I Need Your Support

On the state of Democracy Americana after six months, the pitfalls of the newsletter economy – and what the future holds for this independent publication

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

If a paid membership is currently not an option, you can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Please note that a free audio version of this piece is also available over on Steady!

Dear Readers,

It has been exactly six months since I started a new career as an independent writer – since I made Democracy Americana the focus of my work and the main source of my income.

I set out on this new path in the midst of a series of life-changing transitions. Last summer, my family and I left the United States where we had lived the past five – and six of the past seven – years; we left the only house my two kids remembered as home. And I left academia after eleven years as a full-time professor and almost 18 years of teaching at the university level.

As we decided to follow my wife’s career and settle in Hamburg, in the north of Germany, I made a big bet that this newsletter would provide the basis for a sustainable independent career. At the outset, I gave myself twelve months to figure out if I could make it work. I am now halfway through this first year, and I would like to give you an update on the state of this experiment, on what I am – what we are, together – trying to build here, and on why, as of this moment, the future of Democracy Americana is still uncertain.

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

These kinds of personal reflections are inevitably somewhat self-indulgent, and I know that’s not for everybody. I promise I will do this sparingly (and not again until at least six months from now), and we’ll return to our regular programming later this week. If this isn’t your cup of tea, let me suggest that you just read the abstract / TL;DR version below – and then jump straight to Part II at the bottom of this post, where I am outlining some of my plans for the future of Democracy Americana and what topics, questions, and themes I will be focusing on over the next few months.

I you are continuing to read, please know that I am grateful for your interest and patience. Since I am asking you for your financial support, I think it is only fair to be as transparent as possible. And along the way, I believe my own experience may also provide some insight into the newsletter industry as well as the economic, technological, and online platform realities that are shaping / constraining the landscape for independent writers and journalists.

So, here is the short / TL;DR version of where things stand:

After six months, Democracy Americana has not reached sustainability yet – and as of right now, it is an open question if I can get it there. The newsletter has really struggled to attract new subscribers since I moved it to Steady last September - while the monthly churn (existing subscribers canceling their subscriptions) has gone up significantly. My readership now shrinks with every piece I publish. You don’t need to know much about the newsletter business to see how that math doesn’t work over the long-term.

Meanwhile, I am still gaining new *paid* subscribers – or “members,” as they are called on Steady, the platform that hosts Democracy Americana; but the growth of members is also slowing down considerably. Even if I figure out a way to stabilize the subscriber base, I would need to bring up the conversion rate of free-to-paid subscriptions to about five percent of all subscribers paying for a membership. Right now, I am fairly far off that goal of five percent. To compensate, I would need to grow the overall pool of subscribers to get to the necessary number of paid subscriptions even at a lower conversion rate. Alas, the opposite is currently happening.

Over the next six months I will need to figure out a way to reverse those trends. If you regularly read Democracy Americana, please consider helping me do that. I totally understand not everyone can afford to chip in. But there are other ways to help: Word-of-mouth is essential, and personal recommendations have an enormous impact. So, please tell a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague about Democracy Americana.

And if you are in a financial position to do so, please consider becoming a paid member.

The state of Democracy Americana, Part I: On being an independent writer (and the pitfalls of the newsletter business)

When I re-launched Democracy Americana at a new platform called “Steady” last September and started my new life as a full-time independent writer, I wrote about the changes in my private and professional life that had led me to that point. However, a lot of new subscribers have joined since. And many of those who had already been on board when I sent out what you might call my mission statement may have still missed it, since we encountered some rather unfortunate server issues in the beginning, which meant the launch post only ever went out to a fraction of my readership. So, please allow me to re-introduce myself.

I was trained as a historian and have spent almost my entire adult life studying, researching, and teaching political history in Germany, England, and the United States. Before I decided to take the leap and become a full-time writer last summer, I taught international history as a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC for five years; before that, I was Assistant Professor for contemporary history at Freiburg University in Germany. I received my PhD from Freiburg in 2015 and my MPhil from Cambridge University in England in 2007.

