Might all come down to residential stability...
Social Scientist, Harvard University https://www.ryandenos.com/ https://ryandenos.substack.com/
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Might all come down to residential stability...
Maybe...I just wonder if the first order explanation would be characteristics correlated with both difficulty in matching and Trump voting, rather than unwillingness to report (which might also be correlated with stuff, of course)...so maybe income, education, etc.
In fairness, my experience on Twitter was basically the same.
The worst online discourse is the online discourse about online discourse.
Is this conditional on anything?
Committed to rooting out antisemitism in higher education (except for the part where he was a Hitler fan-boy). www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...
Media has adopted the pretext of the authoritarian.
We just gave this guy this huge secret police force to terrorize cities not friendly to regime. It's Stalinesque.
This is the January 6th-fication of Los Angeles. Just a total fantasy to prop up an authoritarian attack on democracy.
This is true. I have never seen a major American politician with more contempt for American tradition and history - and Americans themselves - than Donald Trump. The fact that Vance can even say this about Mamdani can probably be attributed to simple racism.
Thanks! Some of your influence in there.
Here is the course for my graduate course in Political Geography. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s1qdk...
Here is the syllabus for my undergraduate course in Political Psychology. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tbhed...
Wait, other professors weren't already doing that?
newrepublic.com/article/1997...
Respect to Carpenter, et al on this:
Did you read the article?
It is clearly no coincidence that Prof. Ziblatt focuses on Hitler's consolidation of power as he sounds the alarm about the dangers of cooperating with or appeasing an aspiring dictator
When the executive ignores laws they find inconvenient, it is called a dictatorship.
Consider that this person has direct influence on the President of the United States, but Republicans in Congress are too cowardly to say anything about it.
This entire clip is authoritarianism in action. Smear opposition politicians and use the law to persecute them. Claim absolute authority derived from the people. Ignore laws based on that claim.
Partisan defections & vote switching continued to decline in 2024 as negative partisanship continued preprints.apsanet.org/engage/api-g...
New @goodauth.bsky.social on the big rise in Dems saying civil rights/liberties are the US's most important issue More Ds say it’s the most important issue than inflation & econ combined %Dem saying it’s MII = record %GOP who said immigration was MII in 2024 goodauthority.org/news/civil-r...
Also, cc university presidents.
This is the most important thing you'll read today: "Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe..."
One of the first victims of authoritarianism is the truth. Everyone knows exactly what happened on January 6th. There is absolutely no ambiguity. But now the very Members of Congress who were cowering for their lives try to rewrite history in sycophantic devotion to Trump.
Yes. I don't think many people, even teaching about the US made a false binary about democracy, but there was certainly an assumption that the US was more fully one than it is now.
For example, a mistake of the US press has been to continue with their learned script that assumes we are a fully functioning democracy. The academy should not make that same mistake.
As a teacher of politics, as i go into the new semester, I keep wrestling with the fact that so much of what I teach is premised on the fact that the USA is a democracy. And now this clearly can not be taken for granted.
Eisenhower, who probably had more personal potential to govern as an authoritarian than any leader in modern U.S. history, ordered military personnel in Washington, DC to not where uniforms because he thought the site of so much uniformed military in the capital city was inconsistent with democracy.
One of my big complaints these past two years has been how much the actions of universities have shown that their commitment to certain stated values, DEI then, intellectual diversity now, are based, not on an intellectual or ethical commitment, but simply political posturing.
This article is worth reading because it 1) illustrates how thin the commitments of colleges (and Harvard in particular) were to the values that they spent a decade or so espousing, and 2) how disorienting this is for students. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
Interestingly, the only circumstances in which North American cities have adopted an accessibility strategy similar to European city centers, i.e. a largely pedestrian core with a peripheral vehicular circulation in independent pockets, are University campuses.
There is no political downside to opposing authoritarianism.
Fifth Amendment was a good idea (also, refreshing to know that parts of our constitution are still operating).
Vicente Valentim Receives the 2025 Robert A. Dahl Award for “The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand” The Robert A. Dahl Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor an untenured scholar who has produced…
Un-American and vile.
One thing I'll note about current criticisms of polling is that one of the hardest, but most important, tasks for an empiricist (or anyone, really) is to be equally skeptical of evidence that confirms one's priors as one is of evidence that does not.
I'm cool if we want to criticize the Blue Rose results because we think the samples are bad, but we should really take this as an opportunity to consider samples from which a great deal of our survey results are drawn that share similar pathologies.
Institutions like universities would do well to heed @jamellebouie.net 's word here: "while Trump may want to be a king, it is still up to us, as Americans, whether we treat him like one."
War fighting ethos, etc.
This empirical analysis of how often Democrats actually say these things is really interesting. It reminds me of a similar problem with criticisms of universities, where the criticism is partially driven by nothing more than a rightwing caricature of how universities actually operate.
I also find it galling that not long ago Republicans were the party supposedly centered on free markets and small government and now any pretense of that has been thrown out the window... but given the history of party realignments in this country, I'm not sure it is actually that remarkable.
And are controlled by the geritocracy...
www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...
There is no political downside to opposing authoritarianism.
"But whatever our past failures, however many authoritarian elements embedded themselves over time in our liberal democracy, the challenge we face today is closer to straight-up despotism."
What you would do when authoritarianism comes to the United States is what you're doing right now
"Where We Are: (1) Donald Trump is acting as a dictator. (2) He is fairly easily defeated time after time when people fight back. (3) Far too few people are fighting back." substack.com/home/post/p-...
