Jenny Shen
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jennyqshen.bsky.social
Jenny Shen
@jennyqshen.bsky.social
190 followers 70 following 43 posts
Human to Peli. Content Regulation, GenAI, Child Safety, Privacy, etc. Attorney @Google. Formerly @EA; @HoganLovells; @BrennanCenter. Views my own.
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jennyqshen.bsky.social
"The Democratic base understands what’s at stake. Grassroots activists, organizers, and voters have shown they’re willing to fight. ... Until Democratic leaders can be made to fear cowardice more than they fear Republicans, the pattern will continue."

Every line in this piece is worth reading 👇
From Adam Bonica's On Data and Democracy Substack: "730,000 federal workers went 41 days without pay. Families couldn’t make rent. TSA agents worked security checkpoints while wondering how to feed their kids. Food assistance for 42 million Americans hung in the balance. Republicans created this suffering deliberately, then offered to stop, but only if Democrats surrendered completely. Eight Democratic senators took the deal. They secured nothing: no policy concessions, no protective mechanisms, not even a binding commitment on healthcare. Just Republicans agreeing to temporarily stop the pain they were inflicting. For many watching this unfold, there’s been a persistent frustration with Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to fight, coupled with an inability to fully articulate why capitulation feels so dangerous. This wasn’t a normal legislative compromise, but a pattern of submission to deliberate cruelty that makes the next act of cruelty more likely. Authoritarians worldwide have discovered how to exploit a weakness in democratic opposition: they weaponize our compassion against our principles. It’s a nasty tactic but an effective one. Create unbearable suffering. Wait for your opponents’ empathy to overwhelm their resolve. Then offer relief in exchange for political surrender. The authoritarian doesn’t need to win arguments or offer genuine compromise. They need only inflict enough pain that resistance becomes morally unbearable. Republicans understood this perfectly. They denied federal workers their pay and threatened food aid for millions—not to achieve any policy goal, but to demonstrate their willingness to hurt people indefinitely. The cruelty was the strategy. They were testing how much innocent suffering Democrats would tolerate before breaking." From Adam Bonica's On Data and Democracy Substack: "To understand where this leads, study Viktor Orbán’s playbook in Hungary. When he returned to power in 2010, he manufactured crisis after crisis—economic emergency, migration panic, pandemic fear. Each time, opposition parties faced the same cruel calculus: resist and be blamed for deepening the crisis, or acquiesce and hope to fight another day. Every surrender seemed rational. The crises were real. People suffered. The opposition couldn’t justify obstruction that would worsen immediate pain. So they voted for temporary emergency powers. They accepted limited executive authority. Orbán was teaching them to surrender. Each capitulation lowered the bar for the next. By the time they realized they needed to fight, they’d already given away the tools to resist. Hungarian democracy died through a series of reasonable-seeming surrenders to manufactured crises. The shutdown deal represents precisely this kind of incremental collapse. Democrats secured nothing substantive, just a promise of a December vote on healthcare subsidies. Not actual policy. Not binding commitments. A vote that will almost certainly fail, leaving them in an identical position next month." From Adam Bonica's On Data and Democracy Substack: "The civil rights movement understood something these eight senators have apparently forgotten: nonviolent resistance is the opposite of acquiescence. When civil rights activists sat at lunch counters, when they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, when they filled the jails of Birmingham, they were demonstrating that their capacity to endure suffering exceeded their oppressors’ willingness to inflict it. Their power came not from avoiding pain but from showing they would bear it, that their resolve ran deeper than the cruelty arrayed against them, that they could not be broken. Each act of brutality against peaceful protesters did not break the movement. It revealed the moral bankruptcy of the system attacking them. The Hungarian story doesn’t have to be the American story. But here’s what breaking the pattern requires: Democrats must demonstrate they can stand strong against Republican attempts to inflict suffering. Not because suffering is virtuous, but because it’s the only language of power in a hostage situation. The civil rights movement understood this. Each time they filled the jails, they raised the cost of oppression until it exceeded the oppressor’s willingness to pay. The alternative—calibrating your resistance to stay within bearable pain levels—just teaches your opponents exactly how much pain to inflict. What we just witnessed was another turn of the ratchet in American democracy’s descent. But here’s what makes this moment particularly maddening: this is an elite failure, not a popular one. The Democratic base understands what’s at stake. Grassroots activists, organizers, and voters have shown they’re willing to fight. The failure lies with party leadership who mistake capitulation for pragmatism. Until Democratic leaders can be made to fear cowardice more than they fear Republicans, the pattern will continue. The question now is whether that resolve can force elites to stop surrendering on …
November 11, 2025 at 11:14 PM
jennyqshen.bsky.social
The next Democratic president can fix the evergreen government shutdown crisis: "It’s a systematic disadvantage they must fix when they have the power to do so ... No negotiation. No compromise. Just restore the system that worked for a century."

