leedrutman.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

What would happen if we admitted that the Democratic campaign industrial complex is a complete and total grift machine raising billions to throw darts into the wind and calling it strategy? Because it kind of looks that way, @russellberman.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

submitted 5 hours ago • 1 comment

We are entering the period of Manufactured Chaos. Let's call it what it is: Manufactured Chaos.

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

what do we want to build after autocracy?

submitted 5 hours ago • 2 comments

I think this is part of their delusional worldview- that these protests couldn’t be organic but must be ginned up but a small number of agitators, and if they could just get rid of those people, the whole thing will collapse. Just completely unaware of the reality.

submitted 5 hours ago • 3 comments

Elon - Welcome to the cause of multiparty democracy. I guess??? Except, you’re thinking about it all wrong. This idea of an unrepresented 80% in the middle? If it were that easy, No Labels would have Joe Manchin in the White House by now. It is not that easy. leedrutman.substack.com/p/so-you-wan...

submitted 5 hours ago • 2 comments

Maybe you are the pyromaniac who will burn some of the dry tinder necessary for new growth just to see it burn. But let’s hope it’s a controlled burn. Or maybe everything is already on fire. In which case… who knows anymore? LOL. Comedy is legal, but the joke’s on us.

submitted 21 hours ago • 0 comments

Anyone punditing about this stuff really should know the evidence.

submitted 21 hours ago • 1 comment

I’ll be honest, Elon. You’re not the hero we’d want. But you might just be the hero we need. I’m not counting on it. But stranger things have happened. leedrutman.substack.com/p/so-you-wan...

submitted 22 hours ago • 1 comment

"MAGA plays to a social desert" This seems like an incredibly important insight. We focus a lot on "jobs" -- but economics is only part of the story. People really do need to feel local pride.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

People reasonably point to first past the post and other such aspects of the electoral system entrenching the two major parties from competition, but it's under-appreciated how much banning fusion nominations killed a more multi-party system we used to have even though it was still FPTP at the time.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Great moments in #FusionVoting history: In 1850, abolitionism was rising, and new minor parties like the Liberty Party and Free Soil Party used fusion voting to push candidates to be stronger on abolition. By 1854, this movement helped birth the Republican Party. Fusion = power! #ElectionReform

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Musk's 80% want a third party X survey result is probably a little high, but not by much. Gallup has pegged it around 60%, others as high as 72%, and it's probably higher now that so many have lost faith in the Democratic Party (the Biden dissembling has done some lasting damage)

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Realistically, the coalition for Musk’s politics — techno-libertarian-futurist, anti-system, very online, Axe-level bro-vibes — would be small. But even so, a Musk-powered independent party — call it the “Colonize Mars” Party — could disrupt the whole system. www.vox.com/politics/415...

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

"the very thing that makes our politics feel so stuck is exactly what makes it so susceptible to Musk’s threat... Most money in politics is wasted. But if one knows how to target it, the potential for serious disruption is quite real." www.vox.com/politics/415...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Gonna talk to my accountant about this one for next year.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Time for some game theory... Both Musk and Trump are acting irrationally already. Game theory does not have a parameter for narcissistic dementia or for ketamine-induced incontinence. Game theory is useless here.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Honestly, it surprises me that for all the sophisticated large N polling and survey research consultants do, nobody is doing any agent-based modeling to test assumptions about what would have to happen for their projected interventions to work out as planned, assuming learning and reaction.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Democratic consultants are obsessed with data, but data only tells you what happened in the past. But the future is never quite like the past. Sometimes it is quite different! People react. People change. New leaders emerge. Politics should be alive. Fighting the last war = losing.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

dramatic personality clashes: entertaining easy-to-follow story. characters, plot: straightforward. steady constitutional erosion: too complicated. too many characters. ambiguity, convoluted plot. constitution too abstract.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Millions of people devoted their careers to serving their country and one guy who had devoted his career to enriching himself thought he knew better.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

lol men are too emotional to be trusted with political power

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Welcome to the cause of multiparty democracy. I guess?

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

Zero-sum mindset -> more zero-sum politics.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

we remain on the dumbest possible timeline. It's... (don't make obvious banana joke, don't make obvious banana joke)... nuts (we still grow those here, right?)

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Seems like if you care about the legitimacy of our democracy, now would be a great time to start working for proportional representation and fusion voting to break this damn two-party doom loop before it breaks us. www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-two-pa...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Oooo... now this getting good. The jilted sidekick plans to burn down the big house to finally feel its warmth.

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Democrats would be more effective as a coalition of 2 or maybe even 3 parties, running separately. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

The headline says "collapses" But the actual story is that center-right parties say we'd rather have new elections than go along with an insanely restrictionist xenophobic asylum policy. That seems sensible to me! www.cnn.com/2025/06/03/e...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

I gave Harvard some free lobbying advice here, via the Boston Globe: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/02/n...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

partisanship is one helluva financial planner.

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Hello new news influencers. Bluesky is now the place for you, it looks like. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

I've been using Claude (AI) to help me build an agent-based model of US politics, and it knows me too well: "You're modeling the doom loop of contemporary American politics - the feedback mechanisms that drive polarization even without external shocks." Yes, I am.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

If only people knew how crazy Trump II would be, some of them would have voted differently. Yes, of course! But frustration with the status quo is a powerful force.

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

Loss aversion strikes again: Nothing makes people appreciate government more than bunch of bozos trying to sell it off for parts. www.cnn.com/2025/06/01/p...

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Unfortunately, politics 101 is that you can't effectively neutralize an issue your opponent is trying to weaponize by adopting your opponent's side. The only response is to reframe this issue as: why are they so weirdly obsessed with trans stuff? It's super-creepy. And weird. and creepy.

submitted 11 days ago • 20 comments