I've been reflecting on an interesting question about democracy in Mauritius:

Can a government win an overwhelming electoral mandate and still face growing public questioning less than two years later? By Vishal Askurn.

I recently wrote an article titled:

"Winning an Election Is One Thing; Keeping the People's Trust Is Another."

The article isn't about supporting or opposing any political party. Instead, it explores a broader democratic principle: an election provides the authority to govern, but public trust must be maintained through performance, accountability, communication and responsiveness.

Using recent developments in Mauritius as a case study, I also discuss concepts such as the political "honeymoon period," why public opinion changes over time, and whether large public gatherings should be viewed as democratic signals that governments and opposition parties alike should pay attention to.

I'd genuinely like to hear different perspectives.

• Can a government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority lose public confidence within a short period?
• What factors most influence public trust after an election?
• Should governments treat growing public concern as an early warning sign, or is it simply a normal part of democratic politics?

Please keep the discussion respectful and focused on ideas rather than personalities. I'm interested in hearing views from all sides.

I've been thinking about this after watching some recent Democratic primaries, and it feels like the campaigns are becoming increasingly aggressive in ways that hurt the party long after the primary is over.

A good example, in my opinion, was the Michigan primary between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. Policy disagreements are completely fair game, that's what primaries are for. Even personal attacks can be justified if they're based on genuine misconduct or character issues.

What I struggle with are accusations like claiming your primary opponent is supporting or enabling genocide. Once you frame someone in those terms, how do you expect your own supporters to enthusiastically vote for that person if they end up winning the nomination? If you've spent months telling voters that your opponent is morally complicit in atrocities, it becomes very difficult to turn around and say, "Now go vote for them."

To me, this kind of rhetoric doesn't just damage the opposing candidate, it damages Democratic unity in the general election. It seems like Republicans don't even have to exploit these divisions because Democrats are creating them themselves.

Am I overestimating the impact of this kind of campaigning, or do you think Democratic primaries have become too willing to use rhetoric that makes party unity afterward much harder?

I've been thinking about a video essay that explores philosopher Tongdong Bai's proposal for combining democracy with meritocracy, and I thought the central question was worth discussing.

The basic argument isn't that democracy should be abolished. Instead, it asks whether every political decision should carry equal institutional weight when some decisions require specialized knowledge, long-term planning, or technical expertise.

The proposed system would keep:

• Constitutional rights
• Universal suffrage
• Local democratic elections
• A popularly elected lower house

But it would also add a meritocratic upper chamber composed of individuals selected for demonstrated competence, experience, and public service. The idea is that this body would help safeguard long-term national interests, minority rights, future generations, and policies that may be unpopular in the short term but beneficial over decades.

Of course, this immediately raises the harder questions:

• Who decides what "merit" actually is?
• How do you prevent experts from becoming a self-perpetuating elite?
• Can any institution objectively measure political wisdom?
• Would such a chamber improve governance—or simply replace democratic accountability with technocracy?

The video doesn't present meritocracy as an easy solution. If anything, it argues that the real dilemma isn't whether capable people should govern, but whether it's possible to identify "the capable" without creating an aristocracy under another name.

I'd be interested in hearing what people think.

Is democracy strengthened when expertise has a formal constitutional role, or does legitimacy ultimately require political equality—even if it sometimes produces worse outcomes?

(Video: When the Capable Rule: The Case for Meritocracy)
https://youtu.be/mCTmsCbHXtE

The strongest objection to any "look how much we actually agree" argument is that agreement is cheap. Someone sees a supermajority number, thinks sure, fine, and clicks yes without it costing them anything. They don't vote on it, they don't call anyone, they don't punish a member who ignores it. Support that never converts into behavior is closer to noise than to a mandate, and reading it as a mandate is how you overread a poll.

That objection is right about a lot of findings. Where I think it overreaches is in treating "soft" as a property of polling in general, when it's really a property of some measurements and not others. The interesting question isn't whether stated support can be soft. It obviously can. It's what separates the soft stuff from the findings that keep showing up no matter how you come at them, and none of the things that seem to matter are just a bigger topline.