My academic work focused on anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the American Right as well as the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the Far Right since the 1930s. As you might imagine, when Trump first took over the Republican Party and then rose to the presidency, I had thoughts… or rather questions that I believed were of more than purely academic interest: Where did Trumpism come from? How can we situate it in the longer-term context of U.S. history? Where does our moment sit in the contested history of the struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America? And how is the situation in the United States connected to the inter- and transnational struggle between authoritarian ethno-nationalism and democratic pluralism?

About halfway through the first Trump administration, I decided it was time for me to intervene publicly and offer whatever I could to help make sense of what was happening around us. I became very active on social media, wrote op-eds, gave public talks, started a podcast... Finally, in November 2022, I launched Democracy Americana as a way to provide regular long-form commentary and offer historically informed deep dives into our current political and societal conflict. As long as I received a salary from Georgetown, the newsletter was always entirely free.

Leaving the academy

At the end of May 2025 my contract at Georgetown University ran out. By that point, I had grown disillusioned with academia. Not with what happens inside the classroom: I have always found teaching to be an immediately rewarding experience. And not with the actual doing research either – that was the best part: the chance to learn, discover, grow as a result. But the academic job market is a mess. I was never tenured or on a tenure track. I couldn’t even tell you exactly how many short-term contracts and appointments I’ve cycled through: I crossed into the double digits many years before I finally left.

When I became a father for the first time in 2017, I set certain red lines for myself. I wasn’t going to ask my wife to consider her professional and private aspirations as secondary. I wasn’t going to uproot my boys several more times, chasing yet more short-term contracts here or fellowships there.

At some point over the past few years, I can’t even point to an exact moment, we decided that the best path forward for us as a family was for me to go independent, become a full-time writer, and thereby gain the flexibility to go where my wife’s career would take us and where my kids would have the best possible life growing up.

This was not an easy decision. I’m a first-generation academic from a tiny village in rural southwest Germany. Getting a PhD, the chance to be a historian for a living, to work and learn with students - it all felt light years away from where/how I grew up. I thought this was going to be my life. But as big of a caesura as this has been for me both professionally as well as biographically, I do not regret my decision, nor do I mourn my academic career. In fact, I feel more content with where I am and what I am doing today than probably ever before.

I have long admired people who believed in what they had to offer, took the leap to independence, and built their own careers around what drove them. I wasn’t sure if I had that kind of leap in me. I am glad the circumstances gave me a little extra push.

Leaving America

It was, strictly from a professional perspective, probably not ideal that I launched my career as a full-time writer focused on American history and politics right after we left the United States. But life in America was simply no longer tenable for us.

There was a bunch of reasons why we decided to move back to Germany – I want to be clear that this was not solely, or even primarily, about politics. But the political situation certainly played a role.

Authoritarianism is never distributed evenly. As a straight white man, I was obviously not among the key targets of this regime. But as a foreign national, I increasingly felt my choice was to either continue to intervene publicly, at the increasing risk of potentially making myself and my family a target; or to fall silent, accommodate, ignore the political reality. Don’t go to protests, don’t add your name to any initiative that defends democracy, don’t publish anything too harsh, be careful what you say in the classroom… Unacceptable. Untenable.

In that situation, we were in an immensely privileged position: As German citizens, we could leave. It is, of course, a choice that is not available to those in the United States directly targeted by the regime, those most vulnerable to MAGA’s aggrieved aggression. When we left last summer, I felt mostly relief and gratitude for the privileged position we were in - mixed with a deep sense of despair, sadness, and anger.

Leaving Substack

I needed to move forward. But I did not want to help Substack make money.

It is well documented that Substack serves as the platform for a whole host of unsavory characters. In late 2023, the work of independent journalist Jonathan Katz uncovered what has since been confirmed over and over again: That a bunch of literal, self-identifying Nazis and white supremacists are using Substack to make money off disseminating their violent ideology. Yet Substack’s leadership proved very reluctant to do anything about it, even describing the continued platforming of such ideas and people as a heroic act of defending “free speech.” That never made any sense, as Substack was always in the business of moderating content, of suppressing and prohibiting some forms of speech while actively elevating others. The most charitable interpretation, at this point, is that Substack has a rather lax attitude towards hosting hate speech, and a tendency to be actively lenient towards the rightwing extremist scene.

