“The very scope of the challenge underscores the gravity of the current moment—& the need to be open to lessons from other national & political histories that once seemed of little relevance to the American experience.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @r_lieberman
"It looks like the current crisis will simmer for the foreseeable future. Nothing much will change except for increased…polarization and increasing intensity of conflicts, at the extreme erupting…in spirals of State and anti-State violence.” – Przeworski
“This election blows to smithereens many of the theories in my profession of political science.” Theda Skocpol — Thread:
“Indeed, one reason the mainstream media did not treat Trump as a credible candidate…was that he so obviously flouted the conventions of the racial liberal consensus that…had seemed to define the window of acceptable political opinion.” the-american-interest.com/2018/03/02/col… @nils_gilman
“Still in shock after Trump’s election, U.S. liberals are only beginning to devise a real program for structural justice in the country.” bostonreview.net/class-inequali… @samuelmoyn @BostonReview
“Democratization usually occurs in state response (however reluctant) to popular demands, and after crises have eased." – Charles Tilly
"The massive failure of journalism’s imagination that helped usher in Brexit and Trump makes a strong case for journalism’s necessary and immediate reset. Neither Trump nor Brexit is an anomaly.” journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7YPhR2m… @bzelizer
News markets function “only so long as economic principles do not infringe upon the cultural & political content that the market itself serves to spread. This is still the kernel of truth at the core of Adorno's criticism of the cultural industry” Habermas
“If America still has a public square, it isn’t located in the balkanized press or the halls of Congress, but in public schools… a true public square, where an absence of security or an absence of decent wages can be named as injustices.” newrepublic.com/article/147451… @onesarahjones
“Constitutional rot [Finn] is what happens…when faith in the key commitments of the Constitution gradually erode, even when the legal structures remain in place…& the public either doesn’t realize—or doesn’t care.” theatlantic.com/politics/archi… @benjaminwittes
Constitutional Hardball scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewconten… “Political claims & practices…that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine & practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.” – Tushnet 2004
“Existing pre-constitutional understandings” scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewconten… “The ‘go without saying’ assumptions that underpin working systems of constitutional government. They are hard to identify outside of times of crisis precisely b/c they go without saying”
Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…"Constitutional hardball tactics…do not generally flout binding legal norms. But that only heightens the sense of foul play insofar as it insulates acts of hardball from judicial review" @ColumLRev
“Constitutional hardball tactics…put pressure on the ‘norms of good institutional citizenship’ that help to structure and ‘sustain the constitutional system’.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @ColumLRev
“Something has already gone deeply wrong. When the greatest threats to democracy in the United States come from the man exercising the awesome powers of the presidency, our constitutional system has failed in a crucial sense.” prospect.org/article/democr… via @DavidAvromBell
"Our constitutional rights aren’t worth all that much if there’s no mechanism for enforcing them. One can only hope that sometime soon the Supreme Court comes to its senses and agrees.” nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opi… @steve_vladeck – Przeworski:
The "empirical question at what point perceived differences [between valid claims and those assumed to be valid] are no longer accepted as 'normal' but exceed a threshold beyond which the participants feel alienated from an established practice" books.google.com/books?id=3B0-B… – Habermas 
The “interesting empirical question” of the “threshold beyond which the participants feel alienated from an established practice” – Habermas
"The relationship between language & experience never appears more clearly than in crisis situations in which the everyday order…is challenged, & with it the language of order, situations which call for an extraordinary discourse” monoskop.org/images/7/71/Pi…
If conditions "for the production of critical discourse” remain insufficient, the reaction to “objective crisis” is “defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of establishing in its place the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy.” Bourdieu
“Not spoken to her in a long time”: a metaphor for the state of the union? washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-… – Chelsea Clinton on her (not even spoken about) friendship status with fellow Presidential daughter Ivanka Trump
“We need media that help us understand our societies and our fellow citizens…Just knowing each other, and knowing a common culture together are vital for democracy.” huffingtonpost.com/entry/terroris… @craigjcalhoun "mixing with others different from ourselves"
“Politics has become too much a matter of polarized camps hurling insults &, often, cynical distortions at each other―an enemy not a friend of trust―partly because different groups of citizens barely know each other.” huffingtonpost.com/entry/terroris… @craigjcalhoun
“(Orthodox or heterodox) discourse &…doxa, in the 2-fold sense of what goes without saying & what cannot be said for lack of an available discourse”—"the dividing-line btw the most radical form of misrecognition & the awakening of political consciousness”
“I continue to think that the main aim of Trump’s discombobulating tactics ‘is to delegitimize Mueller…to shape the politics of impeachment or…of massive pardons’” lawfareblog.com/cycles-panicke… @jacklgoldsmith via @samuelmoyn – So the hard Q is still: Answers?
