{"id":53621,"date":"2023-12-06T10:16:14","date_gmt":"2023-12-06T18:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=53621"},"modified":"2023-12-06T10:17:35","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T18:17:35","slug":"personal-update-december-6-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2023\/12\/06\/personal-update-december-6-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Update December 6, 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Kevin McCarthy is leaving Congress at the end of December<\/a>.\u00a0 Well, with McCarthy gone, and Santos gone, we may just be able to find enough sane Republicands to pass an actual budget – but I wouldn’t count on it.\u00a0 For Santos’s seat, we do have a good chance of picking up a Democrat.\u00a0 McCarthy’s seat, not so much.<\/p>\n

I have been thiki a bit about two-party systems as opposed to multiple-party systems, in which no party ever gets a majority but has to form a coalition in order to have a government.\u00a0 But I think that is true in two-party systems as well.\u00a0 It’s less obvious, perhaps, in out Republican Party today, which has morphed into a single-minded raving maniac.\u00a0 But it’s pretty clear the Democratic Party is a coalition extending from people who just want things to work through Democrats who have a clear ideology of how things work, all the way to actual Progressives who are often clearly unconfortable, but still taking the bus which brings them the closest to their destination, because what else can they do?<\/p>\n

It’s also pretty clear that neither a two-party system nor a multi-party system can immunize a nation against turning fascist.\u00a0 But it’s not at all clear what can.\u00a0 My best guess at this point would be reforming journalism – But I say that looking back at the 30’s and early 40’s, knowing we had just as many people then susceptible to becoming fascist, and having at least some idea of how many of us did, and yet somehow we didn’t.\u00a0 But we did have real journaalists with real journalistic standards – who were not perfect – they missed a lot, but they got a lot right too.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Kevin McCarthy is leaving Congress at the end of December.\u00a0 Well, with McCarthy gone, and Santos gone, we may just be able to find enough sane Republicands to pass an actual budget – but I wouldn’t count on it.\u00a0 For Santos’s seat, we do have a good chance of picking up a Democrat.\u00a0 McCarthy’s […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":50381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}