politologue // yinzer // co-editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism // author of "Counting Like a State" https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700638758/counting-like-a-state/ Most posts are first drafts, comments welcome.
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US is a federal system. Re: the division of labor over migration management today, one may assume the feds control the policy area. Three things to keep in mind: 1) the feds didn't always control the area; states did for a century before the Civil War. 1/
USDA quietly said Friday it will, after a century, end the Farm Labor Survey (FLS), the only wage survey of ag employers. FLS is a critical input to setting local minimum wages for H-2A visa workers to try to avoid harm to U.S. workers' wages. #LaborDay #EconSky www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/Not...
So, sending troops to Chicago or Baltimore would be much more complicated than either LA or DC. 🧵
Still remembering when it was evidently a bright line violation of the 10th Amendment to require Medicaid expansion…
Excellent thread here
@ddayen.bsky.social sums it up here: Dems have a choice this month: "They can blind themselves to everything happening in the government...Or they can open their eyes and recognize that pretending the same old politics can deliver the same old results is madness." prospect.org/politics/202...
Good leading indicator!
1/DC occupation/Trump policies causing a sudden stop to regional economy. These policies are not creating a sense of safety but far reaching harm to families, workers, and the nation. www.dcnewsnow.com/news/local-n...
Now there’s a think piece.
A example of what I talk about in Counting Like a State. There is a diverse repertoire of actions that states can take to protect federal data under assault. Not just lawsuits, not just mobilizing census participation, but refusal to cooperate with these schemes. kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700639687/
In the 2x2 of federalism subjects that are both (increasing in relative) importance but yield few annual publications, I’d put interstate compacts towards the top. Right up there with the National Guard.
BREAKING: Big moment as CDC staff stage a mass walkout. They have lined the street outside its HQ to greet and salute the four top officials who have resigned in protest at RFK Jr’s attack on the agency’s science base. (🎥 AP)
This is exactly it.
An underrated problem is that a lot of mainstream media is badly adapted for analyzing big structural problems with a lot of unfamiliar detail. That is why @wired.com has been killing it - it has adapted the perspective of tech journalism to the problem of technically complex political crisis.
This (whole thread) gets at what I was going for, and the point where there should be broad agreement, even as we might wrangle on details, terminology and degree of democratic collapse.
By any conventional measure, we have crossed a threshold in this country where democratic institutions are being intentionally attacked on a daily basis. Of course these attacks are not always successful. But a few failed campaigns does not (should not) disguise the fact that one is at war (3/3).
If I die and go to heaven perhaps St. Peter or Giovanni Sartori will tell me what regime type I really lived in at this moment in time. Until then, as a matter of collective sensemaking, the degree matters less than the direction of change, which is obvious to anyone who wishes to see it. (2/3)
By any conventional measure, we have crossed a threshold in this country where democratic institutions are being intentionally attacked on a daily basis. Of course these attacks are not always successful. But a few failed campaigns does not (should not) disguise the fact that one is at war (3/3).
If I die and go to heaven perhaps St. Peter or Giovanni Sartori will tell me what regime type I really lived in at this moment in time. Until then, as a matter of collective sensemaking, the degree matters less than the direction of change, which is obvious to anyone who wishes to see it. (2/3)
The debate over how to classify the present regime in the US matters primarily because of its practical upshot. If the disagreement is really about the authoritarian “box score” (rather than direction of change), then what really matters is identifying (thus to emulate) successful resistance. (1/3)
New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...
Ladies and gentlemen I’d like to introduce the interstate compact.
Full resignation letter from Demetre C. Daskalakis, a CDC leader, does not hold back. "The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud."
Abbe Lowell and I represent CDC Director #SusanMonarez. Contrary to govt statements, Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor yet been fired. She will not resign. We have issued the following statement:
Conservatives now control federal research funding. The next step: actually manipulating research. A conservative law firm is demanding Brown retract research showing connections between anti-wind groups and the fossil fuel industry. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
Another reason why we could more urgently use better (and more usable) accounts of constitutional realpolitik (and likely fewer doctrinal interventions).