“They…believe that all rich businesspeople have to do shady things from time to time…Any new information about his corrupt past has no political salience.” newyorker.com/news/news-desk… via @nils_gilman
“The capacity for hope is the great capacity of democracy, one which under the right circumstances can and should nourish other, more specific capacities that may promote improvements in democratic quality.” journalofdemocracy.org/article/perpet… – Guillermo O’Donnell
"The Eclipse of the Public” “Optimism about democracy is to-day under a cloud.” – John Dewey 1927
“Trump’s most significant legacy for the evolution of constitutional norms may not be that he laid waste to so many of them, but rather that he obscured where the real normative decay was occurring.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @joshchafetz via @SevaUT
“The principal source of instability is that constitutional norms can be decomposed … applied in ways that are held out as compliant but that limit their capacity to constrain the conduct of government officials.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @joshchafetz
“The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, recently provided President Trump’s lawyers a list of questions he wants answered in an interview. The New York Times obtained the list; here are the questions, along with the context and significance of each.” nytimes.com/2018/04/30/us/…
“The questions provide the most detailed look yet inside Mr. Mueller’s investigation, which has been shrouded in secrecy since he was appointed nearly a year ago.” nytimes.com/2018/04/30/us/…
A “clerical error” – one quick summary of the present predicament: what happens in Vegas, doesn’t stay in Vegas
"Just what is the crisis? In one sense, it is whatever made Trump’s victory possible." dissentmagazine.org/article/normco… @JedediahSPurdy via @samuelmoyn
Constitutional Coup papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @JonDMichaels “Nothing epitomizes today's constitutional zeitgeist better than the Donald Trump presidency…the apotheosis of the businesslike government movement" – @JedediahSPurdy:
"The jokes of 2018 are all about nihilism: 'Nothing matters!' we cheerfully, or not so cheerfully, declare. This is at its truest and most despairing when it comes to the legal chaos around the president." nytimes.com/2018/05/04/opi… via @samuelmoyn
A timely reminder that the actually existing public sphere empirically deviates from the "pressure"-free ideal in varying degrees…
shaping ("distorting") the actual operation of the "rule of law" and elections (any procedures of the legitimation process)
shaping ("distorting") the actual operation of the "rule of law" and elections (any procedures of the legitimation process)
“calling…people back to their principles. It isn’t clear who is listening” dissentmagazine.org/article/normco… @JedediahSPurdy same with “Our Addiction to Trump” via @samuelmoyn – "abstinence-only" appeals to individuals unlikely to heal public attention addictions…
The process norms of the political public sphere — but merely “calling…people back to their principles” dissentmagazine.org/article/normco… @JedediahSPurdy seems also unlikely to fix sub-standard / eroding procedural norms of the legitimation process via @samuelmoyn
“Democracy is & always will be in some kind of crisis, for it is constantly redirecting its citizens' gaze from a more or less unsatisfactory present toward a future of still unfulfilled possibilities.” The Perpetual Crises of Democracy Guillermo O’Donnell
"There is in these crises something that belongs to what is best & most distinctive about democracy. For the crises underline democracy's intrinsic mix of hope & dissatisfaction, its highlighting of a lack that will never be filled”
U.S. “Muslim ban" government assures #FIFA to comply with human rights in 2026: “All eligible athletes, officials and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the U.S without discrimination.” apnews.com/44bab9e072a04b… via @abuaardvark
“an unmistakable tit-for-tat pattern in the parties’ behavior surrounding judicial nominations, going back before the mid-1990s…But we also observe, in recent years, an asymmetry emerging within that ongoing tit-for-tat pattern.“
Procedural & informal norms of “legitimation processes” — “institutionalized discourses” & informal “patterns…of discourse itself” — versus substantive (unquestioned or orthodox) norms via “ordinary law” pace Habermas and Bourdieu:
“whether we have ever been democratic” dissentmagazine.org/article/normco… @JedediahSPurdy – Dewey: – Why mere ‘realist’ debunking of historical misconceptions can "remain quite ahistorical or even antihistorical" Tilly
“Properly mediated” national-level direct democracy: “the key challenge…to ensure that this form of governance is properly mediated so that it enhances the public good.” washingtonpost.com/news/theworldp… @TheWorldPost via @SSRCanxieties – the public sphere's institutional infrastructure
“Regulation might curtail fake news, just as it does fraudulent advertising…In the interim we need to keep clarifying how fake news is distinguishable from legitimate ‘fact-based discursive practices’ and…openly partisan but honest journalism.” @bzelizer
“[American] society now looks sick. The absence of nuance on the Russia question—the embrace of Russia as America’s new-old supervillain—is probably best understood as a symptom of that sickness.” nytimes.com/2018/05/08/mag… @keithgessen via @rodrikdani
“Salami tactics [T. Schelling] work by exploiting ambiguity…incremental violations—of borders, political commitments, or institutional norms—that can be excused away; they always seem to fall short of inviting retaliation” lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/05/consti… @dhnexon
“Perhaps liberals, searching for a path forward into the hearts and minds of voters, need to pay heed to Missouri’s state motto: not ‘rule me more nicely’, but ‘show me’.” theguardian.com/commentisfree/… @samuelmoyn
“The problem is not the bait chosen to lure voters but the whole idea of politics as fishing – as if voters across the country are suckers to be lured into one camp or another.” theguardian.com/commentisfree/… @samuelmoyn
"When the Bush Administration responded to 9/11 by narrowing legal protection for people it suspected of complicity with terrorists, it partially de-democratized the United States.” Charles Tilly (2007) – via @nikhil_palsingh
