Lily Beau Conway

1 week ago | contrarian.substack.com | Joshua Kolb |Lily Beau Conway |Joyce Vance

Otto von Bismarck, the political genius who unified and ruled Germany for decades in the late 19th century, famously said that politics is the art of the possible, indeed the “art of the next best.” This is a lesson the novice Elon Musk learned in calamitous fashion over the past few months. This week’s Democracy Index shows how Musk’s ignominious departure — though not a panacea — represents a signal failure for him, and therefore for Donald Trump.

2 weeks ago | contrarian.substack.com | Joshua Kolb |Lily Beau Conway |Joyce Vance

A spectacle and a sabotage. That was the latest disgraceful display in the Oval Office this week, when the president of the United States ambushed the South African president with patently false white supremacist claims that South Africa is conducting a “genocide” of white South African farmers. That bizarre and disturbing episode provided a capstone to a week when the Trump Administration took new steps in abusing the power of government to attack institutions and perceived enemies.

3 weeks ago | contrarian.substack.com | Joshua Kolb |Joyce Vance |Lily Beau Conway

The Trumpian kleptocracy approached full flower this week. As the president took the first major foreign trip of his second term, heading to the Middle East, the brazenness of his corruption repelled even his most ardent supporters and revealed one of the core features — and weaknesses — of his regime: corruption. That rot has spread throughout his Administration, infesting accountable democratic governance. That is reflected in this week’s Democracy Index indicators, our thermometers.

1 month 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.

2 months 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.