Tag: democracy

  • Gonna Party Like It’s 1999

    A new US party structure, by way of Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the Nordics. Three things need to change if we want a country that actually moves instead of just performing motion for the cameras: The first two are arguments for another day. This one is about the third — because the two-party…

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  • Angry Old Extremely Religious Christian White Man Yelling from His Porch Syndrome

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    What finally broke my brain was the sequence. The Epstein files dropped. The same movement that built itself on QAnon, on “protect the children,” on Democrats running pedophile rings out of pizza basements — the moral foundation that supposedly separated them from the godless left — went quiet. Or shifted. Or decided that maybe context…

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  • What’s Wrong With the Democrats. What’s Wrong With the Republicans. It Doesn’t Matter.

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    Neither One Will Deliver for You. Let me start with something that should be obvious but somehow never gets said out loud. Neither party won the last election. The other party just lost it more. That distinction sounds like splitting hairs until you realize it explains almost everything broken about American politics for the last…

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    Even that’s Odd

  • How an Angry Old MacDonald Became a Protest Song

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    It started with a question: What is actually wrong with this country, and why do we seem so far apart? The division felt real. The anger felt real. But when you actually looked at the polling data, something didn’t add up. Americans agree on almost everything that matters. Healthcare. Wages. Campaign finance reform. Taxing the…

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  • Americans Agree on Almost Everything—We Just Don’t Realize It

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    I scroll Instagram mostly because I have to. Crooked Number lives there and you can’t sell baseball mom shirts to an empty room, so I spend more time on it than I’d choose. Which means most of what I see is algorithm-served noise I didn’t ask for. One of those infographics floated past the other…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 5: What This Means for Democracy

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    Part 5 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → This is the last installment of the series, and I want to do something I have been putting off for the previous four pieces — actually try to land the question of what all of it means. Quick recap of what…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 4: Flooding the Zone

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    Part 4 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In 2018, Steve Bannon gave an interview to Michael Lewis. It was during Trump’s first State of the Union, and Lewis was writing for Bloomberg. Asked about the Trump media strategy, the line that came out — and that has been…

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  • Term Limits: I Was For Them Until I Wasn’t

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    Honest opener: I used to think term limits were obviously a good idea. Get rid of the lifers, drain the swamp, fresh blood, problem solved. It polls at 87% support for a reason — pretty much everybody across the political spectrum looks at Congress and goes “yeah, these people should go home.” I was in…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 8: Voter Fraud

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    I’ve voted in every election I’ve been eligible to vote in since I turned 18. That’s a stretch of decades that covers multiple states — I spent most of my adult life voting in New York City before moving up to Gardiner — and a fair number of polling places, school gyms, library basements, and…

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  • Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other

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    Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist. We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said some version of it. I know I have. And every time it happens, somebody wins — but it’s not you, and it’s not the person on the other end of it. Americans are more polarized than at any…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 13: U.S. Politics: Not Functioning As Founders Intended—And How We Can Fix It

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    Two Yeas A senator from Wyoming and a senator from California vote yes on the same bill. Roll call vote. Two yeas. The clerk records them as equivalent. Nobody on the floor notes the difference. Nobody is supposed to. The Wyoming senator represents about 588,000 people — somewhere between the populations of Milwaukee and El…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 12: The US Political System: The Republican and Democrat Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice

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    Watch the floor of either chamber on a December afternoon when the National Defense Authorization Act comes up for a vote. The bill is 1,800 pages long and nobody has read all of it. The members who will speak against it are mostly junior, mostly from safe districts, and mostly not on Armed Services. The…

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