Evelyn Quartz

My latest on government shutdowns in the attention economy era.

Welcome To The Shutdown Circus, Where Everybody Loses Everyone agrees antics around the spending-bill deadline are nothing but callous political stunts — so why do we agree to be governed like this at all?

Everyone agrees antics around the spending-bill deadline are nothing but callous political stunts — so why do we agree to be governed like this at all?
@evelynquartz.bsky.social
@levernews.com

www.levernews.com/welcome-to-t...

Yes! We must continue to ask what is truly required when we're told to protect democracy & why so many people are right to have lost faith in the narrow, procedural definition. Because it has not come with the material dignity we all deserve as human beings.

I get why it’s hard to see Trump as anything other than the singular threat. We’ve been conditioned to see politics through the democracy–fascism binary, where he’s the villain and everything against him is “saving democracy.” But that framing obscures the bigger story. My work tries to expose this.

Trump isn’t the “end” of American democracy, he’s a symptom of decades of bipartisan erosion in a system that was already failing most people. Treating him as the endpoint turns a structural crisis into a single-villain story, and that story lets the deeper rot go unchallenged. That is my argument.

What I'm really disturbed by and what few are talking about is how Democrats have been gerrymandering for years and now are using rhetoric of war and the American project to grab more power, by making seats safer for them. We cannot let them off the hook for that.

The trouble is, once that power is consolidated, Democrats rarely use it to expand economic democracy or materially improve people’s lives. Instead, they stabilize the same broken order of austerity that helped create the crisis. Calling this a defense of democracy risks gutting the term entirely.

I don’t deny the authoritarian strain in the GOP. But the liberal political and media class has an incentive to cast Trump as an unprecedented fascist, b/c it turns politics into “democracy vs. dictatorship” and lets them justify power grabs like gerrymandering as acts of noble necessity.

And before anyone comes at me for being naive or not understanding politics, please read the article. I go through the major arguments being made in favor of this and try to dispel them.

Do As We Say, Not As We Gerrymander By fighting gerrymandering with gerrymandering, Democrats are betraying their own democratic principles.

My new piece for @levernews.com, on why Democrats should NOT “fight fire with fire” when it comes to gerrymandering.

There is another, much harder but more democratic option: build a popular winning agenda.

www.levernews.com/do-as-we-say...

Shame on the Liberals: They Let This Happen. This piece isn’t written from detachment. It’s written out of fury.

This is the most honest and damning piece I’ve written since leaving a career in liberal politics. I hope you’ll read it.

quartzevelyn.substack.com/p/shame-on-t...

Strange how Epstein becomes a bipartisan outrage only once elites can use it to score points. The people who called MAGA voters conspiratorial now claim moral clarity—without ever naming how their own class insulated him for years.

Such important reporting! The more people that can see identity politics as it's weaponized by both parties to serve corporate interests the better.

What Elissa Slotkin Reveals About Liberal Politics Her Breaking Points interview was one of the most honest moments in years—not because she confessed, but because she couldn’t.

I was just made aware of this by an excellent article by @evelynquartz.bsky.social!

quartzevelyn.substack.com/p/what-eliss...

Why You Know the Far Right in Europe—But Not the Left A case for why that's intentional.

BRAVA @evelynquartz.bsky.social The left doesn’t just critique the right. It offers an alternative to the center. Housing, healthcare, labor rights, public infrastructure, climate —not as technocratic reforms, but as moral commitments. That everyone deserves dignity. That care isn’t a commodity.

So it’s either a project that remains deeply undemocratic or fails due to its unpopularity with the people. As citizens and voters who care about justice and economic equality, we have to understand this for what it is and demand something better.

The problem with the mainstream “pro-democracy” movement that formed in reaction to Trump is that it protects liberal democracy while shutting down economic democracy. The lack of economic democracy is why people are rejecting liberal democracy (i.e. Trump’s second win).

The False Choice That’s Breaking America: Symbolic Democracy or Authoritarian Rule Neither party offers a future. It’s time to reclaim power, not just process.

My new piece argues that we must reject the false choice presented by our politics of technocratic liberalism vs. authoritarian rule.

The third option is intentionally hidden: economic democracy and a politics of agency.

quartzevelyn.substack.com/p/the-false-...

The inconvenient truth: Without economic democracy, political democracy becomes hollow. You can vote every two years, but if you have no say over your job, your landlord, your debt, your time—you are not free.

And the center-left knows this. That’s why they focus on aesthetics, not power.

You see, my concern is that it's not the authoritarianism they hate; we already have a soft version of that. But the aesthetic betrayal that Trump represents. Trump peels the mask off the "respectability" of elite governance.

Suspended civil liberties, eviscerated privacy, and militarized the homeland

Used a crisis (9/11) to consolidate executive power and criminalize dissent

Oversaw the largest transfer of wealth to defense contractors and oil companies in modern history

An honest question I have for the pro-democracy centrist movement: Was George Bush not a threat to democracy?

Was not elected by the majority, but installed by the Supreme Court

Lied the nation into war, killing hundreds of thousands

Legalized torture, detention without trial & mass surveillance

A Big, Bipartisan Betrayal Democrats are using Trump’s apocalyptic bill as a campaign gimmick — and ignoring their role in its cruelty.

Democrats are using Trump’s apocalyptic bill as a campaign gimmick — and ignoring their role in its cruelty.

A Big, Bipartisan Betrayal Democrats are using Trump’s apocalyptic bill as a campaign gimmick — and ignoring their role in its cruelty.

Wrote about The Big Beautiful Bill and a country that has long treated health care as a market commodity to be managed rather than a basic human right. For @levernews.com.

www.levernews.com/a-big-bipart...

I used to write talking points for House democrats. I’ve seen how these moments get turned into scripted outrage. But this isn’t a messaging failure—it’s a failure of moral and political vision. People will lose health care. And there’s no plan to stop it.

Democratic leaders insist they're very angry that Trump is cutting taxes for billionaires...but Democratic leaders are also very angry that Mamdani is proposing to raise taxes on billionaires.

One of the most convenient myths in American politics is that oligarchy began with Trump.

In reality, liberal elites helped build the corporate order long before he arrived. And now, by blaming everything on him, they avoid reckoning with the system they still want to control.

It's not the message! The problem isn’t how Democrats communicate—it’s what they’re offering.

Corporate Dems need to WTFU : "This is the heart of technocratic liberalism: a politics that treats human suffering as a policy failure, not a moral one. It doesn’t ask what kind of society produces such outcomes—only how to optimize it"

🔥from @evelynquartz.bsky.social

The Trump Protests Will Fail — Unless People Do This The resistance won’t succeed until it stops being a performance and starts challenging the system that got us here.

Watch the liberal class, who fawned over the No Kings Day protests as "resistance" and "pro-democracy," sow skepticism and downplay Mamdani's win. It proves my point in this piece.

www.levernews.com/the-trump-pr...

I hear you. Take Rice then. She’s the head of a powerful institution at Stanford.