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democracywork.bsky.social
Thaddeus
@democracywork.bsky.social
410 followers 160 following 1.1K posts
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democracywork.bsky.social
www.indivisiblepeninsulabayarea.org/nokings/
October 16, 2025 at 4:05 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Example 2, from Mark Jacob at www.stopthepresses.news: Jacob, a former newspaperman, observes that most mainstream news media goes out of its way NOT to report the most obvious and important fact of our time.
www.stopthepresses.news/p/why-wont-t...
Many Americans are busy with a second job or a sick parent or other obligations, and they encounter the news only by accident. They don't have time to read a half dozen stories, add them up, and come to the conclusion that the president of the United States, aided by the entire Republican Party and billionaire oligarchs, is overthrowing our democracy. That’s what the news industry should be saying repeatedly, and loudly. Because it’s true, and it’s a huge threat to the future of every American.
September 10, 2025 at 10:15 AM
democracywork.bsky.social
Example 1, from Paul Campos at @lawgunsmoney.bsky.social: Campos, a law professor, points out that SCOTUS is making a mockery of the traditional approach to professing the law.

www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/the-...
If you are a law professor and you are teaching your students something other than this, you are teaching nonsense. If you are telling students that the SCOTUS is a legitimate court of law, even if it does sometimes render an unfortunately partisan opinion here and there in some particularly fraught context, you are teaching nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that. Once upon a time and a very good time it was, something like Bush v. Gore was in some ways a shocking outlier. Now, in the form of the shadow docket in particular, it is the model for contemporary SCOTUS jurisprudence, which can be summarized as, in any really important case, Donald Trump and the Republican party wins, and its opponents lose.
September 10, 2025 at 10:15 AM
democracywork.bsky.social
For years, the whole phenomenon of Donald Trump has flabbergasted me—because, as this great comment at @lawgunsmoney.bsky.social notes, he embodies every villain trope in modern American popular culture. Again and again,I just want to scream: This guy?
www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/no-m...
September 5, 2025 at 4:13 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Then there's this—the glib dismissal, by Trump and (implicitly) by @nytimes.com, of the core principle that this kind of change must originate, and be deliberated, in Congress. The road to dictatorship is being paved with dozens of casually accepted assertions of unconstitutional power.
The Department of Defense and the secretary of defense were named through acts of Congress, so it is unclear if Mr. Trump’s order will go into effect immediately. During his August remarks about the potential renaming, Mr. Trump said he was confident that it would be approved. “We’re just going to do it,” he said. “I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don’t think we even need that.”
September 5, 2025 at 12:00 AM
democracywork.bsky.social
How it started (in the coinage of a certain 14-word phrase).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourtee...
September 3, 2025 at 12:37 AM
democracywork.bsky.social
I don’t have the heart to do it, but a parody of this paragraph—one that channels the voice of a German liberal newspaper as it discusses the early tenure of a certain chancellor in May 1933—almost writes itself.
The building of this coalition should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.
May 1, 2025 at 10:43 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
No good reason not to frame it this way: “Despite lacking a single national leader, the anti-Trump movement has coalesced around a clear message of opposition to Mr. Trump‘s policies and his attacks on constitutional rights.”
May 1, 2025 at 10:10 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Incisive, useful effort to convert general, angst-ridden despair over [gesticulates manically] *all this* into a review of specific unconstitutional and anti-constitutional steps taken by Trump and his regime.
May 1, 2025 at 9:48 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Example: If you go to the Google homepage, what you see is an apolitical slop rendition of contemporary's American life. That, I tell myself (Am I oversimplifying?), reflects what the middle deciles of the US population knows—or doesn’t know—about the coming of fascism to these shores.