The implicit sense we have that when we buy lettuce it won’t make us sick is premised on a vast number of relationships among governments, which are now being destroyed.
There's a point Arendt makes in Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship that people who convince themselves to cooperate with the regime in pursuit of "the lesser evil" end up conditioning themselves to accept evil, which the regime then ratchets up. A similar story with the press here.
“The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, and therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgment for the multitude of real possibilities,” Arendt writes.
it does not follow that we can choose it even if the proportion were eighty to twenty, because of the enormity and incalculable quality of the risk.”…A fine attitude for a gambler, but not a statesman. (3/3)
Except, of course, that this “truth” was entirely irrelevant for the “problem” at hand. If, for instance, it can be calculated that the outcome of a certain action is “less likely to be a general war than more likely” (2/3)
On the asleep-at-the-wheel Dem quants, consider Arendt (1971): “The problem-solvers did not judge, they calculated; their self-confidence did not even need self-deception to be sustained in the midst of so many misjudgments, for it relied on the evidence of mathematical, purely rational truth.” 1/3
Democrat quant strategists are shitting the bed with this mess. They are either completely unaware of the political environment around them, or uninterested in victory. Notice how nothing works? You cannot defeat this government by A/B testing talking points. Stop wasting your time with this
Either federal law binds the federal government (as the constitution says) or the entire constitutional lawmaking process is merely advisory and the president makes a final decision by fiat. That’s the question.
Slideshow of today in Washington DC, and how it looks when a terrorizing government scares people away. By me, no paywall: fallows.substack.com/p/a-summer-a...
But bottom line is that idea should be written up.
Not a bad idea to create fortresses of democracy via a one-time intergovernmental grant (I think that’s the point). But if it’s a one time transfer it would have to be pretty large and I guess you’d have to design a mechanism to undercut clawbacks.
Most critiques of Democratic Party amount to: “they’re awful at PR”. But that’s a symptom of an organizational pathology that is decades in the making. I try to document that in an essay for Catalyst, which @jacobinmag.bsky.social has now made available for free: jacobin.com/2025/08/demo...
This is very good, and clarifies the metaphysical madness not of polling per se but of using calculation to substitute for political judgment.
On federalism, let me put in a plug for Jim Gardner’s essay which we just finished editing for a special edition of Publius in January (there’s a great preprint version here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....)
The ideological campaign “will likely intensify, transitioning from apologetics for ‘relationships with chatbots’ and sympathy with their sycophancy, to castigating human relationships as first inefficient and inconvenient, and then dangerously chaotic.” robhorning.substack.com/p/the-reifie...
In case you were wondering how these states voted in 2024: AL: Trump AR: Trump FL: Trump GA: Trump ID: Trump IN: Trump IA: Trump LA: Trump NE: Trump NV: Trump NM: Biden OH: Trump SC: Trump SD: Trump TN: Trump TX: Trump UT: Trump VA: Biden WY: Trump This is fan service, and electioneering.
I joined Citizen Action WI members, Green Homeowners United, and Revitalize Milwaukee today to highlight federal grants, available through the Inflation Reduction Act to Milwaukee area residents to help with flood recovery -- including basement insulation and electrical panel upgrades.
I don’t understand how a “democracy” survives long-term when tens of millions of people are about to be medically bankrupted because of a public policy and this is not even a major topic of political conversation in the “democracy.” This is literally happening in a few weeks & nobody seems to care👇
ME, TENTING FINGERS ACROSS TBE TABLE: I am going to build a “Cracker Barrel of the mind” MARC ANDREESSEN: Here is $50,000,000,000
I hate tapping the sign: catalyst-journal.com/2025/07/why-...
I often find myself saying "what a time to be alive" but friends, today, defector.com/it-took-many...