Frankly, I find the politics of the Substack leadership rather abhorrent. And the problem is not *just*, as Substack defenders will say, a handful of extremist newsletters on the margins. My biggest issue is that Substack insists on actively supporting leading far-right activists and propagandists like Christopher Rufo, Curtis Yarvin, and Richard Hanania – not only platforming, but actively promoting them as important thinkers.

Unsurprisingly, Substack has also pushed Bari Weiss’ “The Free Press” to becoming one of the most successful publications on the platform – enabling Weiss, a disingenuous reactionary grievance entrepreneur, to become one of the regime’s chief apologists. It makes sense that the Silicon Valley tech elite that stands behind Substack has recently teamed up with the gambling / betting machine: Never pass on an opportunity to make money by poisoning society some more, I guess.

I think all of this is bad. And it didn’t feel right to contribute to the success of such a platform.

I will say, however, that six months after my decision to leave, I am more convinced than ever that people can be a little too quick and casual with their critique of individual writers who publish on Substack. There are wonderful people producing extremely valuable work on Substack. There are academics who have found a broad public audience for their scholarly insight; leftwing intellectuals who offer the most incisive commentary out there; independent journalists who provide invaluable coverage of what is happening around us. Some of the best data and polling analysis in the world is being hosted on Substack.

These are serious people, with a serious commitment to the democratic struggle. The reason why they have stuck around is, I am assuming, that Substack works. There is no question that it has made life as an independent writer or journalist viable for a lot of people who otherwise almost certainly would not have had that option. If you have built a substantial audience via Substack, and your livelihood depends on it, leaving that behind comes with a risk. If you think I am being overly dramatic, let me tell you that it is still unclear whether Democracy Americana will withstand the significant hit that came with leaving Substack behind – and I’ll come back to that point later.

However, I still believe leaving was the right thing to do. As Philip Bump put it so succinctly in a piece he wrote last August in which he explained why he was *not* joining Substack: This is about “building power.” Bump had just left the Washington Post, as all good people have; and it would have been easy for him to generate quite a decent income quickly by launching a newsletter on Substack. But Bump insisted: “There is value in helping institutions that are doing good, important work to build their power” – rather than helping Substack and the Silicon Valley elite behind it build its institutional power.

So, I looked for alternatives and found one in Steady. Founded by a group of independent German journalists, Steady is based in Berlin and operates with a small, international team. It is a privately owned, self-funded business, a real refuge from Silicon Valley venture capitalist domination. That felt right to me, as I was hoping to gain a little distance from the near-monopoly of Substack and seeking to de-risk, basically, from my dependence on U.S. tech feudalists.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Democracy Americana is struggling

So, how has this experiment been going so far?

Before I break down the hurdles Democracy Americana is facing, let me emphasize something that is very important to me: I do not feel entitled to anyone’s financial support. I feel privileged to be doing this work. And the reality is that this is a tough business, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be tough for me. I am not trying to guilt and coerce anyone into giving me money they don’t think I deserve or aren’t in a position to give. My goal is to make sure my readers have an adequate understanding of the realities that determine the future of my work.

As of this morning, Democracy Americana goes out to about 20,000 subscribers, with a little over three percent of them supporting the newsletter financially as paid members. This is almost exactly the same number of total subscribers (free and paid) as six months ago – and that is not good news.

After three years of consistent growth on Substack, the growth has stalled. In fact, since an initial spike in subscribers last September, fueled by my launch announcement and a lot of support from friends and colleagues who helped me spread the word, the overall number of subscribers has been in steady decline. What happens is that every time I send out a new piece a large number of people unsubscribe in reaction. To some extent, that’s just what happens when you drop a newsletter in people’s email inboxes: You inevitably remind some of them they have a subscription they may not want anymore. But the number of “unsubscribes” that follows every post has drastically gone up since I left Substack. Meanwhile, I am finding it much harder to attract new subscribers.

