Oct 12, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Finally, pundits are focusing less on policy victory or convincing voters that their political adversaries are evil, and more on the issue of whether our liberal democracy can be saved, and if so, how. Until recently, those at the forefront of the effort to preserve...
Sep 15, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism
I don’t normally do confessional posts on this blog, so please ignore this one if it’s not your cup of tea. But this ties back to how to preserve our deteriorating democracy. The confession is that when it comes to questionable or unethical behavior, I am...
Sep 4, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
In Climate of Contempt I lament the way today’s political information environment breeds so much interpartisan fear, anger, and distrust that we “under-attend[] to the health of our democratic institutions.”[1] But one thing I did not do in my book was to...
Aug 13, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism
This year’s gerrymandering wars are a predictable consequence of the forces that are driving our political polarization: not the bogeymen imagined by populists on the left and right, but rather the amplification of the angriest, most ideologically extreme voices by...
Jun 24, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism
Growing up in Rochester, New York in the 1960s and 70s most of my friends were Catholic. My family didn’t attend church, so most of what I learned about the Bible came from overhearing my friends talking about their “CCD classes,” their confirmations, etc. The...