Usually in my lectures I have to at some point mention that corruption is more subtle than “bag full of money”, but now I will have to qualify that with “usually”.
I’d read the work of @debbiejsr.bsky.social , who has an amazing piece I just finished editing coming out in Publius soon. Flavin / Shufeldt published a good piece on state pride we put out in 2024. And Pears and Syndor have been doing great work on this too: academic.oup.com/publius/arti...
Article I, Sec. 4, Clause 1 of US Const. makes it crystal clear - states determine "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives" and Cong can pass to alter state law. The President has no power to alter elections. Yet here is POLITICO being beyond reckless. 😡
Trump surrogate attacking government statistics by failing to add correctly is almost too perfect (16% + 30% ≠ “2 out of 3”)
A number of people have claimed recently that the CPS shows a large rise in employment for native-born workers, while immigrant employment has fallen. Here's an exceedingly informative post from @jedkolko.bsky.social, on why the CPS cannot be used in this way. jedkolko.substack.com/p/no-native-...
I can’t believe this exchange is real.
More guts than all the government officials and law firm and university leaders who resigned or capitulated under pressure
RETVRN and join us
There is state capacity for repression, yes. Even for building, if the thing being built represses. Goes back to my fundamental point that power is the determining factor for the ability to advance anything in our politics.
And so, just as any number of other rhetorical devices have in the past, “weak state capacity” has become another surrogate problem that allows think tankers and columnists and others to avoid a confrontation with politics, with power, with the preferences of those who rule. 3/3
Beyond this counterexample, we can say there is plenty of administrative capacity, though much expertise and power is now practically devolved, delegated, or otherwise distanced from public control. Plenty of fiscal capacity, though much of it remains untapped. 2/3
It’s hilarious to me that the phrase “weak state capacity” now gets bandied about as the central problem of American government when we can see plainly just how much capacity there is, say, to construct detention centers in the hinterlands or place troops on city streets. 1/3
To call this action theater is the conventional way of dismissing it as atmospherics. But fascism of course thrives on atmospherics. Even if it is improv, it seeks only an audience willing to be part of the troupe capable of saying “yes, and” even if not licensing it. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/u...
Working on an essay to this effect.
Let me put it another way (riffing on both Derthick and Diamond): federalism is, was, and always will be a repository of power resources that can be used in any number of ways and towards any number of ends. And we need a better theoretical account of those power resources.
big things are afoot in that regard! You could do an entire half semester on separation of powers and another on federalism.
Taught intro in the spring and found it a useful exercise for evaluating the direction of the subfield on the criterion of “does [text] help me account for / make sense of what is happening at present for a lay audience”.
Most important task in the department! Solidarity!
West Virginia has the lowest level of educational attainment in the country. As the governor sends troops to DC, what is he doing to improve the life of citizens in his state? www.wtrf.com/news/study-s...
Even more senior civil servants pushed out at IRS: www.washingtonpost.com/business/202... More than two-thirds of IRS senior leadership has left or been removed since January. Unprecedented and dangerous.
Liked it better when I wrote it for Catalyst last month (and had a theory that captured the enduring collective action problem faced by Dem coalition groups) . catalyst-journal.com/2025/07/why-...
This makes a lot of sense. We need to think quickly about new models of scientific funding in the US, not just bringing back federal dollars. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
Mindless word salad that even the poorest performing AI could not make up
this is a nice example of @ryanenos.bsky.social's point that when discussing Trump's authoritarian moves, we should start by discussing the *action* and ignore or refuse to take seriously the bullshit justification offered for it
This is not speculation of course, it was made explicit in the Hofeller papers. And very consistent with prior controversies over apportionment (eg 1920s non-reapportionment of Congress). Immigration was and remains a convenient tool for disenfranchisement without regard to citizenship status. 2/2
This shouldn’t need to be said, but I do think it’s a problem with news coverage of the census. Removing “noncitizens” from census figures is a means to an end. The goal is to use the immigration issue to license a durable shift of power in state legislatures away from urban population centers. 1/2
Going to start requiring the Voight-Kampff test for admission.