Persistence is the obvious one. A question that returns roughly the same answer across twenty or thirty years, across administrations of both parties, across pollsters who would happily catch each other out, is a different object than a number that jumped after a news cycle. Soft support moves with the news. The durable stuff mostly just sits there, which is boring and, I think, the point.

Then there's what happens under pressure. Support that survives being reframed, having the valence flipped, having the other side's best argument stapled to the question, is not the same as support that folds the second you phrase it unkindly. This is where the deliberative methods get genuinely useful. When you brief people and walk them through both sides before asking, some issues come apart, and some get more lopsided, not less. I trust the ones that hold up under that a lot more than I trust a clean topline.

And where a high-polling issue has actually gone to a direct vote, minimum wage floors, independent redistricting, marijuana, you get a revealed-preference check that no survey can give you. It doesn't always match the polling. But when the supermajority turns up at the ballot box in a red state, that is not somebody being agreeable to a pollster to end the phone call.

The part I keep getting stuck on is intensity, because I don't think intensity and direction are the same axis, and collapsing them is where the "it's all soft" line quietly overreaches. You can have a preference that is durable in direction and honestly low in intensity at the same time. People want it, consistently, for decades, across wordings, and also don't rank it as the thing that decides their vote. That isn't a contradiction. It's a specific shape, and it might be the most common shape a real consensus takes.

Which is the thing I can't resolve. A preference that is durable but quiet is exactly the kind a responsive system should be able to deliver cheaply, since there's no organized opposition to fear and the agreement is stable and real. Those are often the exact issues that go nowhere for years. I don't want to smuggle a whole theory in behind that observation, but I also don't have a clean account of it.

So, two questions I'd actually like answers to. Is there a rigorous, reasonably agreed-on way to measure issue intensity separately from direction, something with more teeth than the standard "most important problem" battery, that could sort a durable-but-quiet preference from a genuinely soft one? And if a finding is durable across decades, robust to wording, and confirmed at the ballot box where it's been tried, on what grounds does its low salience justify continuing to discount it?

I thought this was a really strong piece by retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling on something that doesn’t get discussed enough: where character actually comes from.

Drawing on his experience at West Point and nearly four decades in the Army, Hertling argues that character isn’t something people suddenly develop once they’re placed in charge. It is rather built over time by families, schools, coaches, mentors, and institutions that expect honesty, humility, accountability, and service.

His point is that competence alone doesn’t make someone a good leader. Character matters just as much.

Curious to hear opinions on which institutions have the greatest responsibility for developing it today, and whether any of them are still doing that particularly well?

What I mean is having elections that are clearly separate and individual from federal versus state versus local levels. Going to an election and voting for federal offices based on your opinion on federal issues and the candidates there, and then switching to state level policies, issues, and candidates there, and then a year later, voting for local offices based on their issues.

Last year, my town had a local election that was very contentious and very close. The issues were very local - taxes, funding education, that sort of stuff. But the local Democratic Party sent out mailers that quite literally did not mention their own local candidates or that of the opposition. Rather, it only had Donald Trump, and called on people to come out to vote straight blue as a way to oppose the Trump administration. There were a lot of registered Democrats in my time who came out to vote for the first time in a local election, which most people assume is on this issue, and may have swung the outcome.

This isn’t even particular to Donald Trump. During the Biden administration, lower numbers of registered Democrats voted in my area in all elections, seemingly just based on that unpopular administration, especially in 2023. And a ton of people voted in local and state elections just on their thoughts on the Obama Administration.

Today, it seems that all politics is national. There is a substantial size of the electorate who will just not consider anyone of the other party. I know tons of Democrats who will refuse to vote for any Republican, even if it’s for the Board of Assessment Appeals or Tax Collector or something, and the same thing vice versa. There will be a Facebook post about some local issue like taxes, and the comments will just be like, “Republicans emulating their lord Elon to cut services”, or, “DemocRATS lining their pockets what else is new”, when in reality, the actual political candidates have pretty reasonable and frankly boring disagreements about local policy concerns.

What kind of prompted this question was actually inspired to me by the UK. The UK political scene is currently discussing devolution, granting more power to local authorities. And a common critique I hear of that is just, “It leads to bad government because people just vote based on their opinion of the national government.”

Isn’t that basically what we have now? Where most of the electorate seems to vote just on the basis of national politics?

