Lee Drutman

US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again. America has remade itself every few decades. Are we due?

"Fusion voting would let new parties cross-endorse candidates and build power without acting as spoilers." - @leedrutman.bsky.social @newamerica.org @politicalreform.newamerica.org @vox.com www.vox.com/politics/480...

Wow. Republican Rep Kevin Kiley tells reporters in a virtual press conference that not only will he run as an independent in CA-6, but he will officially be an independent for the remainder of his current term in Congress, @melodykloepfer.bsky.social reports.

We are officially an oligarchy, ICYMI

Correction. Orwell never said this. He did however, warn that: "political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (That's Politics and the English Language, one of my favorite essays)

The SAVE Act is Bad for the Midterm Elections, Here’s a Better Option The SAVE Act is the Trump administration’s latest attempt to federalize elections. Lee Drutman argues for an independent federal elections agency instead.

My latest ->

I think we have a reconcile with this: our elections are increasingly nationalized. The question is how to manage that reality.

www.newamerica.org/the-thread/s...

But I thought it was only noncitizens voting for Democrats... I'm so confused.

In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad Across 25 countries, Americans are the most likely to see the morality and ethics of people in their country as somewhat or very bad.

This seems ... not good.
Pew suggests: "But partisan politics appear to play a role."
You think?
www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...

People sure are complicated.

LLMs are eating logos, which was the speciality of the academy for a long time. They are coming for pathos (you can simulate that). But ethos still matters, and is the hardest to pattern match through sophisticated matrix weightings in disembodied language and pictures.

For those of you just tuning in after the TX primary: political Ideology is still multidimensional. It's just stuck in a one-dimensional median voter narrative, yearning to be free.

Having read A LOT of social science over the decades and having spent a lot of time with Claude recently, this feels absolutely right.
Opus 4.6 is really powerful, and the models keep getting better. The standards of what counts as a "contribution" will have to change. They've had to for a while.

US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again. America has remade itself every few decades. Are we due?

"This is a tough time for democracies everywhere. But ... In America, the pressure just builds. We are distinctly dysfunctional not because Americans are uniquely polarized, but because our electoral system is uniquely rigid."

www.vox.com/politics/480...

I suspect just as the Liberals wished they had supported PR when they had the chance 100+ yrs ago (?), Labour will also regret it. But status quo bias is a real thing, or so everything I've learned about political history and the human mind tells me.

This seems like the perfect political moment for Labour to champion moving from FPTP to a PR system. Why aren't they?

US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again. America has remade itself every few decades. Are we due?

"There will be an after. There always is. The Gilded Age ended. The boss system ended. The Solid Jim Crow South gave way to voting rights. This era of dysfunction and discontent will end too. The real question is: What comes next?"
New from me ->
www.vox.com/politics/480...

Optimism is a good feeling. And yes, change will come.

A good read:

Great piece.

The saddest and most frustrating part about this is that the US has all the resources and talent to build what makes Europe attractive inside of a decade. However, we never will because we're slaves to an archaic, undemocratic and absurd political system. We're a supercomputer that runs Windows Me.

US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again. Every 60 years, America remakes itself. We’re due.

My case for optimism ->
www.vox.com/politics/480...

Must-read ->

How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks What Brazil got right that America got wrong.

Why did Brazil's Congress fight Bolsonaro while ours couldn't? Because multiparty incentives gave legislators their own power base to fight back.
@zackbeauchamp.bsky.social has an important, deeply-reported, must-read here: www.vox.com/politics/479...

Opinion | The 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders, Ranked by Nate Silver

IMHO, Newsom is peaking way too early. My guess is that by early 2028, his energy will seem backwards-looking and very 2025. But for now he seems to be the frontrunner. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/o...

Here's what I genuinely don't understand. Labour is in power now. They could pass proportional representation and likely wind up in a coalition government with the Greens in the next government. Or they could keep FPTP, and run the risk that Reform gets an outright majority in the House of Commons.

Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: A Discussion with Lee Drutman | Stanford Law School With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, both parties have begun to assemble their talking points and draw their respective political lines i

For Bay Area folks, I'll be at Stanford Law School talking about Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop next week: law.stanford.edu/event/breaki...

"The Essay suggests that voting-rights advocates should turn to proportional representation as the logical replacement for the current Section 2 regime."
This is where the action is headed, folks. yalelawjournal.org/pdf/01KGWKVE...

Defeating Authoritarianism with Party-System Reform A well-organized political minority has taken control of one of America’s two major parties. At the same time, the other major party is unable to build a majoritarian coalition. But there's a way out!

"The authoritarian minority that has seized control of the GOP scarcely worries about shifts in public opinion from outside its base. They are protected by the zero-sum, binary choice inevitable in a two-party system." substack.com/home/post/p-...

The median voter theorem assumes voters are fixed points in space, which is only true of dead ones.
(And even they decompose into something unpredictable)

I suspect, upon further reflection, most speeches ever given are essentially AI-quality imitations of other speeches, since the same rhetorical tropes have been used over and over again, back to Cicero, back to Aristotle, back to Ur. Human history is basically just copy-paste-adjust_slightly.

Voters don’t think like strategists. G. Elliott Morris responds in a forum on “How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism.”

Exactly. "The entire debate—moderate versus progressive, centrist versus left, abundance versus populism, whatever you’d like to call it—constitutes an elite discourse largely disconnected from how most voters actually reason about politics."
www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Popularism in a crisis of democracy: the political philosophy of rearranging deck chairs by consulting the deck chairs about their preferred arrangement.