Back from 10 days traveling the beautifully rugged interior of Spain, party politics in the U.S. looks smaller and smaller, through the prism of a distant culture. It’s hard to say there is much to admire in either the Republican or Democratic parties these days, and even less in splinter groups. My feeling is that general apathy towards party politics is growing in the U.S., or at least it ought to be. Our obsolete Electoral College system of electing Presidents pretty much assures that a multiple party system, that might offer some hope for the disenfranchised electorate, has no chance of developing. Party politics needs to be reinvented in time to save our democracy, with vision, transparency and wisdom, rather than stale rhetoric, insider deals and narrow-minded moral parochialism, as its pillars. Meanwhile, I’m not going to the “party” — any of them.

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