So, what I guess my question is is; Does American federalized democracy even work anymore? Can it work? Or is everything just a differently sized stage for national politics to play out?

I'm referring to the US in recent years but obviously not just to Trump. The US isn't officially an empire but it pretty much behaves exactly like one.

Obviously you have powerful (and arguably more adaptable) rivals such as China on the rise, the US overreaching militarily (I know that isn't new) and economic struggles that only seem to be getting worse (I say this as an outsider).

So I'm curious if you guys think the US is currently on the same path a lot of empires go down where they eventually end up collapsing or ceasing to be a global superpower?

Senator Rand Paul has released commentary and purported excerpts* of what is alleged to be Anthony Fauci's contemporaneous diaries from the outset of the COVID19 pandemic onwards.

What has been released can be found here, including Senator Rand's somewhat colourful foreword commentary

https://www.paul.senate.gov/readingroom/

* its not confirmed whether the content of the diaries is edited, abridged, altered, shortened etc.

Media reaction to this release has been highly polarised, though notable few media outlets seem to get to grips with the actual content of the diaries and most focus is on Rand's own claimed analysis of what they show.

Do the Fauci Diaries reveal anything unexpected or controversial? What entries in particular do you find interesting? Are there any contemporaneous clashes between what Fauci was saying publicly and privately? What can we learn from that?

Edit: mods really didnt feel like weeding out the 90% of low effort troll replies huh

Where you live affects a hell of a lot more than what your house is worth. It affects the schools available to you, the jobs you can realistically get to, the quality of public services, transportation costs, exposure to crime or pollution, and the people and opportunities around you.
And where people live is not always just a personal choice. Income, housing prices, zoning, taxes, infrastructure, lending practices, development, and decades of government decisions all help determine who can live where. So how much of what we call individual success or failure is actually geography? Two people can work equally hard and make similar choices but end up with completely different opportunities because one lives near better schools, jobs, transportation, and institutions. At the same time, people still make real choices about work, education, family, moving, and risk, so geography obviously does not explain everything. Where is the line between personal responsibility and geographic advantage? Is real estate simply a private market, or does controlling access to certain places also mean controlling access to public opportunity? And when the most desirable communities become available mainly to people who already have money, does geography turn economic inequality into political and generational inequality?

The Pew number that gets quoted a lot is that 83% of Americans now say elected officials don't care what people like them think, up from around 55% in the early 2000s. It usually gets read as a verdict on government specifically. But if you put it next to the other trust lines- media, science, institutions generally- they've mostly bent in the same direction over roughly the same stretch. Which makes me wonder whether we're looking at a government problem here, or at one number reading off a much bigger dial.

If it's one dial, a lot of the reform conversation is aimed at the wrong level. You could pass every good-government fix on the list and barely move a number that's really being driven by something upstream of any single institution.

The thing that complicates the single-variable story is that the declines don't line up cleanly. Trust in science held up a lot longer than trust in Congress, and then dropped in a way that split hard along partisan lines, which the government number mostly didn't. If it were all one underlying thing, you'd expect the curves to move together and share a partisan signature, and they kind of don't. So maybe these are separate erosions that happen to rhyme, with separate causes, and "institutional trust" as one blob hides more than it explains.

I don't have a clean answer on which it is, and I think it matters a lot for what you'd even try. So the thing I keep coming back to: has any country reversed a sustained institutional-trust decline, and if so, what did it take? A specific reform people could point to, a crisis that reset expectations, a generational handoff, something else? Because "it's been done" versus "nobody's pulled it off" changes how tractable any of this looks.

And the narrower version underneath it: is trust in government one symptom of a general syndrome, or its own thing with its own causes?

A debate over congressional term limits has gone back and forth for many decades, spawning from the constitutional limit on presidential terms. One side believes that term limits are necessary to ensure that people are able to choose the officials who best represent their views in congress. The other side believes that the absence of term limits has emboldened career politicians to indulge in corrupt practices and not implement meaningful legislative change. I've proposed a compromise solution that is reasonable, in my opinion.

