Michael Cerny

This is what authoritarians do - use the powers of the state to humiliate and degrade their opponents in public so that others will not challenge them

The Democrats' Path Forward: Become the Anti-Corruption Party But to reform the system they first need to reform the Democratic Party.

Democrats should become the anti-corruption party. 72% of voters think a member of Congress would likely accept a bribe if offered one. 80% say donors run DC. The solution isn’t left vs right, it’s clean vs corrupt. But first, Democrats must reform themselves and reject big money.

Where we are as a country - the president does not make the law

Warnings From Weimar Why bargaining with authoritarians fails.

A new piece I wrote appearing in FOREIGN AFFAIRS today

www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/warn...

Warnings From Weimar Why bargaining with authoritarians fails.

www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/warn...

I keep seeing the Trump-Intel deal called socialism, but there’s a term for this. This parallels what Mussolini did—the Italian state was one of the world’s largest industrial owners while keeping private companies. Nazi Germany did this too. So did Francoist Spain. It’s called state corporatism.

Authoritarian regimes frequently struggle to govern effectively because accurate information doesn't reach the leadership. Trump is basically designing a system to create this problem.

I suspect the John Bolton thing is less likely a show trial than a show investigation. The powers of the FBI/DOJ/prosecutors provide the ability to systematically persecute people for years, ruining their lives and costing them enormous amounts of money in legal fees with little recourse.

Photo of DOGE staffer Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old white man in a blue pullover, carrying a black backpack.

Photo of 53-year-old Afghan scholar Mohammad Halimi. He is sitting, wearing white pants and shirt with a brown vest.

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout.

On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar.

This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media.

Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

My take is that senior officers are completely unprepared for this moment.

When demo is healthy, there is little tension btw adhering to civilian control & serving democracy

Faced w/ the manifest clash in principles these missions present, they are doing what's familiar--following orders.1/

To reiterate: there is no legitimate justification for this. Violent crime is at a 30-year low in D.C.

hegemonic enshittification how are ya www.wired.com/story/enshit...

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

He's right, and it's not just Brazil.

Around the world, at least 31 democratic leaders who committed similar crimes have been jailed or banned from office since 2010. The failure to hold Trump accountable in the US was a unique and systemic failure of our institutions and political culture.

The first session of The Civic Forum is today at noon EST! Link is here: www.crowdcast.io/c/civicforum.... Come for a short lecture on democratic erosion in the U.S. Full series info here: www.thecivicforum.com

How to Dismantle a Democracy, Legally The unitary executive theory is a masterclass in autocratic legalism.

The "unitary executive theory" is a fancy name for a strategy used by authoritarians worldwide, rebranded for the US. It’s a legal blueprint for a power grab, and my new article explains how it turns the law itself into a tool for undermining democracy:

I hope @christiehenry.bsky.social understands that for many in Xinjiang, the “peace” she saw is what scholars have elsewhere termed “the peace of the prison-yard.”
(Plenty of good scholars at Princeton who could’ve helped them avoid this. Just embarrassing.)

yep! unpaywalled:

It's good to see the OPM hiring memo has started to get the attention it deserves.

We're going to sorely miss the smart, hardworking, career federal workers who serve the public--not the party in power--when they're gone.

Let's break down what this means and why it's a major concern: 🧵⬇️

Targeting Chinese Students Threatens the Bottom Line at American Universities A big decline in Chinese student enrollment could hurt the finances of many universities and damage U.S. competitiveness, experts say.

www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

UPDATE: I've written a deeper dive on these numbers and what's driving this unprecedented judicial pushback.

open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

Photo of Senator Chris Van Hollen with Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.

Steve Kerr: "I believe in academic freedom. I think it's crucial for all of our institutions to be able to handle their own business the way they want to. And they should not be shaken down and told what to teach, what to say, by our government. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

This is very bad and why it's so important for people of good faith to speak out. Resistance to authoritarianism is a coordination game.

DOGE/Musk preferentially cancelled grants and contracts to recipients in counties that voted for Harris in 2024.

Among cancellations with election data available, 92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts.

🧵 This is a perfect example of what I've be describing as disordered discourse, and it's threat to democracy. Politicians are afraid to speak openly about key issues.

Why? Because disordered discourse has captured the system itself—forcing obedience, punishing dissent, and making truth irrelevant.