2003 #Merkel @washingtonpost: “Schroeder Doesn't Speak for All Germans” washingtonpost.com/archive/opinio… only “for the sake of electoral tactics” — @washingtonpost 2018:
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” already in 2003 – HT @washingtonpost graphics department — #Merkel 2003 @washingtonpost: “Schroeder Doesn't Speak for All Germans” – only “for the sake of electoral tactics” washingtonpost.com/archive/opinio…
“The anti-normalization agenda emerged during the election that Trump won. Those facts may not be coincidental…That Trump was uniquely unfit for office—in short, not normal—and must return to the margins” washingtonpost.com/news/postevery… @stephenwertheim
“To find out what happened & disclose it publicly…might seem like a weak & uncertain reed on which to ensure presidential accountability. But at the end of the day, it is the foundation of all constitutional constraints on the presidency.” time.com/5304226/robert… @jacklgoldsmith
“A completely indeterminate situation (i.e. ‘pure’ double contingency) never occurs in our societal reality. It can only be conceived as a kind of conceptual ‘limit’.” biblio.ugent.be/publication/48…
“There had been no such checkpoints there in more than 5 years” cnn.com/2018/06/23/us/… via @bzelizer “Border Patrol checks within the 100-mile zone are getting more attention lately as the Trump administration ratchets up its crackdown”
“concern trolling”: “the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion” en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/con…
“That which must not, can not be” – “The Impossible Fact”: alb-neckar-schwarzwald.de/morgenstern/mo… – Christian Morgenstern (1910)
“If [American democracy] is under threat, what can we do about it? And if it is not, why are we all so worried that it is?” items.ssrc.org/introducing-de… @robert_a_blair @SSRC_items
“‘Flatterer’ was hurled as an insult…suggesting a deep aversion to a style of politics associated with monarchy and court” washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-ca… George Washington: “Superfluous compliments and all affectation of ceremonies are to be avoided”
The Perpetual Crises of Democracy journalofdemocracy.org/article/perpet… “The crises underline democracy's intrinsic mix of hope and dissatisfaction, its highlighting of a lack that will never be filled. The capacity for hope is the great capacity of democracy”—O’Donnell
“The bottom line is this: Can the country tolerate having a president who has been directly implicated in violating the law?” bloomberg.com/view/articles/… @NoahRFeldman via @samuelmoyn – @jacklgoldsmith:
“We are certainly in uncharted territory here, and there is no law book or precedent that can readily provide guidance to decision-makers who must figure out what to do…in addressing—or ignoring—statements of the chief executive.” lawfareblog.com/donald-trump-t…
“The Dept. of Justice…has lost the will+ability to prosecute top executives across corporate America…Instead [it] reaches settlements with corporations, which pay in dollars instead of the liberty of their top officers+directors.” propublica.org/article/why-ma…
“There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works." Confronting Ghosts of 2000 in South Carolina (2007 report) nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/… “The state is…a painful symbol of the brutality of American politics, the place that derailed [John McCain’s] 2000 bid”
Small Change (2010) alliancemagazine.org/blog/a-qa-with… @edwarmi "It's time to pour the generosity of 'philantro-capitalists' into development funds under democratic control" theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
“Despite believing they are working for a better world, they are at most chipping away at the margins, making slight course corrections, while the system goes on as it is, uninterrupted.” nytimes.com/2018/08/20/boo… @JosephEStiglitz – @edwarmi 2010:
“He resigned rather than barricading himself in his office. The essential characteristic of a constitutional crisis—a disagreement about constitutional obligations that could not be resolved through constitutional means—was absent.”
"We face an unstable interregnum and the continuation of the political crisis…The words of Antonio Gramsci ring true: 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.'" americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progre…
“Trump’s unconstrained exercise of executive power…was made possible by the culmination of long-term trends…exposing…that these constraints are already largely unavailable” foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-… @JimGoldgeier @ProfSaunders "could hardly have asked for a more suitable system"
“If liberals focus on winning the political argument, not confirmation battles, laws and programs they favor will be less vulnerable to changes in the courts.” washingtonpost.com/news/postevery… @samuelmoyn
“Political elites are being sucked into the timid, pollster-driven opportunism of short-term power maintenance. The lack of courage to form even a single idea of one's own for which a majority must first be won” zeit.de/kultur/2018-07… Habermas—@samuelmoyn
"Just what is the crisis? In one sense, it is whatever made Trump’s victory possible." dissentmagazine.org/article/normco… @JedediahSPurdy – “Trump could hardly have asked for a more suitable system" foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-… @JimGoldgeier @ProfSaunders
“We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective” @nytopinion – "described 'resistance' to the president among his own advisers" nytimes.com/2018/09/06/us/… @nytimes
“Mr. Trump quickly corroborated these accounts by demonstrating precisely the sort of erratic, antidemocratic behavior that is driving administration officials to come forward” nytimes.com/2018/09/06/opi… @nytopinion "proving your harshest critics right"
“The inside-the-Beltway crowd uniting against a president who has rejected its orthodoxies and norms with gleeful abandon” – The Battle for Crazytown: foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/07/the… @stephenWalt
“A political system that rewards conformity and penalizes even relatively mild acts of dissent…If these elites had done a better job over the past 25 years or so, Trump would probably not have become president” foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/07/the… @stephenWalt