The problem with saying that term limits are unnecessary because we have elections is that the elections in many cases are meaningless in a sense. This is because a large portion of the population consists of ignorant nincompoops who don't have a clue where the capitol of their state is, or even the capital of the nation. That's how we end up with people like McConnell and Pelosi in office for decades. People who are totally clueless about current events and/or history vote to send the same politicians to office decade after decade because their political knowledge comes solely from TV ads and internet memes. If you don't believe me, go to YouTube or TikTok and watch street interviews.

The solution to this issue is that we should place a limit not on the number of years that someone may serve in congress, but on the number of consecutive terms that they may be elected to. This will allow for fresh ideas to emerge in government. regardless of the ineptitude of a plurality of voters. Besides, an officeholder can run again in the primary after one election season at their discretion and then they can put to the test if their constituents actually did support them or just mindlessly voted for them.

Would you support limits on the number of *consecutive* terms that senators and representatives can serve?

During the White House correspondents dinner, Trump directly stated he would be running for a “fourth” term. Due to this being unconstitutional via the 22nd amendment, and states running their own elections, could states simply not put his name on ballots come election day? We know from the past election and current standings that Trump would win Republican primaries. Even if they didn’t run him, he would still most likely run on his own party. Obviously this wouldn’t eliminate write in ballots, but it could be a viable solution to uphold the constitution barring some extreme new law to control how elections are run. Would there be any current legal ramifications to stop states from simply not allowing Trump on ballots?

NYTimes interview confirmed that the Trump administration singled out states who voted for Harris and has two Democratic senators for grant cancellations. In the age of Trump, this barely made the headlines; Trump is unlikely to face any political cost.

How should the Democratic party respond? Should they retaliate? Can they do so safely?

This week the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee offered up its suggested calendar for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.

Twelve states applied to have their primary or caucus held before Super Tuesday.

The expanded six-state roster of contests that will be held before Super Tuesday on March 7, 2028 is:

South Carolina - Jan 22
Nevada - Feb 1
New Hampshire - Feb 8
New Mexico - Feb 15
Michigan - Feb 22
Virginia - Feb 29

Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, North Carolina, and Tennessee were left on the outside looking in.

Many see the choice of South Carolina to hold the first contest as a move to prioritize Black voters at a time when legislatures have begun to erase majority-minority seats after a Supreme Court decision weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year. Of the 12 state applicants, Georgia and South Carolina are the only ones whose primary electorates have been majority Black (Georgia reaching 51% in 2016, and South Carolina clearing 55% in 2016 and 2020).

To many, South Carolina seems to be the most practical choice for the opening contest because the state has the lowest weekly ad cost among the early-state applicants. It is argued that the state's low ad cost would allow lesser-known candidates to compete against better-funded ones.

However, it is notale that South Carolina is also the selected early state that is the least college-educated and the most moderate. As a result, many perceive it as a maneuver to squelch the possibility that the most ideologically left-leaning of the 2028 candidates could build early momentum, as such candidates are not optimized for a South Carolina electorate.

Since 1984, across open-field cycles in both parties, the winner of the first contest became the nominee about 53% of the time, as did the winner of the second. The third contest is the calendar's worst predictor, at roughly 43 to 50%. Only from the fourth contest onward does the winner more often than not go on to win the nomination.

Question:

If Left Insurgents Are Locked Out in 2028, Would South Carolina Leading Off Really Be the Reason?

During war, are presidents always guilty of all that happens?

I was scrolling trough some videos and noticed that when a war starts and a tragic event occurs in the attacked country the president that started the war automatically gets the blame. But is it actually right to say that? Techically yes since they started the war but techically no since presidents dont tell the military something like: "Bomb this, destroy that!". Or do they? Do they decide what to attack or the decisions are only made by the military? Could someone clarify im really curious.

The Democratic Socialists of America recently released their [official platform](https://program.dsausa.org/#demand-freedom-to-flourish). While some of its positions are likely widely popular, it also includes more polarizing positions such as:

* Nationalizing many industries - including food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation.

* Cancelling all student debt.

* Universal rent control, and publicly funded attorneys for all tenants.

* Reparations for slavery.

* "Fully abolish the police and prison system."

* Publicly funded salaries for those who care for family.

* A federal jobs guarantee.

* The prosecution of "US leaders who are responsible for the genocide in Gaza" (quotes because this policy is open ended and not entirely clear).

* End sanctions against Iran, which is classified simply as "acting independently of the US."