April 15, 2025 at 7:46 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Until quite recently, Pfeiffer explains (I'm paraphrasing here), he viewed this moment as normal enough to justify continued use of a traditional, poll-driven messaging framework. But now he sees that something new and ominous is afoot—a pattern of "democracy falling into dictatorship." 2/3
In the months after the election, I pushed for Democrats to focus exclusively on the economy and stop defending broken institutions. That approach no longer sits right with me. Something feels off about focusing on the price of eggs when American democracy is under its greatest assault in history. I find it hard to imagine that the best way to defeat an authoritarian is to run the same campaign Democrats ran against Mitt Romney twelve years ago.
April 14, 2025 at 11:17 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
In fact, the Trump regime has replaced the US Constitution with Wilhoit’s Law. It’s a simple as that.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
April 14, 2025 at 5:24 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Highlights from the @parkermolloy.com piece:
When hundreds of thousands of people coordinate across an entire nation to protest governmental policies, that’s not a page 18 story. That’s not a “see more in section B” situation. That’s front-page news. Period. What gets front-page treatment instead? The same recycled profiles of Trump voters in diners we’ve been reading for nine years now. The same bothsides framing that treats authoritarianism as just another policy position. Meanwhile, the actual resistance happening in real time gets buried beneath crossword puzzles and lifestyle sections. The relegation of these protests to footnotes is more than just an editorial failure—it’s part of a broader pattern where establishment media normalizes extreme policies while marginalizing opposition. We saw it during Trump’s first term, and here we are again.
April 9, 2025 at 4:49 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Fighting against Trump’s dictatorial ambitions and fighting to keep his hands off matters of material interest to Americans (Social Security, the global trade system) are two great political tastes that go great together.
The most important thing for everyone in America to know right now is that Trump is causing immense damage to the U.S. and the world in a completely heedless way, and Democrats want to stop him. Period. People in Michigan and Maine need to blame Trump for this disaster much more than they need to be convinced that Democrats have struck the perfect goldilocks balance between free trade and strategic protectionism. And they need to see Trump’s conduct as fundamentally illegitimate—anathema to the American tenet that our leaders serve us, not the other way around.
April 9, 2025 at 3:29 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Maybe we should call it “smart-washing” (def.: the act of describing abjectly stupid behavior as though it were the result of a rational thought process).
www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/04/the-...
The sanewashing around Trump’s “risky tariff policy” assumes that there’s something that rises to the level of a policy, that involves some sort of rational risk calculation. This is false. It’s like trying to discuss the costs and benefits of “open heart surgery” after observing someone stabbing somebody else 23 times in the chest. Stabbing someone in the chest 23 times is not open heart surgery, and Trump’s insane destruction of the world’s international trade structure is not a “tariff policy.”
April 7, 2025 at 11:51 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
As @digby56.bsky.social succinctly puts it, “Life is just going on in the midst of the most serious political crisis of any of our lifetimes and the cognitive dissonance of that is making us feel a little bit crazy.”
And yet, most of us are still living our lives in more or less normal fashion. Yes, many immigrants, even those in the country legally, are now living in a state of abject terror. And vast numbers of workers have abruptly lost their jobs, with many more to come. But the vast majority of Americans are still going to work, taking the kids to school, hanging out with their friends, pursuing their hobbies. Life is just going on in the midst of the most serious political crisis of any of our lifetimes and the cognitive dissonance of that is making us feel a little bit crazy.
March 30, 2025 at 2:19 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
However horrific a “crisis” may be, we can see it and we basically know how to respond to it. What’s happening now is something that we can feel but can’t quite see.

By evoking the idea of erasure, @tribelaw.bsky.social adds vital clarity to a discussion that’s getting harder and harder to avoid.
But searching for evidence of a “constitutional crisis” in the rapidly escalating clashes of the executive branch with the judicial branch misses the larger cataclysm taking place across the US. This president, abetted by the supine acquiescence of the Republican Congress and licensed by a US supreme court partly of his own making, is not just temporarily deconstructing the institutions that comprise our democracy. He and his circle are making a bid to reshape the US altogether by systematically erasing and distorting the historical underpinnings of our 235-year-old experiment in self-government under law.
