Institutionalizing the power Trump grabbed ain’t it, although the temptation will be strong. I hope a midterm landslide ensures that the resolution to all of this is initiated by a Democratic Congress stripping much of these power grabs back, BEFORE a Democratic president is tempted by them.

Simple amendments that IMO would have a decent chance of getting ratified:

Good

I now firmly believe Trump’s handlers are constantly showing him AI slop content - created to support those handlers own individual, often-clashing agendas. GenAI companies have created Grima Wormtongue as a service.

I checked out his timeline, and guy Musk is promoting (someone with >100k followers) is just posting straight up Stormfront ca. 2005 material, or White Aryan Resistance material ca.1989. The world’s richest man and the GOP’s most important funder has turned X into Stormfront.

It’s best to avoid just assuming too much of a person’s ideas comes from their upbringing, but sometimes it’s true. Elon Musk’s tweet today absolutely grow out of his South African roots and experience. My contribution on the history of neoliberalism and those ideas is here (with another coming):

Why am I seeing so many calls to impeach Noem as if her incompetence is what is driving this? You know *exactly* who you should be impeaching.

Of course it is. They try to mock it and call it “woke” because they understand that it is shining light on a rotten society and they can’t countenance that.

Looking back, everyone will one day realize that all that woke stuff was right. Unfortunately, being right won’t erase the suffering.

This is like if they put one of those Andy Serkis CGI suits on me to capture my motions folding the laundry to animate a laundry folding robot.

For months, Trump’s DHS has wreaked lawless havoc in our neighborhoods. Tear gassing infants, families, and police. Firing their weapons at peaceful citizens. Killing innocent people. It’s brutal, unconstitutional, and out of control. It must stop. Kristi Noem must go. Now.

they all think it's just content up till the moment the social fabric unravels

Today I found out I got a bonus for outstanding performance the last year and I did what any reasonable person would do with a surprise infusion of cash: I ordered the Camic HUP Veblen biography and the England JHU George biography.

Bro could get a Nobel Prize in economics if he figured this out why this happens 40 years ago.

I’m currently writing a paper on Frank Taussig, scratching an itch I got writing my Du Bois paper (which prominently featured Taussig). I firmly believe now that this guy is dramatically underrepresented in history of economics work.

Many of us who scoff at antivaxxers still miss our shots for one reason or another. This year I am one of them! It was an unusually crazy Fall and I just didn’t, but I’m going to this weekend because I’m seeing a ton of reports this week about how bad the flu season is. You should too! 💉💉💉

This is bad but it’s two or three days of U.S. oil production. It’s a shakedown, not annexation (yet). Obviously shakedowns are the basis for his arbitrary exercise of power, not good.

I think Greenland is at risk. I don’t think Canada is at risk, but I think they should obviously plan for that. Greenland isn’t about Greenland it’s about wrecking NATO in a way that is not so obviously pro-Russian. All of it is disastrous for peace and liberalism and needs to be confronted.

all this is both foolish and unnecessary

New book chapter by Bob Lerman and me on policy transfer and apprenticeship: books.google.com/books?id=l5q...

I wish I was a tree guy. I know some basics but you know the guys that can identify a million trees on sight and are knowledgeable about why they grow the way they do and various maladies. That would be great.

Just realized I’ve gotta drop Larry Summers from my Spring syllabus.

this is basically ricks' argument in THE GENERALS: that the structure of the american military (and political leadership) has generated an enormously competent professional force... that consistently generates useless results because of a void of strategic thinking at the top

The Monroe Doctrine has been stretched beyond any recognition for centuries, but even the Cold War invocations at least had a veneer of concern about combating malign intervention from outside the hemisphere. There’s not even a hint of that with Trump, it’s spheres of influence all the way down.

Welp, today was awful geopolitically, constitutionally, and because I had to wait and pay for car maintenance but on the plus side there was a great deal on lamb legs…

It’s sobering to look back on the run-up to the Iraq war—a period of unceasing chattering-class debate, elaborate official lies, media complicity, unavailing global protest, in the end a giant stitch-up—and have it seem like some sort of paradise of public deliberation compared to these gangsters.

Protesters in Fairfax City against the strike… that was quick.

Kidnapping Maduro and taking over Venezuela would be illegal even if Congress had authorized it.

Threats against Mexico and Cuba now. Insanity.

you think this is a one-off? don’t be deluded. we are firmly in the zone of lawlessness & impunity. repression at home and aggression abroad. and a sleeping congress.

Understandably the news coming in is fixated on Trump, but do we know anything about what’s happening on the ground?

I’M SORRY, WHAT?!

Liberty has triumphed over tyranny in so many forms in America’s history. Retrenchment and reaction has been deep and awful, but every time we’ve beat it things have ended up even better than the last triumph. I think it’s important to commit to that long run dynamic.

the digital quality isn't good but you can watch the Nunn/McKellen/Dench Macbeth from the late 1970s here, which is excellent - www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgEs...

I’ve owned land in the mountains for a year and a half now but for some reason this week I’m being flooded on my social media accounts with targeted ads about leasing land to hunting. It’s like some law changed January 1st or something, but I can’t figure out what.

This is what they took from you

In 2026, the oligarchs will seek to use the celebration of America’s anniversary to strengthen their grip on the economy and government. Taking inspiration from Thomas Paine, @nicholsuprising.bsky.social writes that we must reject these new monarchical elites. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Usually I’m quite productive (in terms of my job) over these holiday weeks because it’s a time without meetings, but I’ve found it basically impossible to be productive this year. I didn’t realize how much I had to decompress from the disaster that was 2025. Hoping it sets me up well for 2026.

Yep. It’s amazing how culture develops on these platforms. Even before Twitter went so bad, people still acted like this. Here I see people actively step back and acknowledge when they do things like this (and I try to as well). It makes the experience so much better.

All kinds of amazing books for this trend but you’d want to be sworn in on a masterpiece, right?

Incredible thread. My favorite is “My man looks like he’s telling the judge he sincerely misunderstood what “bottomless mimosas” meant” The shame is Schneider is a perfectly fine, funny actor that always made you laugh. I don’t know why they feel the need to beclown themselves with these rants.

Really looking forward to this next. Ever since starting my paper on W.H. Hutt and Nazism I’ve been fascinated with the fall of France, why it happened, and how people reacted (Hutt felt that France’s fall totally vindicated his analysis of the Nazis… my paper here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....)

I finished Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise today on audiobook and it was really impressive. I’ve never spent a lot of time with Veblen but you realize why he was such a big deal as well as the intellectual ambition of American Institutionalism.

I was wondering what Mamdani's first executive order would be, and I'm not disappointed by this. He has wiped off the books EVERY Eric Adams executive order issued on or after September 26, 2024, the day Adams was indicted on federal bribery charges.

If you start a post with “for those who care about liberty, 2025 was a mixed bag,” you don’t care about liberty. If Trump stuck to tearing up the constitutional order and subverting racial equity he’d get the enthusiastic support of a huge swath of libertarians. www.independent.org/multimedia/2...

2025 has been a terrible year for society, at work, and with family health issues. Some of this has resolved itself, much of it hasn't. There have been some bright spots, though, and it's good to hold on to them. One bright spot for me was having my two favorite papers to write published this year.

Nothing has been stranger about the last decade than the complete subversion of traditional understanding of Russia. You feel out of place being the one insisting that these are the bad guys. Like some stupid Cold War caricature. But in important ways it remains true and everything is upside down.