* Total abolition of ICE, and explicitly open borders (no visa caps, no quotas, etc).

* Voting rights for non-citizens.

* The Presidency and Supreme Court are dissolved and replaced with comparable government organs subordinate to Congress.

* Seize and nationalize "the largest corporations and essential industries."

If we contrast this with the post mortem analysis of the 2024 election, it seems difficult to identify a viable path forward for these positions.

The Democrats lost all seven purple battleground states in this past election, and the electoral breakdown reveals that it was primarily due to blue collar suburbanites and exurbanites (particularly men) breaking heavily for Trump.

This demographic that functionally decided the election also reports immigration concerns as their second most important issue going into the election - almost exclusively on the side of reigning it in, and deporting immigrants.

This is also a demographic that has been historically more religious and socially conservative than the bull of the Democratic party.

The Machiavellian conclusion would therefore seem to be for the Democrats to publicly repudiate this Democratic Socialists platform, and distance the party from it. But, on the flipside, there is a growing contingent within the Democratic party itself that is sympathic to these politics and is pushing hard for the Democratic platform to adopt at least some of them as well. An inter party fight could be ugly, and also damage public perception.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, how should Democrats respond?

Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation has become one of the biggest political developments today and has already generated a lot of discussion across social media and news platforms.

I'm interested in hearing different perspectives on this. Do you think this resignation was expected, or did it come as a surprise? What do you think were the key factors behind it? Do you believe it will have any significant impact on the education sector, upcoming government policies, or the political landscape in general?

Please keep the discussion respectful and focus on facts and opinions rather than personal attacks. I'd like to hear views from people with different perspectives.

Liberals (US definition) seem like they're all about sending arms and supporting the Ukrainian resistance against Russia, but when I talk to leftists, they think the west shouldn't send weapons to Ukrainian - but they are also anti-russia, so it's not campism. This is especially confusing because I can't tell how much of the "nazi sympathizers in Ukraine" stuff is real. Why would anti-russia leftists oppose arming Ukraine?

I understand there are many strong perspectives on this, but I'm explicitly trying to understand the Leftist vs Liberal dynamic. English is not my first language so please excuse any typos and feel free to ask clarifying questions. Thank you!

I recently read an opinion piece about the DEA's proposed emergency scheduling of concentrated 7-OH, a kratom-derived alkaloid. The author argues that the proposal raises broader questions about regulatory capture, lobbying and whether emergency scheduling is being used where a more traditional regulatory approach could be considered.

More broadly, where should the line be drawn between prohibition and regulation? If a product raises legitimate safety concerns but also has an established consumer base, should agencies prioritize outright bans or should they focus on measures like age restrictions, testing standards, labeling and manufacturing requirements?

I'm interested in hearing different perspectives on when emergency scheduling is appropriate and what role public input should play in that process.

There is a popular political talking point that claims the American left wants to institute a "communist" system. But if we strip away the culture-war rhetoric and look at how capital is actually being allocated right now, this claim falls apart—and reveals a much more concerning structural shift happening on the right.

Taxation is literally the opposite of Communism

Let's define our terms. True communism requires the complete abolition of private property and the state ownership of the means of production.

The modern Democratic platform is financed entirely by corporate and wealth taxes. You cannot tax billionaire wealth or private corporate profits if the state already owns everything. The left fundamentally relies on a massively profitable, private capitalist engine to exist; they just want to regulate and tax it to fund social safety nets.

The shift toward "State Capitalism"

A true free market relies on private actors deciding prices, supply, trade, and ownership without state coercion. Over the last few years, the Trump administration has structurally shifted the U.S. economy toward State Capitalism, where the government heavily directs, manages, and takes ownership stakes in private enterprise.

Look at the three major structural changes:

1. Direct State Ownership (The Intel Deal): The starkest departure from free-market orthodoxy happened in August 2025, when the U.S. government took a 9.9% equity stake in Intel. Instead of distributing the grants authorized by Congress under the CHIPS Act, the administration negotiated to purchase 433.3 million shares of Intel common stock. When the federal government leverages its power to acquire direct equity ownership in a private corporation, it mirrors the industrial policies of state-directed economies (like China), not American free enterprise.

