Sam Rosenfeld

I've moved from despairing exasperation at students referring to nonfiction works as "novels" in their essays to affectionate relief at this emblem of non-AI organic human error.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory was rooted in organizations that took up the base-building and mobilization functions that once fell to parties. dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Gather round the table tomorrow for a Thanksgiving reading with your loved ones!

You see an ideological range of people, lefties to mods, in and out of the Senate, who have no such reverence for the ridiculous, outlier institution of the filibuster and are reacting with incredulity at the sight of copartisans folding amidst visible Republican flailing. /end

Key Democrats, to their discredit, preferred to blow a winning hand than to risk the GOP actually having to *take* that responsibility.

Trump was absolutely right to see the proper endgame of the shutdown as the GOP ending this farce by finally going nuclear on approps and taking actual responsibility for governing. And Senate Republicans didn't *want* that responsibility.

In its limited, cabined, semi-nuked-and-therefore-always-potentially-further-nukable contemporary state, the filibuster has become the Senate's dark matter, at once powering and obscuring behavior on both sides.

Here’s another example illustrating the shortcomings of the moderation thesis: An independent candidate named Dan Osborn ran for Senate against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in Nebraska in 2024. He came within 5 points of winning, in a state that voted for Trump by 20 points. He ran on an anti-swamp, pro-Trump, pro-border wall agenda. Setting aside that a Democrat would never have been nominated with that agenda, I am confident that a Democrat would not have come as close as Osborn close even if they took those same issue positions. That’s because Republican voters attach stereotypes and baggage to Democratic candidates simply because of their party label. If you’re a Democrat interested in breaking the Republican stranglehold on the Senate, the way you do that is to decrease the number of Republican Senators in the Senate. You can try to accomplish that by running a bunch of pro-Trump “Democrats” in red states like Nebraska. Or you can support institutional reforms to increase the likelihood that the anti-Democrat voters of Nebraska elect someone from a party other than the Republican Party.

I think this passage is the crux of my disagreement with Drutman and @gelliottmorris.com on moderation: this reasoning is circular. The party labels and levels of polarization are not exogenous to choices made by both parties.

www.gelliottmorris.com/p/democrats-...

The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld. A major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico) at the center of America’s political parties

Now in #paperback with a new preface by the authors, The Hollow Parties by @daschloz.bsky.social & @samrosenfeld.bsky.social is a major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico).

Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

No Kings As the president escalates his authoritarian power grab, the NO KINGS non-violent movement continues to rise stronger. We are united once again to remind the world: America has No Kings and the power ...

Stay peaceful, disciplined, and confident, and make this huge. www.nokings.org

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

ActBlue, Open Society, Indivisible—terrorists all.

Note how slipshod, confused, and ramshackle this project sounds even from quoted behind-the-scenes insiders. Miller WANTS it to sound maximally ominous and intimidating. The targets should hold their heads high and carry on.

Cringy 2017 protest-brunch energy matters a lot right now. Trump has used deployment in four cities as a provocation of violence & further crackdown. With protestors largely staying disciplined, he's been failing. A day of nationally distributed, localized, peaceful protests drives the failure home.

Henry's writing about about institutional actors more than the mass public, but the basic collective-action point relates to mass protests as well--a means of signaling the scope of opposition, unafraid and peaceful. Put me in mind of the No Kings day planned for 10/18, which can't come soon enough.

Opinion | You Beat Trumpism by Banding Together. It’s as Hard and as Simple as That.

“This battle holds bigger lessons. The greatest weapon that the forces of regime change possess is the fear of inevitability. If everyone believes that Mr. Trump will succeed in reshaping America, he will.”

A great @himself.bsky.social column in the @nytimes.com.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

Hahrie Han Analyzing the organizations and movements that equip people to participate in public life and solve problems together.

Super happy for the awesome @hahrie.bsky.social and her MacArthur fellowship -- couldn't go to a more deserving scholar and person... www.macfound.org/fellows/clas...

He's gish-galloped himself.

d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...

Theory: Trump's governance is so hardwired to generate crisis & chaos and multiple media stories at once (typically a problem for Dems struggling to break through the noise) that it's actually making it hard for the GOP to effectively focus attention and jam Dems on the shutdown.

The Dems can't abide that, but they've been reluctant to actually bring themselves to say any of it out loud. It's bracing to see a House member at least start to do so. /end

What the GOP position boils down to is that a few Dems should be made to eat shit and affirmatively vote for a bad-faith bill that's substantively objectionable and guaranteed to be reneged-on thru rescission and impoundment--*even though those votes are not actually necessary.*

But what's genuinely crazy-making is that even that leverage is in a true sense illusory. At any moment it's in the Republicans' power to jettison the 60-vote requirement and pass whatever they want.

Dems are in the minority across the board. They're feeling intense pressure to "fight," which means shutting down the entire govt via the one thin piece of leverage they have--the weird supermajority requirement for cloture on appropriations votes. It's a weak position to be in.

Divided government presents a perfectly legible clash of democratic mandates--"the people gave us control of the House to check this president!" "I'm your president and will stand up to extremists in Congress!" But right now Republicans have unified control of the government.

It hasn't penetrated the discourse sufficiently how unusual it is to be in a shutdown-via-filibuster. All the major past shutdowns have stemmed from divided party control of govt. (Though Trump's weird border-wall shutdown started in the lame duck just prior to divided govt.)

But the vibe *I’m* perceiving from “Dems need to fight” types seems surprisingly congenial to this position. It has the benefit of being true and making sense: We can’t make a deal with you because you’re going to reneg, so go ahead and take ownership of your own terrible budget.

No Senate Dem wants to say that because they want to talk about the popular substantive demands they’re making instead—and presumably because they think that explicitly welcoming the GOP’s filibuster-nuking will be seen as abdication by their base.

Is this the first Dem MC to say this explicitly? That the reason this is the GOP’s shutdown isn’t because they “refuse to negotiate” or whatever but because they in fact have the power at any moment to nuke the filibuster and pass whatever they want to keep the govt operating?

The Hollow Parties A major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico) at the center of America’s political partiesFeatured on The Ezra Klein Show and The Weekly Show with Jon...

press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...