Also, I can't help but think of this contrast. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
When we come out of the other side of this (and I still think we will), we will require a concerted effort to make sure young people, having grown up in the Trump era, understand that this is grossly incompatible with democracy and American tradition. newrepublic.com/post/199561/...
This is right. Any effect on the economy is of secondary importance. Trump is weaponizing the government against people he doesn't like. The very definition of an authoritarian.
The question of whether Trump will respect democracy and the rule of law has been decisively and unequivocally answered in the negative. The only question we should be debating now is how to restore our democracy.
The last sentence should be terrifying for everyone (L'État, c'est moi) & this is well beyond Nixon-level impeachment/resignation stuff. Unprecedented levels of unpunished authoritarianism.
In case it is not crystal clear: THIS IS AUTHORITARIANISM.
Tens of thousands of Americans died in the conflict Trump wants to switch sides in.
Yea. And one suspects some of the criticism is because people don't like the results.
The shocking thing is that this article doesn't even manage to catalog all of Trump's abuses.
www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...
Every EO Trump issues, every direction he gives to his subordinates, and everything out of his mouth is an affront to democracy and freedom. Every decent leader should condemn him. If not for decency, at least to avoid the shame of complicity.
When we've lost habeas corpus, that's pretty much the whole ballgame folks. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...
No doubt. But unpopularity makes it hard for anti-democratic regimes to consolidate. That's why it still matters now.
"will we strike a Faustian bargain — selling our souls to regain research funding and political favor?" www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
And, if I remember correctly, the jar was usually plastic, baking in the sun for days...which is pretty gross.
I know...in case it didn't come across, that was my joining your sarcasm.
That's testable, my man.
For the love of God, no! It is not a political horse race, it is an authoritarian attack on our democracy.
Trump is widly unpopular. There is no political downside to opposing his authoritarianism.
Unimportant rant of the day: college sports once provided a community-building ritual. Playing American college football in Dublin, Ireland is an example of how that function is quickly being lost.
It is not that I never hear them, but only when I wander into a humanities seminar. In my corner of the social sciences, they are pretty much absent.
But also, if people want to use them, I could care less. Language changes. It rarely has the consequential effects on electoral politics that some imagine.
As I occasionally point out, as somebody employed at the quintessential "academic hothouse", the number of times I heard those terms on campus was close to zero.
Also, on the spectrum being considered here, I am not sure it's accurate that the quantitative social scientists were overwhelmingly progressive. A lot more Obama voters in there than anything else.
Not super lefty. Could be worth revisiting Sasha Iseenberg's book about this.
Could be right. I don't have any strong view on it other than being in graduate school and adjacent to those circles when it got going. If you look at early scientific campaigning, it was mostly non-ideological stuff about turnout (which progressive groups adopted). AFL-CIO was big player...
add universities to that list.
One could do an interesting history of this sometime, but fwiw, I don't think that's right. At least for me, original "data guys" were people who said we can take analytic methods, mostly only popular among academics, and use them to move away from hunches. Wasn't really ideological in any sense.
Reminder: It does not matter if Lisa Cook filled out a form wrong or if the raid finds some document in a file folder in John Bolton's house. These actions are wrong no matter what because they selectively target opponents of the government. The rule of law is under attack.
Also, given my job, I try to be very aware of avoiding "seminar talk" but there is a certain type of patronizing that is also *very* important to avoid, which is the assumption that "regular" people don't care/don't understand the way you talk about things.
I'm all for refining political messaging, but tell me how speaking about democracy signals "people have no agency".
It's remarkable to consider how this hubristic incompetence has damaged lives across the globe.
Think this take is right. (although it might overstate the policy consequences of people dying in office). www.liberalcurrents.com/age-limits-f...
Here's what comes up from Google AI if I search for George Washington.
For others, perhaps especially conservatives, maybe Enke's theories of moral-universalism are useful, where political ideology is correlated with how far you extend your concern beyond yourself. If you are only concerned with whether a small circle benefits, maybe democracy isn't so important. 2/2
I don't really know. I think on the universities thing, it is just self-preservation, nothing more, and people can find ways to reduce dissonance by convincing themselves that they are somehow not being self-interested. 1/
I'd be careful attributing this to an inability. I see lots of people at universities, trained to think systematically and expansively, making the same mistake.
Agitating politically active senior citizens is a famously effective political tactic.
Also, can somebody explain to me how this isn't a bag of contradictions?
I don't have a dog in this WAR debate, but this is just ad-hominem and contributes virtually zero to understanding an important question. www.natesilver.net/p/real-talk-...
I often think that one of this regime's greatest weaknesses is that everybody who ever worked for Trump ends up hating him and regretting it. It's why most Republicans I talk to don't actually like or trust him. The question is whether he can consolidate power so completely that it doesn't matter.
Yes, I agree. It is an insult to our intelligence to just believe this all happens by coincidence. I would honestly rather be told honestly that it is being done as a matter of self-preservation.
We can't pretend to want "intellectual diversity" and "intellectual vitality" while simultaneously censoring even the mildest forms of political speech. Stop complying in advance. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
A remarkable coincidence.
Well said.
Mugger wants the victim to show him the money, or they will continue to be pistol-whipped. Critics call it extortion.
Yes, this is almost as close to zero as you can possibly get in a public opinion poll. Trump has virtually no support for attacking universities. We have every reason to stand firm against him.
"Boston will never back down from being a beacon of freedom, and a home for everyone." Do you hear that tyrants?
A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”
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