Civics Unhinged American power was strongest when it didn't need to prove it. Now allies are planning for a partner they can no longer count on.
How impulse displaced architecture in American statecraft [This essay is Part 1 of a two-part series on Trump’s foreign policy method and its global consequences. Part 2, Coercion Without Credibility Publishes March 3.]
How the Presidency Became a Souvenir Shop
Why Judicial Power Now Turns on Compliance, Not Rulings
Trump and the Politics of Permissioned Violence
Foreign Affairs took a decade to admit it: Trump governs not through institutions but through himself—appetite as strategy, grievance as doctrine.
Trump, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Cramping His Scene
Civil rights laws didn't inflict mistreatment on white Americans. They withdrew an entitlement—and that is the whole grievance.
A democracy fails when the institutions tasked with describing reality decide that saying it too plainly might seem unseemly.
Despair has become fashionable—and like most fashions, it flatters the people selling it.
Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...
Heritage, Myth, and the Power We Inherit
How impulse displaced architecture in American statecraft [This essay is Part 1 of a two-part series on Trump’s foreign policy method and its global consequences. Part 2, Coercion Without Credibility Publishes March 3.]
Somewhere between the ruins of Enlightenment optimism and the latest GOP fundraiser, History called it quits.
Why Judicial Power Now Turns on Compliance, Not Rulings
A chronicle of American absurdity, written with a straight face and a sharp pen. Civics Unhinged — satire for those who still give a damn.
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