What’s changed? Some of this is difficult for me to decipher. Why the number of people who click on “unsubscribe” every time I send out a piece is something like six to seven times higher now, on Steady, than it had previously been on Substack is utterly beyond me, for instance. I just don’t understand it. I have not changed the type of essays I write nor the frequency with which they go out – and yet…

It seems undeniable to me that the change of platforms played a significant role. Substack very likely exaggerates the effect of its reference and recommendation system - but that system does generate growth. Most importantly, I believe, is the fact that so many millions of people are already on Substack, where subscribing to another newsletter is just one click away. And if someone already has their payment information stored on Substack, upgrading to a paid subscription also takes one click only.

Meanwhile, I have been trying to convince people to set up an account and enter their information at yet another platform, one that my overwhelmingly American audience is highly unlikely to be familiar with. That has proven to be a much more significant hurdle than I anticipated.

This may also explain why social media attention no longer translates into new subscribers. I have built a relatively substantial social media presence, and there used to be a direct correlation between successfully promoting a piece or even just posting a thread with some observations on social media and an increase in subscribers. That is no longer the case at all. I always thought people found me on social media and that animated them to subscribe. But that probably wasn’t quite right. The more likely explanation is that social media attention only reminded people who were already on Substack to subscribe to *my* Substack newsletter as well – while it is much harder to get people to follow you from social media to a new platform.

One particularly frustrating change I have had to institute is the use of paywalls. When I started, my plan was to continue publishing most of my writing for free and only reserve occasional extra content for paid subscribers. I was hoping, perhaps naively, that with a sizeable (and supposedly growing!) subscriber base of 20,000, enough people would still want to support my work, even if they didn’t *have to* in order to access it. That has, unfortunately, not worked at all. For quite some time now, free pieces have generated hardly any new paying members – not even enough to replace those who cancel their paid subscriptions. What is especially nasty is that free pieces still cause the same high number of “unsubscribes” – while not even generating any more free subscribers either. It is very hard to justify sending out free pieces, therefore. But while putting most of my writing behind a paywall does generate revenue, it also means I am drastically curtailing my audience. If you believe that you work matters, in whatever small ways – and as a political writer, you must! How on earth could I be doing this work if I didn’t think it had any significance at all? –, this is a big issue.

Is this newsletter worth your money?

Some of you may be thinking: We are already thousands of words in, and the author hasn’t even addressed the key questions yet – Is Democracy Americana *worth* your money? I hesitate. This is a totally fair question. But I truly don’t believe I can properly answer it for you. Let me share my own thinking on this matter.

First of all, a paid membership gets you additional benefits. While I still intend to publish free pieces regularly, the majority of my writing is now reserved for those who support Democracy Americana financially. Members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form – either via an RSS feed that enables you to get the audio version in the podcast player of your choice or via a premium Spotify feed. Members also have the option to discuss all the posts with me and other readers in the comment section. If you are feeling especially generous and consider a “Democracy Ambassador” tier membership, you will get all that – plus two free “Ambassador” passes that you can share with / gift to whoever you think might benefit from reading Democracy Americana.

Does that package mean a Democracy Americana membership is “worth” the cost? Purely in transactional terms, who am I to make that assessment for you? Sometimes, people reach out to me to tell me they don’t believe Democracy Americana is worth $9 per month or $90 per year when that also gets you a New York Times subscription. And if that is your calculus, then fair enough!

The question I am most concerned with is this: Does my work add something of value to the political discourse? And that question I feel justified answering with a confident Yes!

Not counting this piece here, over the past six months I have published about 92,000 words here on Democracy Americana. That means an average essay comes in at about 4,000 words (the median at about 3,900). These are not opinion pieces (for those, a newspaper will usually give you around 900 words or so), I am not firing off some quick takes. These are proper deep dives. Intended for a broader audience, yes – but I take pride in researching and writing them in a way that stands up to academic scrutiny. Others will always be faster or cover the news more broadly. But I don’t think anyone will be more thorough.