“His rise is a symptom of constitutional rot and constitutional dysfunction.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @jackbalkin – “The decomposition of these norms predates and to some extent helps explain Trump’s political ascent.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @joshchafetz
“Unlike other constitutional systems…ours does not give minority parties in the legislature the right to demand information and make inquiries.” prospect.org/article/democr… – Paul Starr @WilsonSchool
“The production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak…are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life.” www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f1…
“Are Constitutional Democracies Really in Crisis?” iconnectblog.com/2018/09/are-co… via @samuelmoyn – “trying to explain degrees and changes of democracy…not…yes-no switches between undemocratic and democratic conditions”: – Charles Tilly
“‘You look at the operation of this White House and you have to say, Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis.’ One has to wonder what constitutes a serious crisis in Woodward’s eyes.” nplusonemag.com/online-only/on…
“Many people worry that…any day now, the President is going to tweet: ‘that was a nice Constitution you had there, but it’s over. Sad!’” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @jackbalkin
“I do not see how a return to nation states that have to be run like big corporations in a global market can counter the tendency towards de-democratisation and growing social inequality." theguardian.com/commentisfree/… – Habermas 2015
“What institutions and institutional arrangements can optimally steward long-term, foundational research that serves the public good?” – @ssrc_org report: ssrc.org/to-secure-know… via @alondra
"This ‘game-oriented consciousness’ progressively comes to replace their ‘justice-oriented consciousness.’ They…begin to oppose those who hang on to it: they begin to…’disdain right-versus-wrong thinking as unprofessional＆naïve'" hlrecord.org/wp-content/upl… hlrecord.org/2017/10/our-bi…
“While the academic legal literature generally continues to…ignore its partisan distribution, the idea of asymmetric constitutional hardball has become increasingly familiar (if seldom analyzed in depth) outside the legal academy.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
“We write as faculty members of @YaleLawSch …to urge that the Senate conduct a fair and deliberate confirmation process…[It] must always be conducted…in a manner that gives Americans reason to trust” law.yale.edu/yls-today/news… via @samuelmoyn #must #urge
“A productive legitimation crisis presupposes subjects who interpret the crisis dynamics they experience as manifestations of system failures, not as fatalities that cannot be changed, nor as bad luck.” publicseminar.org/2014/11/democr… – Nancy Fraser @NSSRNews
“Whether we are in a time of simple flux or full-blown crisis; whether any such crisis rises to the level of a constitutional—as opposed to just a political or cultural—dislocation; and how we can steer the ship of State back on course” uclalawreview.org/the-safeguards… @JonDMichaels
“If we taught less deference to courts—and how in high stakes politics the challenge is to convince our fellow citizens first and foremost—law schools would begin to look very different.” lpeblog.org/2018/10/02/pol… @samuelmoyn
“These are words I write with no pleasure, but with deep sadness. Unlike many people who will read them with glee…As much as I admire Kavanaugh, my conscience would not permit me to vote for him.” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
“Then, to make it crazier, Hillary Clinton called…He had a whole conversation about the race, repeatedly mentioning ‘our plan’“ against Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination theguardian.com/us-news/2018/s… – Stormy with Trump in a hotel room in 2007
“’It might surprise people to learn how much of this is something of a game to the president,’ said Haberman, who covered Trump as a local news personality for more than a decade with the NY Daily News＆Post before joining the Times”realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/…
“Today’s equivalents are not aristocrats, yet they have both the sense and the experience that the rules don’t really apply to them and that they can act without much concern for the consequences.” washingtonpost.com/outlook/kavana… @shamuskhan
“Not a commitment to shared democracy but a moral imperative to lead because of one’s exceptional qualities. And…space for lying…Privilege means that things like perjury aren’t wrong under one’s own private law.” washingtonpost.com/outlook/kavana… @shamuskhan
“During a period of advanced constitutional rot＆high political polarization the federal courts are unlikely to be an instrument of constitutional renewal…will have to come from political mobilization” balkin.blogspot.com/2018/10/consti… @jackbalkin via @nils_gilman
“We all know we’re constantly navigating a web of lies and misrepresentations that possibly have a relationship with the truth and possibly don’t. Our entire democracy functions under a noxious haze of justified mistrust.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/kavan… @ebruenig
“Talk of constitutional hardball is in the air…Commentators have been pondering tactics such as impeachment, jurisdiction stripping, and especially ‘packing the court’ to a degree that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.” lawfareblog.com/hardball-andas…
“Living in a web of lies…always on guard…against deception…is an exercise in brute force: The truth is inaccessible; all that matters is which side has the power to win the day. It’s a self-destructive cycle.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/kavan… @ebruenig
“What kind of democracy? One where wage slavery is the norm? Where politicians deploy the ample tools of demagoguery to get elected and then ignore ordinary voters?” bostonreview.net/politics/wajah… @BostonReview
“Electoral authoritarians do as they please to win elections. Illiberal democrats do as they please after winning them…Elected leaders and governments often combine both features as democracy erodes” foreignaffairs.com/print/1123331 @SlaterPolitics @ForeignAffairs
“Deepening social divisions are, with the help of opportunistic political entrepreneurs, turning into a form of politicized segmental pluralism that undermines both social commitment to democratic norms and generalized social solidarity in civil society.”
