) and then fill it with meat and dairy (which has a much bigger impact)."
Two men were paid by D.C. to stop violence. Both are charged with homicide.: Frank Johnson is the second violence interrupter in the city to face charges in the fatal shooting of a former college basketball star. - "Johnson previously worked for Life Deeds, according to documents The Post obtained through a records request. He was terminated from Life Deeds in December 2023, three months after the fatal shooting of Bozeman, after he was charged with an unrelated felony gun possession offense. Johnson was convicted — only to be rehired as a violence interrupter last year for a different organization receiving D.C. government grant funds. Now, he has been fired again following the murder charge, according to the Rev. Judie Shepherd-Gore, the executive director of InnerCity Collaborative Community Development Corporation, where Johnson had worked as a violence interrupter since last year.
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"It was the second time in five years that Wynn, who was well known in the violence intervention space, was charged with murder. He was also accused of committing a homicide in 2020. Prosecutors dropped that case for lack of evidence, and Wynn was allowed to continue working as a violence interrupter."
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Moderation used to help Democrats win, but its advantages now have been greatly exaggerated. - "This brings us back to a crucial point: successful anti-authoritarian movements don’t win by moderating their positions on a traditional left-right axis but by creating an entirely new one. They mobilize previously disengaged citizens by framing the struggle not as a contest over policy, but as a fight for the fundamental fairness of the system itself.
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"Scholars of democratic breakdown know that moments like this demand institutional coordination, civil society mobilization, and the political courage to name and confront the authoritarian threat on its weakest flank. Every democracy facing this challenge has learned you don’t defeat authoritarians by being more reasonable. You defeat them by being more determined and by uniting the country against their most visible vulnerability: their corruption."
Forum How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Moderation helps when margins are small. - "But, of course, [an ideologically dogmatic party] runs the risk of empowering fascists, threatening the foundations of American electoral democracy, costing millions of people their health insurance, subjecting the country to a terrifying new regime of internal immigration enforcement, making less-than-zero progress on climate change, and depriving millions of women of their basic rights. To me, that makes “shoot the moon” a bad bet—Democrats have been trying a version of shoot-the-moon since Obama’s reelection, it has hurt, and the solution is to stop doing it. But it would be an intellectually stimulating debate. Highly ideological leftists are aware, I think, that the mood in the Democratic Party is very alarmed by Trump and Trumpism and that if we had square argument about the benefits and risks of shooting the moon, their side would lose."
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Trans rights aren’t tanking the Democrats.
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: We need reconstruction, not restoration—as FDR knew.
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Democrats must rebuild in rural America. - "Each of the last six times Republicans won majority control of the Senate, they were elected by a group of states in which less than half the county’s population resides. Moreover, because the Senate is tasked with confirming nominees to the Supreme Court, this electoral bias translates into outsized power to shape the judiciary and, in turn, the rulings it hands down. Four of the six sitting conservative justices were confirmed by senators from states that are home to less than 50 percent of the U.S. population. In short, the rural-urban divide helps facilitate minoritarian rule."
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Macroeconomics is the driver, not median voters. - "Unless Democrats offer a message far stronger than anything they have in a long time—unless, in Warren’s words, they 'aggressively challenge the status quo' and 'chart a clear path for big, structural change,' especially on the economic front—they will remain easy targets for caricature. Promoting a Whig revival around democracy and Obamacare tweaks, supply-side tinkering and free trade, or abundance-by-deregulation, jobs, AI wonders, and all the rest risks cementing their status as a permanent minority party."
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: The focus should be fighting plutocracy.
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: The antidote to cynicism is going big. - "The notion that moderation would serve as a corrective to this perception is wildly off base. The millions of Biden voters who sat out crave more differentiation, not less, and a grander vision of an economic and political system that they could thrive within. None of them were in the mood to tinker around the edges. The antidote to cynicism isn’t to get small but to go big."
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Jesse Jackson’s campaigns point the way. - "The path is clear: seek out an authentic candidate with an agenda that expands our ideas of what is politically possible, someone who can lead a diverse coalition united by a renewed sense of justice and collective purpose."
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Public opinion is only partly malleable.
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: We have no choice but to fight.
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Voters don’t think like strategists. - "Bonica and Grumbach are correct that the empirical case for moderation has largely collapsed. But the more significant lesson from our collective work is that the entire moderate-progressive debate constitutes an elite construction—one that projects the strategist’s hyperideological conception of politics onto an electorate that predominantly does not reason in those terms. When one abandons the pretense of optimizing one’s way to electoral victory, something clarifying emerges: the necessity of determining what one actually believes, and campaigning accordingly. That, after all, is what democratic politics is supposed to entail."
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Democrats can’t simply react to polls. They must lead.