March 30, 2025 at 1:57 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
I'm struck by the all-too-timely wisdom offered by @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social in an item embedded in a @thebulwark.bsky.social newsletter today. Mordantly titled "Lucky Us," the piece evokes the way that having it good ill-equips us for things going bad. 1/4
www.thebulwark.com/p/back-work-...
We tend to forget that history is full of instances in which demagogues, bullies, opportunists, sycophants, and liars rule the roost. Or to put it otherwise: In the big sweep of human history, something like today’s Trump administration is the norm. Decency, humanity, legality, sobriety, responsibility—those are the exceptions. I offer these melancholy observations not because they’re particularly original or insightful. They’re not. They’re commonplace and common sense. But I offer them because I’m struck by how difficult it is for us to escape the wishful thinking that follows from our experience of good fortune.
March 28, 2025 at 3:16 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
This take by @vermontgmg.bsky.social on the “constitutional crisis” question is perfectly, painfully on target. A crisis something that should seem *loud.* What’s alarming about this moment is how quiet everything, and everyone, seem to be.
www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-s-...
The problem right now isn’t that we’re in a moment of great tension for our constitutional system, with members of Congress poised to act if the presidential defiance of the courts continues. Nor have we stumbled into some strange ambiguity where we’re wrestling with the right path forward. The problem is that in effectively a single blink of the historical eye, we’ve seen our entire constitutional system simply … stop. We aren’t just outside the bounds of normal constitutional operations; we’re several standard deviations outside anything America has ever experienced before. We can clearly see what’s happening is wrong—illegal and unconstitutional—and the actors who can do something about that just … aren’t.
March 26, 2025 at 2:32 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Bookmark: A hallmark of autocratic societies is the coexistence of normality and depravity. This key article describes the two-tier justice system in Nazi Germany, and how the Trump regime is already putting a similar system in place.
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
Building a dual state need not end in genocide: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore have followed the same model of the dual state that Fraenkel described, though neither has undertaken a mass-killing operation as the Nazis did. Their deepest similarity, rather, is that both are intolerant of political dissent and leave the overwhelming majority of citizens alone. The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression.
March 26, 2025 at 2:22 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
What, indeed, if the top Dem funder/power-broker had a family story that even partly resembled Musk's story?
www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...
March 21, 2025 at 10:52 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
But I cry foul on the embedded assumption (not just here, but everywhere in US politics) that Dems—but never Repubs—need to anguish over past mistakes, and need to regain voters' trust.

Repubs nominated a felon who tried to steal a presidential election—and its Dems who must pass a "litmus test"?
March 21, 2025 at 10:51 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Here, @danpfeiffer.bsky.social offers sweet and simple messaging tips. Worth clipping and saving.
Persuade Your Friends and Family How do we discuss the issue with friends and family, on social media, and in group chats? Take this bit of guidance: Keep It Big Picture: Talk about gutting public education or shutting down the Department of Education instead of talking about reduced funding; Be Specific About the Cuts: Abolishing the Department of Education means teacher layoffs, larger classroom sizes, more dilapidated schools, and cuts to special education; and Explain Why the Cuts Are Happening: Donald Trump and the Republicans are gutting public education to pay for tax cuts for billionaires like Elon Musk.
March 21, 2025 at 2:11 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Here's a sample. Claude Malhuret cuts through layers of obscurantism and equivocation, and simply observes that Trump and Putin share a "spheres of influence" worldview that turns the global order inside-out and throws us back to the dark, amoral politics of a premodern era. 2/2
What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force. This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations. Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.
March 10, 2025 at 10:06 PM
democracywork.bsky.social
Here's the gut-punch data, which @jvl.bsky.social draws from an article by John Burn-Murdoch at @financialtimes.com. Sobering but not surprising.

Slender silver lining: At least the US right remains an outlier among right-leaning factions in Western advanced democracies.
March 10, 2025 at 9:54 PM