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Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression During Putin’s War on Ukraine
My remarks (slightly edited) last night at Ukrainathon, a 24-hour educational marathon benefiting displaced students and scholars from Ukraine. Thanks to the PONARS leadership for this great initiative. For my fifteen minutes, I would like to talk about domestic politics in Russia, which is obviously central to this conflict. Let me begin by revisiting some claims I made a week before the...
Imagining Trump’s End
I'm teaching Socialism and Transitions to the Market this semester, and we're reading Francis Spufford's excellent Red Plenty. Here he is on Khrushchev's end: e was starting to frighten them…He had made alarmingly specific, alarmingly verifiable economic promises…He had tried to stick his thumb in the scales of the strategic balance by putting the...
Veto Players (Second Edition)
In my last post, I discussed in broad terms work on a second edition of my textbook, Formal Models of Domestic Politics. Beginning with this post, I will lay out the specific changes I have made to the text. For the existing chapters, most changes fall into one of three categories: new models, new exercises (which sometimes cover new models),...
A Good Conference
What makes for a good conference? The opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. Quality panels with work that challenges and crosses intellectual boundaries. Outstanding plenary sessions. Pleasantly situated receptions and dinners. And what sort of conferences satisfy these criteria? To my mind, those that are small enough that everybody can fit into a banquet hall, that bring...
Life and Death During the Transition Depression
Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a new blog devoted to historical political economy. The New York Times published an interesting pair of reports on Tuesday. The first related a recent study in Health Affairs that documents a staggering, and unexpected, decline in hospital admissions since the arrival of COVID in the United States earlier this year. With the important exception of those...
The Rise of the Bullies
So, it's looking like the establishment will have its revenge on Trump. Trump is no Hitler in an important respect: he has no party of his own, just the one that he seized during the election, and so he is reliant on Republican regulars to staff the federal government. That's not a happy outcome for progressives—it is important to emphasize...
#TrumpPutin
Typically lurking just below the surface, the question of whether Vladimir Putin has anything on Donald Trump has dominated public discourse since the Helsinki summit and the American president's declaration that he believes a former KGB agent over his own government. It is a fair question—one that we have every reason to think Robert Mueller and his team are...
What I Learned from Working with Deceased Soviet Historians
Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. Broadstreet readers may know that Jeff and Jared are editing an Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy. Tracy and I have committed to writing a chapter on “HPE in History and the Social Sciences” that elaborates on various earlier contributions on the relationship between these two component parts of the...
Donald Trump as Lightning McQueen
Watching Donald Trump struggle to make good on his extravagant campaign promises, I am reminded of the opening scene in Pixar's Cars. Hot rod Lightning McQueen attempts to win the Dinoco 400 by ignoring the advice of his "expert" pit crew, who demand that McQueen change his tires. Announcers Darrel Cartrip and Bob...
Regime Change (Second Edition)
In previous posts, I began to describe the changes to my textbook on Formal Models of Domestic Politics, with a second edition planned for next year. Most of those changes involve new material: additional models and exercises, a new chapter on nondemocracy. There are, however, a handful of clarifications—small edits suggested by eagle-eyed...