Daniel Schlozman

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

I'm talking with Tyler Pager about his 2024 election book at the MV Book Festival on Sunday at 12:30, so if you're on-Island and not working your three jobs to be able to live here, at the beach, or Alan Dershowitz, please come by.

Want to get back at that prof who gave you an A- on an exam? Or maybe you don't think people of color or women should be professors?

Make up a story about antisemitism, plop it into an anonymous student evaluation, and watch as your prof's life is upturned faster than you can spell "fascism."

This is too perfect.

I've had a Walter Mitty-like idea for an Institute for the Study of University Trustees. I assume that even if someone agreed to fund it (lol), no university president would actually greenlight a center designed to investigate what they'd rather--as a class interest--keep quiet.

Truest neocon line out there.

This pro-Landon poster from 1936, in the current Hake's auction has the same vibe as a lot of Stop Mamdani propaganda, inadvertently making the leftists look like the cool ones. www.hakes.com/Auction/Item...

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves

A timely and trenchant piece by Suresh Naidu. When future generations sift through the wreckage of our era, they’ll find it strewn with the institutional and personal failures of leaders both great and small.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Here's ours. Mostly institutions.
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Late to the Party | Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld Why did it take them so long? The warning signs were clear to see. Long before the debate on June 27, Joe Biden was unpopular. Since September 2021 his

Looks like the Democrats' "autopsy" will skirt the real question of 2024 (www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/u...), which is whether the party should choose its strongest nominee or cheerlead for the president. @samrosenfeld.bsky.social and I poked at that issue last summer: www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...

Fun fact for tonight's lawsuit: in 1990, the same mid-level banker at Citibank, Ann Lane, handled the restructurings for Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, and kept each of them from bankruptcy.

I'm old enough to remember when the prevailing argument against affirmative action was that it failed to consider the "real" form of unfairness, which was income disparity

Also true!

That Tip, unlike so many in his cohort, had been a dove on Vietnam was one of the things that allowed him to be a bridge-builder in the Dem caucus after the Watergate Babies arrived. I am happy to explain this to Josh Kraft in exchange for a suitable retainer.

Tip O'Neill, unreconstructed liberal who knew how to cut a deal and the first member of House leadership to come out against the Vietnam War, was not a Blue Dog Democrat.

My favorite detail is that Bob Crane and Bill Galvin say "pat-ronage" like St. Patrick's Day while everybody else says "pay-tronage" like payola. Anyway, you don't need to be obsessed with the relationship between liberalism and machine politics to devour it, but if you are, you certainly will.

A friend said, "it was like they read your book" (which @lilygeismer.bsky.social nicely name-checked), but the causality works the other way. I did some Mass. politics in my youth and tried to capture in writing about accommodationism the last vestiges of the old politics I saw in the '90s and '00s.

Scratch & Win Never in American history has it been so easy to gamble, legally at least. We’ve got casinos, sports betting, online poker, keno — but it was all made possible by state lotteries, which brought gambli...

A strong, if belated, recommendation for @iancoss.bsky.social 's podcast Scratch & Win about the rise of the Mass. Lottery. A total joy with a keen sense of how the old politics actually got played. I found myself talking back to the audio in a Boston accent: www.wgbh.org/podcasts/scr...

Democrats Are at a Historic Low Point. A Certain Kind of Advice Brought Them Here—and They Can’t Stop Listening to It. During the Reagan revolution, Democrats settled on a new way to win—and it’s destroying them now.

In which I make a crack about Chris Murphy going on podcasts talking about building organization not doing it, and @benmathislilley.bsky.social follows up to learn that Murphy is starting a summer basketball league in Hartford. And other good stuff. slate.com/news-and-pol...

“The University is a school of liberty as well as of learning.” The last page of Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, from 1936, ought to weigh on the Corporation with the eyes of the world upon it.

Second-order consequences of party hollowness all ricocheting against each other even as Mamdani is actually doing the contemporary left version of old-time street-level politics.

What Can Zohran Accomplish? - Dissent Magazine What distinguishes Zohran Mamdani's socialism is not its aims. It’s his willingness to take seriously the problem of how to get there.

Of the several dozen Mamdani pieces I have read in the last few weeks, this one from @jwmason.bsky.social is perhaps the best. Give it a read---you will learn some things. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Mahmood Mamdani · The Asian Question: On Leaving Uganda President Yoweri Museveni was careful not to refer to Asians as citizens; he explained that they were ‘investors’,...

A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Wilbur Cohen and Robert Ball are rolling over in their graves.

How the GOP Megabill Would Turbocharge Local Immigration Enforcement - Bolts Congress is poised to pour tens of billions of dollars into more immigration detention, private jails, and border operations, plus new ICE partnerships with local police and sheriffs.

Vast spending plus effectively zero oversight is going to mean huge huge corruption boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-...

Which prominent Democrat will be the first to say that we'll need to raise taxes next time by a lot and not just on millionaires? Saying so is a good way to get influence, but maybe not the presidential nomination.

Fabulous thread from @masonbwilliams.bsky.social on the odd yet expanding and robust coalition that made La Guardia mayor (plus his longstanding connections with labor and Socialism, and the forgotten ways foreign policy shaped --and almost cut short-- his mayoralty).

My question to that (and to a lot of things that have a left populist flavor of some kind or another) is, that works for a bit, but what happens when the tides run the other way? The question looming for American politics from Bevins, If We Burn.

You gonna write a full political science version of this? Want, self-interestedly, to see where it does and doesn't match up with the more organizationally minded Schlozenfeld Thought.