“It may turn out that systems based on contested elections do not endure unless some x's hold. If democracy must generate some conditions…just to last, then the minimalist defense of the minimal conception breaks down” books.google.com/books?id=8dBT8… – Pzreworski
“If people define democracy and democratization mistakenly, they will botch international relations, baffle explanation, and thereby reduce people’s chances for better lives.” (Charles Tilly) assets.cambridge.org/97805217/01532… – @washingtonpost:
“Congress should…” 11 reform proposals: brennancenter.org/sites/default/… “an ‘ought’ statement addressed to agents who through their actions can bring about the state of affairs that the regulative statement only posits” – @jacklgoldsmith:
“Epistemological progress consists in the construction＆reconstruction of more adequate narratives＆…epistemological crises are occasions for such reconstruction…an intelligible dramatic narrative which can claim historical truth” ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Texte_…
“The prohibition on assassination has either eroded or disappeared ('norm death'), never meaningfully existed…for the actors in question ('norm dissociation'), or still exists but has changed in form ('norm transformation').” journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…
“A legitimate critique of that consensus, which I consider myself to be part of and still believe in, is that we did not adapt quickly enough to the fact that there were people being left behind” nytimes.com/2018/11/28/us/… – Barack Obama
“Instead of suffusing the legal system w/ legitimacy…law schools must help demystify it so that the law’s disservice to…ordinary people is clearer to them…Law forges dependable tools for social improvement only when democracy takes the lead” chronicle.com/article/Law-Sc… @samuelmoyn
“While Trump’s style of rule may be patrimonial, its legitimacy clearly cannot depend upon…tradition…nor is it legal-rational. It can only be charismatic…His appeal is that of the taboo-breaker…with a macho swagger…transmitted…through media”
“Since…Trump’s ‘emergency’ declaration would be a direct response to his failure to convince Congress that national security requires his wall, it is hard to believe that a majority of the Senate…would accept his show of contempt for their authority.” nytimes.com/2019/01/05/opi…
“The Bush admin. acted as though 9/11 created the basis not only for a national state of emergency, but also an int. state of emergency that requires other countries to make exceptions to both int. law & their constitutional orders” scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewconten…
“Trump’s Muslim ban is simply the War on Terror on steroids.” bostonreview.net/politics/jeann… @BostonReview via @stephenWalt
“These orders…feature…findings that the relevant conditions exist, and the exercise of the relevant powers, as applied…When it comes to the president’s findings about the state of the world, OLC generally defers to the president” washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wor…
“Two venerable democracies in crisis. Rarely have British＆American politics seemed quite so synchronized as they do…3 years after the victories of Brexit ＆ D. Trump upended the two nations’ political establishments” nytimes.com/2019/01/12/us/… @MarkLandler
“Among the most corrosive developments of recent years—one that predates the election of Donald Trump—has been a breakdown in our ability to debate and reason with others with whom we disagree.” hewlett.org/listening-with… @Hewlett_Found
“The corporate media’s obligation to maximize ad revenue by maximizing viewership…has left it no choice but to elevate its opposition. Of course, one could make a similar argument about media coverage of…Trump in 2015” nymag.com/intelligencer/… @EricLevitz
“In such a context, it is not hard to portray the rule of law and constitutional norms as tilted towards the corporate rich or corrupt political elites, nor to cast liberal constitutionalism a misnomer for oligarchy” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @ColumbiaSocSci
“At the end of history, it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different & higher forms of human society.” wesjones.com/eoh.htm @FukuyamaFrancis 1989
"The real problem most of Washington has with ‘AOC’: her self-generated popularity and large social media presence means she doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to say anything.” rollingstone.com/politics/polit…
“Working-class jobs make up over half of the American labor force, but working-class Americans hold less than 3% of the seats in the typical state legislature and less than 2% of the seats in Congress.” washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-ca… @monkeycageblog
“Democracy or plutocracy: That is, fundamentally, what top tax rates are about.” nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opi… via @nils_gilman
“When Ernst asked how an ad about castrating hogs might be received, Harris told her to ‘be prepared for a lot of East Coast hyperventilating’ but assured her that it would be well received by people in Iowa." washingtonpost.com/politics/how-j…
“Siding with authoritarians when faced by unpredictable radical democratic forces…When calls to honor the public good bump up against self-interest, liberals often suffer a moment of queasiness that is usually salved by declaring a problem ‘complicated.’” newrepublic.com/article/152935…
“The Enlightenment culture of truth on which democracy rests…that no single individual or institution should ‘hold a monopoly…on determining what counts as truth in public life'" thenation.com/article/david-… @DavidAvromBell "Faced with this very real crisis, what should we do?"
"Sunsets…don’t guarantee a thoughtful, principled debate…But…they at least put the onus on Congress” nbcnews.com/think/opinion/… “If Cong. regularly had to reauthorize the 2001 AUMF…the American people would have more of a role in identifying those we are at war w/”@steve_vladeck
The “Great National Debate”: a “detonator of collective intelligence” nytimes.com/2019/01/23/wor… via @landemore “By thrusting himself squarely into the debate…& showing his command of all the subjects thrown at him, the president has clawed back lost ground”
“We’re building a new form of democracy…Participative democracy. Information circulates much more quickly. We’ve got to do a sort of hygiene of information.” – Macron nytimes.com/2019/01/23/wor… “What is missing, many agree, is less mouth and more ear on the part of the president.”
“Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we…match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200 signals—things like relevance, freshness, popularity” theverge.com/2018/12/11/181… “This is working at scale, and we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result”
“‘Executive Time’ was Kelly’s response to the president’s complaints that he was over-scheduled…and ‘didn’t have any time to think’” politico.com/story/2018/10/… “a euphemism for the unstructured time Trump spends tweeting, phoning friends and watching TV”
“68% of voters were in favor of…the so-called ‘rip-off’ initiative": Prison Sentences for Golden Parachutes cnbc.com/id/100516799 “In the U.S. and Britain [shareholder] ‘say-on-pay’ votes are non-binding” cbsnews.com/news/the-swiss…
“If the only things that mattered were 'material' conditions and the constellations of interest directly or indirectly 'created' by them…all economic auguries point in the direction of a growing loss of freedom.” – Max Weber 1906
“The reason I laughed [in July 2015] was not at the notion of Trump as a nominee…The congressman described Trump's ‘momentum,’ which struck me as him trying to elevate the wished-for Democratic candidate instead of expressing a real fear” (Feb 22, 2016) washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w…
“Trump was ‘in a very personable and good mood’” (Jan 31, 2019) mailchi.mp/cnn/rs-jan-31-… – “Maggie and George are great at their jobs” (Feb 22, 2016) washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w…
“Trump has spent decades cajoling and needling the journalists who cover him…He sidestepped the notion that his ascent to the world’s most powerful pulpit had made his criticisms far more consequential” nytimes.com/2019/02/01/bus… via @mathewi
“The generic defensive strategy is not fully satisfying, because there remains a question about the degree to which the assessment of a political theory can legitimately remain unaffected by the failures of sustained attempts to realize it in practice.”
