Lily Beau Conway

4 weeks ago | contrarian.substack.com | Joyce Vance |Joshua Kolb |Julie Zebrak |Lily Beau Conway

Remember in “Mary Poppins” when Julie Andrews sings, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down…In a most delightful way?” How she made us feel like we could get through an unpleasant task with a positive attitude? This week, the news is pretty awful, and we at the Democracy Index won’t sugarcoat it for you. But we are here, alongside all of you, as together we run a no-holds-barred temperature check on our country’s democratic institutions.

1 month ago | contrarian.substack.com | Joyce Vance |Joshua Kolb |Julie Zebrak |Lily Beau Conway

This week, the vision of our democracy that emerges is of one that is battered but still resilient. The wellsprings of resistance, of democracy itself, are continuing to bloom, in the middle of the serious damage this administration is trying to inflict on it. The Democracy Index takes stock of both forces. Trump’s economically inexplicable moves on tariffs make sense when they are viewed as part of our throughline that watches Trump continue to seize power for himself. As Sen.