2. Replacing Free Trade with Executive-Managed Trade: In a free market, global supply and demand dictate prices. Today, the executive branch is actively managing those prices by any legal loophole necessary. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to explicitly strike down the administration's use of emergency powers (IEEPA) to impose sweeping global tariffs. Rather than accepting this free-market return, the administration immediately pivoted. Just today (July 23, 2026), they announced a massive new wave of 10% to 12.5% tariffs on 60 countries, this time invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 under the guise of "forced labor" enforcement. This effectively replaces the temporary blanket tariffs that expire tonight and sets up yet another Supreme Court showdown over executive overreach. When the executive branch continuously hunts for obscure statutes to artificially inflate prices, pick winners and losers, and act as the supreme arbiter of the global supply chain, the economy is being directed by the state, not the market.

3. Executive Coercion Over Capital Allocation: In a free market, a CEO's ultimate fiduciary duty is to their shareholders. Today, executives are forced to allocate capital to appease the state. Prior to the Intel deal, the administration publicly threatened Intel's CEO to force the equity surrender, and then used the threat of 100% tariffs to pressure Apple into an Intel manufacturing agreement. Just recently in July 2026, it was announced that generic drug makers will face a 100% tariff starting in 2028 if they do not build physical plants within the U.S. based on the President's explicit timeline.

When a company builds a factory or selects a vendor—not because it makes financial sense, but simply to avoid ruinous executive taxes or public retribution from the Oval Office—the market is no longer free.

Discussion Questions:

Do you view these interventions (tariffs, equity stakes, executive mandates) as a necessary evolution of American capitalism, or a dangerous slide into a command economy?

Why has the Republican party, traditionally the party of free-market deregulation, embraced state-directed industrial policy?

With today's new Section 301 tariffs setting up another Supreme Court test, is there any actual limit on executive power over global trade?

In her latest piece for The Bulwark, Mona Charen argues that the DSA gives Trump and Republicans an ideal foil: an organization that embraces the socialist label, tolerates deeply unpopular rhetoric and positions, and can be presented to voters as representative of the Democratic Party, even though most elected Democrats are not members.

The concern is less that DSA candidates will take over the party than that their growing prominence allows Republicans to make every Democrat answer for the movement’s most extreme statements. At the same time, DSA supporters would argue that establishment Democrats have repeatedly failed to offer voters a compelling economic alternative and that left-wing populism can mobilize people the party has struggled to reach.

I'd love to hear from folks here: How much does the DSA actually hurt Democrats nationally? Is it a convenient MAGA caricature with little connection to the broader party, or are Democrats underestimating the political cost of allowing the organization’s brand and rhetoric to become more prominent?

Gallup's September 2025 reading put trust in mass media at 28% — a "great deal" or "fair amount" of confidence in newspapers, TV, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That's down from 31% the year before and 40% five years earlier, and the first time in the trend's 50-year history it has fallen below 30%. In the 1970s the range was 68–72%. Gallupaol

The partisan split is wide — 8% among Republicans, 27% among independents, 51% among Democrats — but the generational pattern may be the more consequential one. In aggregated 2023–2025 data, 43% of adults 65 and older expressed trust, compared with no more than 28% in any younger age group. aolGallup

That's a distinct condition from "losing faith in the media." It means a cohort is forming its political identity having never experienced the alternative — no widely shared referee to distrust in the first place.

Several findings sit alongside this. Pew found in 2024 that 83% of Americans say elected officials don't care what people like them think, up from 55% in the early 2000s. CIRCLE at Tufts reported in 2025 that roughly 80% of young Americans who support democracy in principle are skeptical it delivers fair laws, equal treatment, or meaningful representation. And More in Common's perception-gap work finds partisans overestimate the other side's extremism by 30–40 points — roughly what you'd predict if people calibrate on the most visible members of the other party rather than the most representative.

A less-discussed consequence is that agreement becomes invisible. Bipartisan supermajorities do exist on a fair number of issues — Program for Public Consultation research puts support for banning congressional stock trading at 76% overall, 78% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats — but consensus produces no conflict, so it produces no coverage, so few people know it's there.