“The flaws and imperfections of actual liberal societies may or may not reflect any inadequacies in liberal theories…may reveal only the extent to which actual societies have failed to conform to the requirements of liberal theory” bostonreview.net/politics-philo…
“The difficulty with political liberalism, old and new, is the neglect of the structural sources of inequality, influence, resource, and power among competing groups.” – Benhabib cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.ya… – Offe:
“The ability to afford not to learn” (Karl Deutsch) books.google.com/books?id=9GOnu… “Power…is the priority of output over intake, the ability to talk instead of listen…the ability to afford not to learn…When carried to extremes, such narrow power becomes blind”
“The normal constitutional approaches to governing…are no longer respected…His I’m-The-Only-One-Who-Matters approach…fits well with the needs of modern media, both social and traditional” washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-r… “The real national emergency is the triviality of our politics”
“There has been a long steady counterrevolution taking place since 9/11…But Trump’s fake state of emergency reveals that American democracy is now fully eclipsed.” thenation.com/article/donald… @BernardHarcourt
“Instilling a more ‘combative’ approach…Gingrich and his allies…helped to establish ‘politics as warfare’ as the GOP’s dominant strategy…Partisan warfare only intensified…on the counsel of Karl Rove” newrepublic.com/article/145916… @dziblatt
“Constitutional crises in the U.S. are rare in large part because of the robustness of the country's informal constitutional practices, reasonably good constitutional design, and relatively limited political disagreement” (2002) core.ac.uk/download/pdf/7…
“Reagan once called America the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ Today, our light of freedom is shining less brightly…Democracies are backsliding the world over…The Trump administration does not fully grasp the threat these trends portend” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… @AdamSchiff
“When an epistemological crisis is resolved…the narrative in terms of which he or she at first understood and ordered experiences is itself made into the subject of an enlarged narrative” ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Texte_…
“Available to candidates that challenged the policy consensus that had done so much damage to the region…the election was decided by a Rust Belt revolt that unified black＆white working-class voters against H. Clinton” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.111… @mgmcquarrie
“Once associated with hierarchical differentiations of rank and status, ‘dignity’ now conveys the idea that all human persons belong to the same rank and that that rank is a very high one indeed” brown.edu/Research/ppw/f… @JeremyJWaldron
“In the name of a narrow＆strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic＆social conditions of rational orientations＆the economic＆social structures that are the condition of their application” mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bour…
“Can it be expected that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by this sort of political-economic regime will one day serve as the starting point of a movement capable of stopping the race to the abyss?” mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bour… – Bourdieu 1998
“Neoliberal goals that individuals behave as informed consumers responsible for their own health…in sharp contrast to the tenets of public health that expect individuals to accept minimal risk to protect those…most vulnerable” gendersociety.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/neo…
“The ‘imperious immediacy of interest’…refers to instances where the actor's paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes the consideration of further or other consequences of the same act” pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dc9f/6f377a931… – Merton
“DOJ could combine its policies against indicting a sitting president＆against disclosing negative information on an investigative target who was not indicted to justify keeping secret all the information collected about Mr. Trump” nytimes.com/2019/03/14/us/…
“Congress can only terminate an emergency…if veto-proof supermajorities…agree…The demise of the legislative veto has turned what was supposed to be a meaningful constraint on the president into a blank check” nbcnews.com/think/opinion/… @steve_vladeck
“Just behind the presidents and vice presidents, Ivanka Trump sat next to Chelsea Clinton, suppressing from public view any hostility that might exist between them.” washingtonpost.com/politics/bush-…
“Trump, a frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman and the Late Show with David Letterman for decades—before he was the Republican presidential nominee” vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016…
“By defining knowledge as actual knowledge, the [ABA] ethical rules promote duties to the public on the surface while allowing lawyers to ignore them in reality…The rules…are merely ornamental” digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewconten… – "tolerating willful ignorance"
“The sphinxlike riddle of McConnell’s deeper motivations…The answer, as ever, is that McConnell is in every way a study in stolid depth-resistance” newrepublic.com/article/153275… via @nils_gilman
“Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism＆sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction btw the continuity of basic structures of power＆their political legitimation” lrb.co.uk/v41/n07/adam-t… @adam_tooze
“Mueller’s team assumed the information was going to be made available to the public, the official said, ‘and so they prepared their summaries to be shared in their own words…not in the AG’s summary’” washingtonpost.com/world/national… via @yeselson—@jacklgoldsmith:
“Never in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist of fire and fury that even I have had a moment…” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… @jtlevy
“Refeudalization” archive.org/stream/in.erne… “At one time publicity had to be gained in opposition to the secret politics of the monarchs; it sought to subject person or issue to rational-critical public debate＆to render political decisions subject to review”
“Trying to find a different formula that produces a different result…Unless you either change the court directives or the asylum law, it’s very hard to quickly come up with a solution. And the president’s frustrated by that” politico.com/story/2019/04/…
“In fact, it was Friedman himself who capitalized significantly on this 1971 ‘crisis’ as well, as his ideas gained significant legitimacy in public policy in the post–Bretton Woods period” journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117… via @zeithistoriker
“The Führer protects the law from its worst abuse when in the moment of danger he,by virtue of his domain as Führer+as the supreme judicial authority, directly creates the law…The true Führer is always a judge as well” books.google.com/books?id=jPckD… Schmitt 1934
X “would qualify as an obstructive act if it would naturally obstruct the investigation…It would be necessary to show…the natural+probable effect” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/… “difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a trad. prosecutorial judgment”– Mueller
“Trump submitted written answers to the special counsel, but notably declined to address questions related to obstruction.” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…
