@samulmschneider.bsky.social
Teaching Constitutional studies, poli sci, political theory, US history topics in Virginia. Own views & comments, these don't reflect my institutional affiliations. Husband / cat person / Madisonian / Lincolnite / Trekkie / strategy gamer / metalhead.
I am not much of a military policy wonk, but it seems to me that 3,000 Marines are hardly enough for a large or sustained ground presence, so I have no idea what the much-headlined incoming force really bodes in the medium to long term.
I have not found this message to sell as well as I'd like outside of voters who already agree with me - but I agree, among young people, voters in urban areas, service economy workers, yes, it is a simple and effective message.
I think there's a genuine problem with some young people looking at influencer culture and believing that they should be living like that and something's wrong (either with them or society) if they're not. (And a lot of that influencer culture is guys living with five roommates in Dubai in reality!)
Look, I am deeply sympathetic to this policy position. But by the time we get to this point in the discussion too many voters have tuned out. We have to find a way to lead with benefits (better roads! better police! better schools!) and follow only distantly w “that means taxes.”
I strongly agree with you as a matter of opinion policy. I’m at a loss as to how to translate that agreement into an effective policy against a tax-cutting opponent.
Genuinely, I do not know that there is any good or effective response to race-to-the-bottom tax policy in a high cost of living era. There’s virtually no way to combat its seductive power for voters that I am aware of, and the first to deploy it wields its strength best.
I agree with you but it is VERY hard to ask people running for office to resist the siren song of “voters are absolutely famished for more take home income or think they are at least.” I don’t know a good way to fight this fight against GOP opponents who are all in on stuff like no-tax-on-tips.
Every American owes high school civics and government teachers one (1) free beer, minimum, for trying to make this last fucking decade+a half into the skills, knowledge and dispositions we are meant to be developing in 18 year olds without anything but bipartisan opportunism to support/undermine us.
store bought curriculum removes democratic responsiveness and badly dilutes the ways in which we can/should expect curricula to reflect the needs and values of the community (state or local) which develops it. that's as big a problem as any other imo!
Seems possible that the whole idea of a major national for-profit (or fake non-profit) curriculum company is a dangerous one to the principles of liberal education, I dunno, just kind of a hunch.
There are many criticisms I have of the AP Government curriculum, but at least by requiring students to read Federalist #10 we will hopefully, over time, put the dumb version of the republic/democracy distinction to bed.
too bad for them! you're right! The Supreme Court, at least until it has a fundamentally different function in our political system than the one it assumed in the 20th century, is a body more like Madison's 'council of revision' than not, so its members should be conceptualized in that mold!
oh yeah, sorry - I misunderstood that you were implying the 2004 that ALMOST happened rather than the 2004 that really did happen as the missed opportunity. Yeah, the not-quite, alternate-universe 2004 might have been and probably would have been the death knell for the electoral college.
Codpiece not a feature of comics in the decade preceding the Stallone film, no (1986, 1982, 1987)
2004 would only have been a missed opportunity if Kerry had flipped Ohio but not the national popular vote, defeating Bush in a way analagous to the way Bush defeated Gore. b/c Bush won both popular and electoral votes decisively, it generated no momentum for reform to be 'missed' as an opport'y.
the KC-135 Stratotanker, incidentally, is an airframe so old that my grandfather worked on it as one of his main jobs in the air force pre-1980s, so it's weird to see the loss of a KC-135 crop up as a major moment in 2026. (I'm in my 40s, no super-young childbearing on that line) .
basically everyone agrees but also no one wants to burn down the electoral college until they are convinced that the ashes will be a system which works to the advantage of their political party or at least not to the advantage of the OTHER political party, so it never actually happens.
never ceases to amaze me the degree to which the Electoral College was probably one of the least carefully deliberated and discussed things at the Constitutional Convention, a committee-kludge compromise no one loved much, but we've been stuck in a standoff over how to reform it since 1824 at least.
can someone please let me have a couple years out of the classroom to get the PhD I crave? I don't want to compete in the gladiator publishing of real academia. I love my topics and my Poli Sci and History MAs were great, left me wanting more depth of my own to enrich my students understanding with.
Stephen Miller complaining about the UK finally eliminating heredity nobility from their legislature is a perfect encapsulation of how perverse it is to have these people in charge during the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Great video from @jamellebouie.net ; this topic of reforming our expectations about who gets nominated/confirmed is one of my personal hobby horses and he name drops all the reasons why far more eloquently and succinctly than I every could in his typically effective fashion. Give it watch!
Little but** more evil
I wasn’t terribly clear, sorry- I agree there’s no room for moral ambiguity about the awful evil of the conflict or those who set it in motion, and that no one should pretend there is. It’s an evil war set in motion by evil men for evil reasons, and it will spawn little bit more evil as its progeny
When your opening approach to a person is personal, principled, sharp and cruel moral attack, it tends to prime in them an antagonistic attitude to your moral claims. But like I said, I respect your attitude here - it’s not an easy or clear case to be made, I think, for either attitude.
Perhaps. But that process can be made more effective w a soft first touch. It is easier, I think, to help people first understand the evils in which they are (often without true knowledge of it) participating, then demand they live up to the moral demands their new understanding requires of them.
I have got to wonder what the average naval enlisted man suffering in the bowels of the USS Gerald Ford (that’s true in a couple of senses…) or Army enlisted hunkering in a bunker in a Kuwait control room thinks when they see a post like this from their commanders and political superiors.
I won’t try to argue with a stance that absolute, though that doesn’t mean I fully agree with you, I do respect your right to pure moral positions (and your clear, thoughtful expression of them!)
Reading Umberto Ecos “Ur-Fascism” w my political philosophy students tomorrow as part of a broader unit on fascism and anti-fascism (we already did some Mussolini, Gentile, Sorel, Schmitt). It’s one of my favorite all time pieces of writing and I’m intensely curious how they’ll take it in and react.
Idk man, I think the average laundry-doing sailor on a current day US carrier is a tad less morally culpable than like, William Calley. This whole war is evil and wrong but it’s fine to have graduations for just how badly tarred everyone around it is by the acts dictated by the evil men at the top.
Schmitt was an active scholar in the legal academy, considered important and insightful enough to be a writer, advisor, and commentator to the Weimar government on its constitutional system. I’m not sure if he was contrarian per se but he was an active, strong voice in important Weimar era debates.