The state of Democracy Americana, Part II: Future plans

This has all been rather gloomy thus far, and that’s not the note I want to end on. Because despite all these very real concerns about the sustainability of what I am trying to build here, I also feel a great deal of excitement about the next steps in this journey. A big reason why the past few months have been such a grind is that I had to deal with so much bureaucracy and spend so much time on the business side of this one-person enterprise – something I had zero experience with and also not something I can claim any great talent for. It’s been a lot of trial and quite a bit of error. But my sense is that I am getting the hang of this, which hopefully frees up time and resources to build Democracy Americana into what I am envisioning it to be.

I know these long-form essays are a hard sell for some people. Sometimes, I wonder if there is something outrageous about asking people to spend so much time with my work every week. In fact, one of my oldest and closest friends flat-out told me two weeks ago that he stopped reading the newsletter months ago because he simply didn’t have the energy or the nerve to read such pieces. Fair enough.

I do have some ideas for complimentary formats, both video and audio, that I would love to offer in addition to the long-form essays (more on that soon, in a separate post). But the core identity of Democracy Americana has always been – and will always be – the deep dive.

The idea behind this newsletter is to offer extensive, historically informed explorations of our current political and societal conflict. So much is happening, on so many levels – it often feels overwhelming, almost disorienting. We need to find ways to gain perspective, a sense of the big picture. I truly believe the mission of Democracy Americana is more important than ever.

Something I am really excited about is to launch, in addition to the week-to-week reflections on the political conflict, several ongoing series of essays that focus on broader questions and specific themes. The first of these I am tentatively calling: “Core Texts of Trumpism.” I will announce the start of this series in more detail soon in a separate post. But basically, I want to look at speeches, essays, and books by rightwing politicians, intellectuals, and activists that I believe anyone should know, because they capture core ideas and sensibilities of today’s Right, because they can help us understand the permission structure that governs rightwing politics. I want to select texts that can provide a window into key dynamics that have shaped the past and present of the modern Right and the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the far right. In every entry in this series, I will choose one such text and explain why it is important, what it helps us understand better about the modern Right since the 1950s or so. Over time, I am hoping to build a virtual library of sorts, focusing on accessible, shorter texts so that you can read them yourselves and follow along as I explore what they can unlock about Trumpism and its antecedents on the Right.

A second such recurring series I would like to tentatively call “How Progress Happens in American History.” Where “Core Texts of Trumpism” is very much preoccupied with the question of how the hell we got to where we are now, this series is about where we might go next, and what we can learn from America’s past about the kind of democratic transformation that the country so desperately needs. My idea is to explore the moments when transformative change happened – after the Civil War, for instance, during the New Deal, or in the 1960s Civil Rights era – and explore what made those leaps possible; the structural conditions that made them feasible; the key actors that seized the moment; the possibilities and limits of imagination in such moments of acute crisis-turned-transformation. Conversely, I also want to look at moments when such transformative change, even though it may have been possible, did not occur – and explore the reasons why the potential was squandered.

A third idea for a series (and then I’ll leave it at that, as this piece is already far too long!): “Why We Fight Over the Past.” This series will closely track the Trumpist assault on history that has already been ramping up – and is certainly about to escalate as we are getting deeper into this anniversary-heavy year. I want to situate this latest escalation in the context of the twenty-first century “history wars,” as “history” – the stories we tell about the past, how we teach it, how we commemorate it – has been at the forefront of the political debate for quite some time. The struggle over “history” is a conflict over national identity and who gets to define it, who gets to define what “America” is and who gets to belong here. As such, the assault on history is an essential part of the Trumpist agenda. These “history wars” have been going on for a long time, of course (the term itself was popularized in the 1990s), and it is worth exploring the longer-term continuities as well as the more recent radicalizations. There is also a transnational dimension here, as similar contestations over the national story have been escalating all across the “West” and wherever authoritarian movements have been on the rise. Understanding the U.S. “history wars” in this broader context will help us understand the stakes in this struggle – and how to respond to the rightwing assault.

Onward. Forward.

If you have hopefully made it this far, let me say that I am feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude: Being able to do this work that I believe is meaningful is deeply gratifying. It is the best job I can imagine, and I promise you I will work as hard as I possibly can to keep building Democracy Americana into something that is worthy of your time, your engagement, and your support. It is your generosity that is making all of this possible.

Thank you!

Take care, Thomas