“We did not make a traditional prosecution decision about these facts…Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President 's conduct” cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/image… – Mueller
“Trump submitted written answers to the special counsel, but notably declined to address [i.e. obstructed?] questions related to obstruction.” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…
“He did not…agree [i.e. obstructed] to provide written answers to questions on obstruction…While we believed that we had the authority and legal justification…to obtain the President 's testimony, we chose not to do so” cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/image… – Mueller
“We determined that the substantial quantity of information we had obtained from other sources allowed us to draw relevant factual conclusions on intent and credibility” – Mueller cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/image… – “relevant” as distinct from “ultimate conclusions”
“And…we recognized that a fed. criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President's capacity to govern＆potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct” cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/image… Mueller
“relevant factual conclusions on intent and credibility” as it is called in “ultimate conclusions”-abstinent Mueller lingo
“Dear AG Barr:…There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Dept appointed the SC: to assure full public confidence” int.nyt.com/data/documenth… – Mueller
“In 2016, our fellow citizens used their one form of power—majority rule, however outrageously designed…—to protest. The democratic way to engage w/ them is to seek justice for their plight,＆not merely to bring down an exasperating president” nytimes.com/2019/07/26/opi… @samuelmoyn
@samuelmoyn “Conflicts…over the distribution of the social product…divisible conflicts over more or less, in contrast to conflicts of the either-or or nondivisible category…of societies split along rival ethnic, linguistic, or religious lines” jstor.org/stable/192144?… – A. O. Hirschman
@samuelmoyn "A potentially bleak future for US politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social＆cult. cleavages that serve to reinforce deep partisan divisions＆undermine the stability of liberal democratic institutions" osf.io/preprints/soca… @bartbonikowski
“A news media that pretends moral outrage will greedily cover his every move (cable-news profits have soared 36 percent since Trump began his run four years ago).” rollingstone.com/politics/polit…
“Using Marine One as a backdrop, the White House has replaced formal briefings with impromptu chats where the president sets all the rules” politico.com/story/2019/08/… “Trump’s ‘chopper talk’”
“The secret of democracy lies in the expectation that one's day will come, that today's loss is only a temporary setback, that everyone eventually gets a chance…That shared belief is a social product.” brandonkendhammer.com/challenges_of_… – Charles Tilly
“For at least two decades, the evolution of our political institutions has rendered our democracy increasingly flawed and fragile. Removing Donald Trump from office, will not, in and of itself, alter this trajectory” books.google.com/books?id=A2FmD… McAdam: Trump in Historical Perspective
“In contrast to a normative agreement, a cognitive agreement does not affect the way in which the actors select and pursue their action goals…guided exclusively by their personal preferences or…also…by binding norms” books.google.com/books?id=mv4kC… – Habermas
“Strategically acting subjects presume of each other…beliefs…they themselves hold to be true. However, the truth values that guide each of them from…their respective personal…goals are not transformed into truth claims” books.google.com/books?id=mv4kC… Habermas
“In 1974, 69%…trusted the mass media to report the news ‘fully, accurately＆fairly'…Today the number is 41%, incl. only 15% of Republicans…[Nixon]‘might have survived if there’d been a Fox News,’ the only outlet a majority of Republicans say they trust” nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opi…
"In […] a performative attitude, actors are immune to acknowledging empirically observable imperfections until these reach a threshold at which the discrepancy btw the ideal＆its incomplete realization…becomes intolerable”books.google.com/books?id=RrjlB… Habermas
"Democracy is a good in itself, since…it gives a regime’s subject population collective power to determine its own fate…It delivers better living conditions, at least…access to education, medical care, and legal protection” assets.cambridge.org/97805217/01532… Tilly
“Only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises […] a disintegration of social institutions.” archive.org/stream/JurgenH… – Habermas
“An early poll like this is largely a measure of name ID. But it's also a vivid illustration of just how strong Trump's brand is with the GOP. Ivanka and Don Jr. find themselves near the top of a long list of politicians who have held elected office” axios.com/2024-election-…
“Rossiter's 1948 Constitutional Dictatorship…argued…that the US has a particularly deficient form…the fact that the President is significantly unrestrained in declaring the existence of 'emergencies’ that license expansions of executive power” balkin.blogspot.com/2020/01/consti…
"what the so-called realists or the advocates of Critical Legal Studies discover about how the motives of judges are determined by interests” books.google.com/books?id=jh1rD…
“The Führer protects the law from its worst abuse when in the moment of danger he,by virtue of his domain as Führer+as the supreme judicial authority, directly creates the law…The true Führer is always a judge as well” books.google.com/books?id=jPckD… Schmitt 1934
“at heart, liberal or radical democrats disappointed by the transparent failures…intellectuals who have actually experienced life under severely repressive hegemonic regimes rarely argue that differences in regime are trivial” books.google.com/books?id=JcKz2… Dahl
“having…confirmed that it was true, for some reason continued checking. ‘People in the bottom half have essentially no wealth,’ he helpfully pointed out. ‘So the comparison is not especially meaningful’.” newrepublic.com/article/156039… “a centrist columnist disguised as a fact-checker”
“Fact-checkers have expanded their purview from checking strictly empirical statements…As a result, Trump’s most glaring whoppers…appear no different than Rep. AOC’s contention that it’s morally wrong to pay people less than a living wage”
"That’s why I don’t sleep through the night very well in the Trump era, because…what America is is at stake in this period.” annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.114… – Theda Skocpol
“In most of the Western European democracies, although there is a populist far right that has risen, it has not gained power. In the U.S. it has gained power.” newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/c… “the advantage of the multiparty systems throughout Western Europe"
"We respectfully urge the resumption of regular press briefings across our government” cnn.com/2020/01/10/opi… via @brianstelter
“The reason I laughed [2015] was not at the notion of Trump as a nominee…[Ellison] described Trump's ‘momentum,’ which struck me as him trying to elevate the wished-for Democratic candidate instead of expressing a real fear” (2016) washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w…
“Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future” nytimes.com/2010/10/29/opi… – Habermas 2010
Q: "I’m wondering how you flying around the country in 2021 rallying the people would be different than what Donald Trump has been doing?"