Read: data4democracy.substack.com/p/why-americ...
An excerpt from Adam Bonica's Substack: On Data and Democracy: The Political Reality: A One-Sided Problem Congressional leaders might insist they need shutdowns as leverage—that without this threat, presidents won’t come to the table. This gets the recent history backwards. Nearly every shutdown in the past three decades stemmed from Congress’ own internal gridlock, its inability to send any bill to the president’s desk. These weren’t battles between Congress and the White House. They were congressional Republicans holding the government hostage to extract concessions they couldn’t win through normal legislation. The current rules aren’t neutral. They’re a structural gift to the party that wants government to do less. Republicans keep their priorities funded during shutdowns while Democratic priorities—environmental protection, workplace safety, food assistance—get decimated. This asymmetry explains why Republicans consistently trigger these crises while Democrats scramble to end them. When the rules reward your side for creating chaos, why would you want to change them? Democrats need to recognize this isn’t a shared problem requiring bipartisan solutions. It’s a systematic disadvantage they must fix when they have the power to do so. The next Democratic president should issue the corrective memo. No negotiation. No compromise. Just restore the system that worked for a century.
November 8, 2025 at 1:24 AM
jennyqshen.bsky.social
The entire piece is worth a read.

"The evidence suggests that compromising on basic humanity doesn’t broaden coalitions; it hollows them out. The work now is to find ways to expand our reach without abandoning our foundation—to bridge gaps, yes, but never at the expense of our neighbor’s humanity."
"The authoritarian playbook deliberately seeks to conflate these two forms of anger. First, you normalize hate by presenting it as merely another political position deserving of debate. Then, when people express righteous anger at this dehumanization, you accuse them of being the real problem—intolerant, divisive, unwilling to engage in public discourse. The aggressor becomes the victim; the defense of human dignity becomes the attack on civil discourse. Klein’s strategic pragmatism—suggesting pro-life Democrats run in red states, seeking compromises that might expand the coalition—has an appeal, assuming one accepts the premise that the dwindling political center remains the main electoral prize. Sometimes difficult compromises have led to better outcomes: Obama’s calculated positions on same-sex marriage arguably helped him appoint justices who advanced equality. But these compromises carry profound risks. They signal whose humanity is negotiable. They tell vulnerable people that their rights are chips to be bargained when convenient. And crucially, such compromises should never be voluntary—they should only come when all other avenues have been exhausted, not as an opening bid for hypothetical coalition expansion. But here’s where the strategic calculation becomes self-defeating: “Bridging gaps” cannot come at the expense of key parts of your coalition feeling abandoned and without a sense of belonging. When we muse about trading away reproductive rights or soft-pedal responses to hate speech, we don’t just lose moral clarity, we lose the very people whose passion and commitment form the backbone of progressive politics. The trans kids facing violence, the immigrants branded as invaders, the women losing bodily autonomy—they need to know their party won’t trade their humanity for swing votes. And so do their families and those who love them." From Adam Bonica's "On Data and Democracy" https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/you-cant-expand-the-tent-by-shrinking
September 28, 2025 at 9:48 PM
jennyqshen.bsky.social
It's only been about 150 days since Jan. 20. And yet there's been so much devastation to so many people. It's more important than ever for Dems to actually be a party that reflects the people it seeks to represent—to be aggressively pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian, anti-corruption, anti-oligarchy.
Quote from Perry Bacon's article, "Drop the 1990s tactics. Here’s how Democrats can win today." “The issues that matter most right now transcend left-right ideology: pro-democracy, anti-authoritarianism, protection of institutions, anti-corruption and anti-oligarchy,” said Bonica. “The Republican Party is embracing corruption in a way that is astounding from an international perspective, and Democrats have not found their footing on that.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/23/democrats-strategy-election-voters/
June 23, 2025 at 7:12 PM
jennyqshen.bsky.social
So timely, so important—read the full piece at: data4democracy.substack.com/p/federal-ju...
An excerpt from Adam Bonica's "On Data and Democracy" Substack: "The sharp language from the bench isn't judicial activism; it's the sound of democracy's defense mechanisms under unprecedented stress. These interventions span the political spectrum. Judges were responding not to partisan disagreement but to actions that crossed fundamental legal and constitutional lines. Perhaps no warning was more chilling than that of Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a respected conservative jurist: 'If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive's obligation to 'take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed' would lose its meaning.' Federal judges are doing their best to hold the line. But they can't hold it alone. Their warnings signal a critical moment where intervention can still prevent systemic failure. When courts protect protesters' First Amendment rights, they enable the very public mobilization that can, in turn, defend judicial independence. When judges block unconstitutional detention schemes, they preserve the space for democratic organizing. As citizens, our task is clear: pay attention to these voices, understand their warnings, and recognize that judicial pushback alone cannot preserve democratic norms. When judges start speaking in the language of constitutional crisis, democracy needs every defender it can find."
June 9, 2025 at 1:09 AM
jennyqshen.bsky.social
This is so right and so devastating—required reading for these times:

data4democracy.substack.com/p/how-to-dis...
June 1, 2025 at 8:33 PM