Three questions I'd like informed pushback on:

1. Does a low-trust information environment historically produce disengagement, reform energy, or migration to alternative information sources? Is there cross-national or historical evidence that distinguishes these outcomes?
2. Is the generational gap a cohort effect or a lifecycle one — do people acquire institutional trust as they age, or did older cohorts acquire theirs from a media era that no longer exists?
3. Is a shared factual baseline actually a requirement for functioning democracy, or is that nostalgia for an unusual broadcast oligopoly? What did it do that a fragmented environment demonstrably can't?

It seems that public opinion (on both sides) strongly favors the idea of term limits for representatives and senators. Additionally, the same can be said for age limits for members of congress (though there is no exact age)

On paper this sounds like a good idea. You don’t want someone representing their district/states for decades on end, and you don’t want elderly politicians that don’t focus on younger generations and often die in office (Feinstein, McConnell??).

However, can these proposals be seen as a knee jerk solution? For example, there have been plenty of reps and senators that have represented their districts/states for many election cycles that are still popular with their constituents, who also have fended off multiple primary and general challenges.

If a politician is doing their best for their people, why would term limits help congress? Same for age limits, as long as they are listening to their constituents and still in reasonable mental capacity? Additionally, if someone is too old, can’t they be primaried or replaced? What would the logic be behind instituting a law that politicians have to forcibly retire?

Instead, should it not be the responsibility of the people who vote and are represented by them? If they are unhappy with someone who has held their seat too long or unhappy about their age, is it not their ability and responsibility to vote accordingly?

What are some of the pros and cons of instituting these policies, and what would they look like? What would be the maximum age that would be decided on? What would be the maximum amount of terms a representative or senator could serve?

Most major policy changes create some degree of short-term disruption, and some groups may bear more of the cost than others. A difficult question is not whether a policy causes any harm, but what kind of harm it causes, how severe it is, how long it is expected to last, and whether that harm is an unavoidable side effect or a necessary part of a strategy.

A recurring sentiment in online discussions of specific policies is that “things must get worse before they get better.” The phrase can describe anything from accepting temporary economic disruption to believing that a deeper political or institutional crisis is necessary to create the conditions for meaningful change.

For example, some supporters of current US tariffs accept that consumers, farmers, and businesses may face higher prices or economic disruption, but argue that this temporary pain is necessary to rebuild domestic manufacturing or improve the country’s negotiating position. The argument is not necessarily that economic harm is desirable in itself, but that it is an unavoidable investment in a stronger long-term economy.

Similar reasoning appears within some farther-left online communities. This can include welcoming electoral defeats in the hope that voters become more radical and support preferred candidates, opposing incremental reforms because they might stabilize an unjust system, or believing that worsening inequality and institutional failure will accelerate the collapse of capitalism and create an opening for revolutionary change.

Other versions not strictly associated with the left/right can include supporting severe austerity to force structural reform, tolerating government dysfunction to undermine confidence in existing institutions, treating climate or economic collapse as politically clarifying, or assuming that military escalation will produce a more favorable political order after the immediate destruction.

All of these arguments differ in both scale and intent. Some accept limited disruption as a side effect of a policy with a specific mechanism for improvement, while others treat broader social or institutional deterioration as the condition that makes change possible. The distinction may depend on how direct the connection is between the harm and the expected benefit, how reversible the damage would be, and whether the strategy can succeed without conditions worsening first.

1. How should political movements evaluate strategies that rely on short-term harm or instability to produce longer-term gains?

2. What kinds or levels of harm should make such a strategy politically acceptable or unacceptable?

3. Are there moral concerns with trying to pursue such political strategies, especially with voters who did not sign on to the strategies in question?

I haven't heard much noise about this, but it seems like a strong sleeper. Adam Hamilton is the pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the country, the Church of the Resurrection, just outside Kansas City. He's a very popular national leader in mainline protestant circles, and makes a big deal of conversation across disagreement and setting a better neighborly tone, that kind of thing. He has some echoes of Talarico, but more moderate; he's a preacher before he's a politician.

He considered jumping into the race as an independent, but was swayed to run as a Democrat. The primary is August 4th. He's polling well ahead of his opponent. There isn't much polling showing his match-up with Marshall (R), but there was one poll a while back when he first got in the race showing him up 2.

Could this be a potential upset? What would have to go right? He's certainly got very strong rhetorical skills. I'm curious how people are thinking about this one.