I have not been posting a lot lately (past month or 2) because my life has been rather hectic lately... nothing wrong here, but instead too many things went right at the same time and I am struggling to keep up...AND also frantically trying to write a paper by a deadline that got moved up a month sooner than I anticipated...

Buck, I can say that the mid-terms were not as bad as I feared, but not as good as I hoped. You are happy about that, and I feel some relief... If we do keep the house, then I will feel like we have a little breathing room.

But... this isn't over, not by a long shot... declarations that "the fever is breaking" ignore the very deep sickness that we have here... %30-%40 percent of our populace is - at the very least- open to authoritarian rule to 'put the libs in their place'... A very sizable minority is eager for violence to accomplish that goal.

That has not changed.

Sure- some in the GOP have turned on Trump, but we have seen that before and it didn't last. But Trump isn't the main problem... if he fades away they will find a new strongman ... and the next one will probably be smarter... it will probably be DeSantis. You seem to believe DeSantis would abide by the constitution... I have no idea why you would believe that given his behavior and statements...

If they take the House they will use that power to cripple the government - they will do whatever they can to hurt Biden's chances at a second term.

Our democracy is deeply wounded and there is a large fraction of the population eager to see it die, there is a multi-billion dollar right-wing propaganda machine working non-stop to kill it.

The mid-term results were not a victory- if we lose the house then its another wound... We have to get lucky every time, they only need to get lucky once.

I am glad things didn't go as bad as they could have, but we are a long way from being able to breathe a sigh of relief. One thing that has been made painfully clear the past 6 years is that democracy is NOT as resilient as we would like to believe.

The coup is still in progress, and we need to start acting like it.