There is a coffee stain problem on my shirt which is why it is risky for anyone to critique me burning my entire wardrobe.
The lesson here is to litigate, not cower.
NEW: A 2020 survey on census privacy and confidentiality concerns found that most participants wanted the Census Bureau to collect information directly from the public instead of relying on data from the records of other government agencies
After epistemic closure, there is only George Webb
The hour of George Webb is nearly at hand.
The idea of using state or local power (via threats on tax, exemption audits, zoning) to alter the cost-benefit for higher ed institutions is novel. The threat would have to be a credible one, of course. Harvard wd have to perceive city or state as more capable than Trump of following through.
Evidently the tone I use when I'm yelling at someone on the radio getting something wrong about the census clause is identical to the tone I use when the cat is about to throw up on the carpet.
Important @gelliottmorris.com analysis on moderation: Going from the average House Dem position to the most moderate position will net you just over 1 percentage point in the general election. Eh.
There’s a theme here, between Miller and Vermeule, which is that the authoritarian right has a view of “order” which has nothing to do with actual crime and has everything to do with violently enforcing their preferred cultural hierarchies.
One time the Brewers were beating Pittsburgh at PNC Park 20-0 in the late innings and Uecker said "And the fans are now leaving in droves. Look at them all on that bridge over there. I hope there's a net underneath" and I almost drove my car into a bridge abutment
Worth asking why the same news outlets that tripped over themselves to explain that Obama getting 53% of the vote was meaningless - “still a center-right country”! - but Trump getting 49.8% of the vote against a candidate who entered the race in July is effectively the Enabling Act.
Bright line violation of 29 USC 1, if we’re still even bothering to clock those things.
Today's data show inflation is accelerating. Friday's showed job growth is decelerating. That's evidence of movement towards stagflation. It's not a reality now. It's a rising risk.
But answers to other questions are bound to emerge—are in fact emerging—too. Namely: what would January 6 have looked like if the government itself had been the primary agent enlisted to carry out the autogolpe?
In any case, the potential for a backlash that matters seems meaningfully greater should the District of Columbia itself become the terrain of conflict. Still, this obviously invites questions about which battle, what movement, that—for reasons I have specified elsewhere—have no easy answer.
The question, I think, is whether such an opportunity can effectively be seized upon at a moment when even the sharpest focal points seem to melt into air thanks to a fragmented opposition, the economy of distractions, and all the rest of it.
On a related note, choosing DC as the municipality to target for an authoritarian takeover also creates a focal point for backlash that is unlike any another—for both symbolic and quite obviously practical reasons.
This is right. It’s of little solace that states have greater legal protections than DC for the simple fact that (1) this distinction apparently doesn’t matter at all to the Trump admin and (2) seizing control of the capital is, even if legally a lighter lift, categorically different.
DC remains the only capital region in any democratic federation in the world whose residents lack full political incorporation (either as part of another state/province, or as a unique political subunit). Also among the lowest levels of political autonomy for any capital region in a federation.
12/Tariffs aren't about jobs but exemptions Goal is Trump's LICENSE RAJ ie.concentrating power in WH w a spoils system as w his 2018 Tariff war Fotak et al. (2024):"spoils system allowing the administration of the day to reward its political friends and punish its enemies." bsky.app/profile/jona...
Ladies and gentlemen, the meritocracy
Very useful thread on Trump’s assault on DC autonomy.
Excellent op-ed here on Trump’s census directive:
This is an example where the problem is not so much the capabilities of LLMs as it is the fact that we have independently normalized a widespread culture of acceptable lying
i'm doomed to write a version of this essay every single year. i wrote about Matthew Yglesias' intellectual sophistry, LPE, Uber's business model, the problem with venture capital, economic welfare, "economic analysis," and more. thetechbubble.substack.com/p/ride-shari...