I think Ezra Klein's take is that America is on the verge of a major step up in terms of sectarian violence, and he is afraid of that, and thinks very major compromises are worth it to avoid that outcome. Admittedly sometimes he says/suggest otherwise, but it's my overall impression.

Barney Frank liked to say that politics was all about working alongside people whom one finds morally repugnant, which seems, if one is going to be clear-eyed and also in the arena, the correct disposition.

Roger Stone is selling sets of Nixon-Agnew buttons (from his "personal collection" lol) that would have trouble commanding $5 on the open market for $45. stonezone.com/product/auth...

Wherever the dateline, "Regulars return once more to beloved local food place before it closes" is reliably the best genre of article. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/w...

I just want to say that it gives me great pleasure to answer questions about political buttons, so please send my way. Already this morning, I've replied to Ryan and, via text, identified a fake in a display on the wall at a prominent civic venue.

If the road to democratic renewal runs through better parties, and the formal Democratic Party is run by Jay Jacobs and his ilk, then we need a massive effort to unfuck the state parties and the "Bermuda triangle" of the DNC www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/n...

The real problem with the Biden-era Democratic Party? They pursued policy goals rather than build the party. @johnsides.bsky.social shares insight from @samrosenfeld.bsky.social & Danny Scholzman: goodauthority.org/news/the-rea...

A good time to say, since we're talking about the Biden years, that @samrosenfeld.bsky.social and I wrote a paper for APSA, to be presented Sat. at noon, about why the Biden-era Democrats turned to policy as their salvation, and why it didn't work out. Here's the first paragraph.

“Whether 250 years later, with tyranny again at our door, Boston has still got it.” Right here, right now, at the @wutrain.bsky.social victory party, it still feels like we have a future to build together.

With video like this, Henry George would have won.

Antitrusters and abundists are sniping about their opponents' unsavory dalliances--Lina Khan posing with Steve Bannon; fash-ish speakers at Abundance DC--but the underlying question of what's beyond the pale are the same for both. See @colmpm.bsky.social from June: renewal.org.uk/blog/the-cho...

A nicely wistful appreciation that captures just what Nadler's brand of liberalism meant, just why now feels like the end of the line. Bella Abzug to Ted Weiss to Jerry Nadler in that seat is a hell of a run.

Another brave column in Haaretz by my third cousin, Noa Limone. www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025...

This is a genuinely edifying exchange between @waleedshahid.bsky.social and @mattyglesias.bsky.social, each extracting fractionally tinged lessons from the Republican Party of its founding generation. t.co/zDDSB4pYmK www.slowboring.com/p/your-cause...

This man is being subjected to a real-life version of Kafka’s “The Trial” as punishment for being the embarrassing object of the regime’s own malicious and chaotic incompetence. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...

The Zcavenger Hunt is the closest thing we've seen to the torchlight parade in 21st-century progressive politics.

Making politics fun and doing it together, which Democrats regardless of faction haven’t done well.

After all these years, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Three Worlds of of Welfare Capitalism, is still the best book ever written about the welfare state in rich democracies. With luck, this comprehensive demolition job will win it some new readers.

Last week, Boston received a letter from AG Bondi threatening to prosecute officials and withhold funds unless we cooperate with carrying out mass deportations. The US Attorney General asked for a response by today, so here it is: stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.

Gallego on Mamdani: "It's okay to say 'I disagree with this, this, and this, but I agree with that.' But the idea that we're just gonna throw out people that are really bringing in new ideas to the fold, exciting people, just because they're slightly to the right or to the left of us is dumb."

Schlozman Thought

A WAR thought from APD/political history: seen from 19th-century party rhetoric, this debate is cramped. If you think any move to the center for a slightly improved margin is bad, say that. If you think it's worth it, say that. If you want to reposition anyway, say that.

I was delighted to blurb Julia's book and you should buy it and read it.

Alan Dershowitz hanging around in front of the pierogi stand getting his picture taken.

