Happy Independence Day and 250th Anniversary of the United States of America! This feels like a good time to release the first installment of Cleanup on Aisle 47, a short blog series to share ideas on how to strengthen democracy in the United States. I have been noodling on these thoughts for over a year and started getting them into organized posts over the 2025 winter holidays. They are meant to counteract Project 2025, The…
To learn about ways to save U.S. democracy from an anti-democratic regime, I read “Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World,” by Srdja Popovic. Popovic helped lead a nonviolent student movement called Otpor! to overthrow Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. Though I have read the book three times, I didn’t understand how, in a practical way, people could use…
During Donald Trump’s first term as president, his supporters, MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans, started calling pro-democracy folks “snowflakes.” They thought they were being clever. “Har, har, snowflakes are so fragile! They melt with a little heat. Lol!” True, snow melts with heat, as it has been doing these past few days in Minnesota. It’s the middle of February and we’ve got temps in the high 50 degrees Fahrenheit, about 30 to 40 degrees…