A: "Well, I don’t know if I should be insulted by that question.” nytimes.com/interactive/20… @nytopinion
A: "Well, I don’t know if I should be insulted by that question.” nytimes.com/interactive/20… @nytopinion
“Over 60% of Clinton’s TV ads were solely about candidate characteristics compared to those of Trump, over 70% of whose ads concerned policy, a figure much closer to what has typically been seen in presidential campaigns since 2000” stanford.edu/~dbroock/publi…
"Trump can dictate an entire news cycle w/ a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference…The pol. economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem…A solution is nowhere in sight” vox.com/policy-and-pol…
"and third, reduction of autonomous coercive power centers" [military rule; secret police, clandestine prisons, paramilitary; warlords＆militias; autonomous power of capitalists, private protection services, gangsters] books.google.com/books?id=g2wyD… Charles Tilly
"The deliberative attitude is capable of being separated from the propagandist attitude. Deliberation implies the search for the solution of a besetting problem with no desire to prejudice a particular solution in advance" freewebs.com/thebewilderedh… Lasswell
“Post-democracy as a situation where all the institutions of democracy…continue, but they become a charade…surpassed as major decision-making entities by small groups of financial and political elites” discoversociety.org/2016/11/01/vie… – Colin Crouch (2004/2016)
“Containment of previously autonomous military forces…seems almost a necessary condition for democratization, but it also has significant effects on the capacity of government…likelihood of civil war…even…international war”professor-murmann.info/tilly/2001_Mec… Tilly
"Standardizing the scope of sincere utterances…under oath during trials or marriage ceremonies, which institutionalize a uni- or bilateral claim to 'the whole truth,' thus excluding strategic withholding of information” books.google.com/books?id=CQtDR… – Habermas
"'Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law'…To withhold funds…to influence the reputation of a political adversary is a high crime” justsecurity.org/68233/what-sor… via @samuelmoyn
@samuelmoyn “The team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage…a pre-election release of the American hostages” nytimes.com/2019/12/29/wor…
“When Ernst asked how an ad about castrating hogs might be received, Harris told her to ‘be prepared for a lot of East Coast hyperventilating’ but assured her that it would be well received by people in Iowa." washingtonpost.com/politics/how-j…
"If the Trump era has proved anything, it is that American democracy, which has never been without profound flaws, cannot be taken for granted.” @NewYorker series on the future of democracy: newyorker.com/news/the-futur…
@NewYorker "Crises…when the consensual foundations of normative structures are so much impaired that the society becomes anomic” archive.org/stream/JurgenH… – Habermas
"By speaking last, he can present testimony precisely calculated to hurt those he most wants to embarrass…He will dole out the details and evidence methodically, thwarting his critics like steers in a cutting horse competition” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… via @nils_gilman
"Answers to such questions primarily tell us how well citizens perceive their political system to be performing…may be strong believers in liberal democracy & yet dissatisfied with the performance of such institutions…That said…” bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/…
"'Faithful execution of the law does not permit the Pres. to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congr. has enacted'…To withhold funds…to influence the reputation of a pol. adversary is a high crime” justsecurity.org/68233/what-sor… @just_security
@just_security “If the agent opportunistically adjusts his idea of impartiality…it will be…difficult for him to maintain the belief that he is not motivated by self-interest. Some…may be capable of this feat of self-deception, but most are not” books.google.com/books?id=Jztkf…
"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies…have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history” nybooks.com/articles/1978/… – Arendt
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” isreview.org/issue/108/morb… – Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, c.1930
“Laden with comparatively weak normative expectations…the liberal model hinges…on the legal institutionalization of an economic society that is supposed to guarantee an essentially nonpolitical common good” books.google.com/books?id=oUo9p… – Habermas
"Transferring the historical diagnosis of crisis directly into the historiograph. narrative…can…be misleading…the historiograph. tendency to treat crises not as phenomena that need to be explained but rather as events that can explain other developments”docupedia.de/zg/Graf_jaraus…