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump. Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt. Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

I'm talking with Tyler Pager about his 2024 election book at the MV Book Festival on Sunday at 12:30, so if you're on-Island and not working your three jobs to be able to live here, at the beach, or Alan Dershowitz, please come by.

Want to get back at that prof who gave you an A- on an exam? Or maybe you don't think people of color or women should be professors? Make up a story about antisemitism, plop it into an anonymous student evaluation, and watch as your prof's life is upturned faster than you can spell "fascism."

I've had a Walter Mitty-like idea for an Institute for the Study of University Trustees. I assume that even if someone agreed to fund it (lol), no university president would actually greenlight a center designed to investigate what they'd rather--as a class interest--keep quiet.

This pro-Landon poster from 1936, in the current Hake's auction has the same vibe as a lot of Stop Mamdani propaganda, inadvertently making the leftists look like the cool ones. www.hakes.com/Auction/Item...

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

A timely and trenchant piece by Suresh Naidu. When future generations sift through the wreckage of our era, they’ll find it strewn with the institutional and personal failures of leaders both great and small. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Looks like the Democrats' "autopsy" will skirt the real question of 2024 (www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/u...), which is whether the party should choose its strongest nominee or cheerlead for the president. @samrosenfeld.bsky.social and I poked at that issue last summer: www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...

Fun fact for tonight's lawsuit: in 1990, the same mid-level banker at Citibank, Ann Lane, handled the restructurings for Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, and kept each of them from bankruptcy.

I'm old enough to remember when the prevailing argument against affirmative action was that it failed to consider the "real" form of unfairness, which was income disparity

Tip O'Neill, unreconstructed liberal who knew how to cut a deal and the first member of House leadership to come out against the Vietnam War, was not a Blue Dog Democrat.

A strong, if belated, recommendation for @iancoss.bsky.social 's podcast Scratch & Win about the rise of the Mass. Lottery. A total joy with a keen sense of how the old politics actually got played. I found myself talking back to the audio in a Boston accent: www.wgbh.org/podcasts/scr...

In which I make a crack about Chris Murphy going on podcasts talking about building organization not doing it, and @benmathislilley.bsky.social follows up to learn that Murphy is starting a summer basketball league in Hartford. And other good stuff. slate.com/news-and-pol...

“The University is a school of liberty as well as of learning.” The last page of Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, from 1936, ought to weigh on the Corporation with the eyes of the world upon it.

Second-order consequences of party hollowness all ricocheting against each other even as Mamdani is actually doing the contemporary left version of old-time street-level politics.

Of the several dozen Mamdani pieces I have read in the last few weeks, this one from @jwmason.bsky.social is perhaps the best. Give it a read---you will learn some things. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Wilbur Cohen and Robert Ball are rolling over in their graves.

Vast spending plus effectively zero oversight is going to mean huge huge corruption boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-...

Which prominent Democrat will be the first to say that we'll need to raise taxes next time by a lot and not just on millionaires? Saying so is a good way to get influence, but maybe not the presidential nomination.

Fabulous thread from @masonbwilliams.bsky.social on the odd yet expanding and robust coalition that made La Guardia mayor (plus his longstanding connections with labor and Socialism, and the forgotten ways foreign policy shaped --and almost cut short-- his mayoralty).

To make an awkward point amid Democrats' tut-tutting: Obama and Biden did nothing to roll back an imperial presidency whose dangers they had well observed, and here we are.

They were wrong in 2003 and they're wrong now.

Few books have worn quite so well over the last 15 years as Garry Wills, Bomb Power penguinrandomhouse.com/books/298677...

so I have a lot of complicated thoughts about the specific issue at hand, but I have to point out that’s not what “magical realism” is

What @daschloz.bsky.social and I wrote in March: "At a time when the stakes of interparty conflict are existentially high, the Democrats’ picayune organizational dynamics retain an unmistakable student-council quality." The DNC's crisis of student-councilness is more acute than we knew.