Brian Levy

Lower income whites with no post-high school education slowly come to the realization that Donald Trump is not their friend. This is the core of the MAGA movement.

For readers interested in why I’ve been engaging with the Abundance debate, how it connects to my work on homelessness in Los Angeles, and where related pieces can be found, I’ve pulled together a short overview here: workingwiththegrain.com/2026/01/23/a...

My piece linked below explores why LA’s efforts to address homelessness matter for the broader Abundance debate. The efforts have been sustained - and underpinned by a set of bold governance reforms. Can they stay on track, even in the face of increasingly severe headwinds?

Europe: Don't Back Down YouTube video by Frankly Fukuyama

Don't back down, Europe: youtu.be/SS5Ep3LTqnE

Problem-focused coalitional governance in action – three case studies (Abundance series #3) Ideas can help break an accelerating downward spiral of polarization by offering inspiration – but to be credible, a positive vision also needs to be accompanied by a pr…

In translating Abundance’s vision into practice, is civil society’s primary role to engage with the state adversarially or to enter into (sometimes) uneasy, problem-focused coalitions with reformers in government? Some surprising insights in link below. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/12/08/p...

Achieving ‘Abundance’  –  from vision to action (part of a series) Increasingly, we seem trapped in an accelerating downward spiral of polarization, with no way out. What will it take to break the spell? In their best-selling book, Abundance, Ez…

In Abundance, Ezra Klein & @dkthomp.bsky.social lay out a compelling positive vision & a stark wake-up call for progressive governance. But how does that vision become an agenda for action? The post below begins a short series that wrestles with the gap. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/12/08/a...

History rhymes. I came of age in apartheid South Africa. What is happening around me feels all-too-familiar. "All the hatred, all the persecution, seems like the panic of racists pretending they can stop the future of this country no longer being majority white through sheer cruelty."

The bounceback from corrupt populism is precisely why Trump hates the place. (Well, that, plus the racism.)

Hope in the dark? LA’s bold governance reforms to address homelessness The drumbeat of dispiriting daily news makes it difficult to look beyond immediate crisis. Where to find hope? Los Angeles’ ongoing homelessness crisis might seem an especially unlikely place to lo…

Good & bad news re LA homelessness.
Good news: Bold governance reforms provide a promising new platform for action.
Bad news: Trump budget cuts could produce a homelessness tsunami.
A trial by fire is coming. Will the reforms be up to the task ahead?
workingwiththegrain.com/2025/10/01/h...

Occam's Razor always rules. Always.

Some role reversal here, Filipe - feeling especially bleak this morning, I find the solace of some optimism in your post 😢😎😇

Wow, this is great.

Once again, the "real America," or what we hope is real, poking up its head.

h/t bsky.app/profile/oisi...

Happily, because in times like these "hope" matters a great deal, these are BIG "ONLY"'s ...........

Filipe: even more than I feared a few months ago, we certainly are living under a government that acts with impunity, ignores all guardrails, and has repressive intent. But having lived for decades in a repressive, authoritarian (apartheid) state, this is not (yet) that. For now 11/26 matters.

This is the number that keeps me up at night

‘Undocumented’ in LA – some stubborn facts I’ve lived through this before. My first two decades of life were during peak apartheid  in Cape Town, South Africa. Beneath the glistening surface of the city’s sunshine, mountains and ocean…

I've lived through this before. Forced removals in Cape Town set in motion decades of protest, repression & dehumanization, & destroyed the city's soul. In vibrant, diverse LA, the consequences of forced removals will be devastating. How to avoid catastrophe? workingwiththegrain.com/2025/06/20/u...

Fantastic

I’m saddened to learn of Stanley Fischer’s passing. He is known as a top economist of course. But I was lucky to observe him, long time ago, also as a diplomat and peacemaker getting Israelis and Palestinians to work together. His talents will be much missed.

A thought: Instead of an ongoing flood of annoying, thinly-disguised fundraising text messages, might it perhaps be helpful to the Democratic Party to send text messages that connected credibly with the substance and concrete organizing tasks of our current moment? One can dream......

Protecting the guardrails of America’s democracy –  some lessons from South Africa Now what? Four weeks into the Trump administration, a wrecking ball threatens to wreak havoc with millions of peoples’ lives. A  sense of urgency is in the air. Indeed, we urgently need to bea…

And here's a link to the earlier piece, written in February. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/02/13/p...

100 DAY UPDATE: Protecting the guardrails of democracy – some lessons from South Africa In early February, I wrote a blog post that laid out some lessons for today’s USA’s from South Africa’s efforts to protect the guardrails of democracy. Here is a link to the piece.  A hundred days …

Here is an 'update' I wrote yesterday to an earlier piece on Trump's rule through a South African lens. It points to a more accelerated trajectory to authoritarianism than I'd anticipated. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/04/28/1...

A suggested edit: ".......under a .... [wannabe]..... authoritarian regime......"
Even for the competitive authoritarian' variant, it isn't yet 'game over'........

This quote from @adamprz.bsky.social hit home: The idea that "Hitler's crimes were inconceivable... applies above all to his contemporaries. They could at most feel what the Führer & his men were capable of. It is probably in the nature of a breakdown of civilization to be difficult to imagine it"

The tide in academia has turned. Harvard’s unequivocal stand has brought others along. The process of finding a spine is interesting - but now equivocators have a lot more to lose by being spineless than by rediscovering their principles.

From crisis to renewal? Affordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles In dark times, I take inspiration from the great social scientist Albert Hirschman’s commitment to  the search for ‘a bias for hope’, for  “avenues of escape from exaggerated notions of a…

Decades of good intentions gone wrong helped fuel Los Angeles' twin homelessness & affordable housing crises. Recent reform initiatives offer hope that progressive approaches to governance can become part of the solution. Introducing my new research project. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/04/16/f...

Republicans Like to Cut Taxes. With Tariffs, Trump Is Raising Them. President Trump’s tariffs are scrambling the Republican plan for the economy, long centered on tax cuts and growth.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/b... This is an outrageous article, with the main point buried at the end: combining regressive tariffs and the scaling back of progressive taxation is the “ideal” way of redistributing from the poor/middle to the rich, under the cover of economic nationalism

The former ambassador to Denmark for the United States, Rufus Gifford, posted this video on his Facebook account:

Ht: @hpsc24.bsky.social

Thanks, Duncan. Useful, but….The challenge in the USA right now is not to push back against “a” bad thing, but a zone flooded with dozens (hundreds) of bad things. A different problem for which we also urgently need ideas…..