Category Archives: American political history

Know Nothings

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Know Nothing flag, mid-1850's.

Know Nothing flag, mid-1850’s.

Native-American didn’t always mean American Indian. That definition took hold in the 1970’s*. Back in the 19th century, at least until the Civil War, it meant native-born American, and American meant White, English, Protestant and especially not Irish. In fact, many people in the 1850’s hated the Irish flooding into American ports after the Potato Famine of the 1840’s, hated them so much they formed a political party, the Native American Party. It was a secret, at first–secret societies were all the rage back then–and if asked a member was supposed to say I know nothing. Hence the common name. (Seriously, that explains the name, as stupid as that sounds.) Later it called itself the American Party, but it wasn’t around long enough for that name to stick. To this day we know them as Know Nothings. Only the Anti-Masonic Party of a generation earlier (they really hated Freemasons) had an odder appellation for a major American political party. Continue reading →

Bernie Sanders and the Fifth Great Awakening

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Oh man, another Bernie supporter telling me that Bernie is GOOD man (not merely a good man, but a GOOD man) and therefore deserves to be president. And another just told me that Bernie will never lie to us….

So what’s with this weird “he’s a GOOD man” trip that so many Bernie people are on? They make it sound more like a religious movement than a political movement. Is Bernie the messiah, promising utopia? Any time anybody mentions even the slightest hint of imperfection they start with the Bernie is a GOOD man mantra. Or how Bernie will never lie to us. Hell, he’s a politician, he will lie, he will sometimes betray his own principles. It goes with the gig. But if Bernie’s losing campaign has proven anything, he’s shown that the under 40 year olds in this country are as ripe for the next great American religious revival as were the under 40 year old baby boomers in the 1970’s. They called that one the Fourth Great Awakening. Looks like the Fifth Great Awakening might be right on its historical schedule. Continue reading →

Generations

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The Millennials today will have their presidential election year about the time they morph into grumpy middle aged people who actually vote. 2024, maybe, or more like 2032, when today’s eighteen and twenty-nine year olds are thirty four and a thoroughly disagreeable forty five, respectively. As for the geezers, well, some of us will be there for it, and some will never have our year, we’ll be memories. The luck of the draw. But it won’t be the baby boomers’ world by then anyway, thankfully, we who voted more for Nixon and Reagan than Gene McCarthy and George McGovern, we who helped sweep the Reagan Revolution into power and helped it dismantle the New Deal. This mess we’re in today is as much our fault as the establishment we railed against way back when. We can’t blame it all on the Greatest Generation. Half of us voted for Reagan, even icons like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Johnny Ramone were card carrying Republicans. (You gotta serve somebody, Bob said. Keep on rockin’ in the free world said Neil.) And a lot of us Baby Boomers will wind up cranky old Republicans, chasing left wing Millennials off our lawns. No, we fucked up, sold out, gave up. The New Deal generation never let the US descend into income inequality hell like we did. They had their priorities right. And it’s hard to imagine that Millennials won’t eventually do something about getting those priorities right again, once they get off their aging asses and vote. Continue reading →

A little early for the Revolution

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Someone read a blog post of mine and told me it just show who frightened I was of a Bernie Sanders victory. That was weird, I mean why the hell would a Hillary supporter today be frightened? Had the guy even looked at any of the poll data? Bernie’s campaign is doomed. It’ll run for a while, and with fervor, but Bernie has lost the support of the majority of voters. He simply cannot find enough voters to win him the delegates he needs to win the nomination. He peaked in New Hampshire, as predicted (in fact as I said all along, and said beforehand he would, it was so predictable), and collapsed afterward, as predicted. The only surprising thing for me* was that his collapse is happening so much faster than expected. I mean look at Massachusetts. He is behind. He is behind so much–somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent–that the results while not certain for Hillary and very uncertain for Bernie. Bernie should be up 20% there now. Massachusetts is the state where, outside of Vermont, he should be massively popular. Which he is, actually, voters love him. Love him even more than Hillary, who is also very popular in Massachusetts, but those same voters will tell pollsters, over and over, that they would prefer Hillary as president because Hillary has the experience and skills need that Bernie lacks. The problem for the Bernie campaign in Massachusetts now is that after the New Hampshire win Bernie was about 20 points higher than he is now. So any Hillary win, or even a very close Bernie win, will be seen as a Bernie loss. He has to win by a solid margin for it to be seen as anything other than proof of weakened momentum in the most liberal part of the country. The fact that he is desperately struggling to hold Massachusetts is just indicative of just how much Bernie’s momentum after his big New Hampshire win has collapsed.

Continue reading →

Progressive scorecard

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1968. The Democratic party, bitterly divided between liberals and way liberals, blows up.

1972. George McGovern is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

1984. Water Mondale is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

1988. Michael Dukakis is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

2000. Voters, disgusted at Al Gore’s sell out conservatism, elect Ralph Nader in a landslide victory and American is changed forever.

2004. John Kerry is elected in a landslide victory and American is changed forever.

2008. Barack Obama, reaching out to black and moderate voters, is defeated in a landslide and America is unchanged forever.

2012. See 2008, but way worse even.

2016. Bernie Sanders is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Convergence

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Wow. Twelve declared Republican presidential candidates as of today, and another four expected. Sixteen total. That’s seems nuts.

But thinking back to my college days when I had dreams of being another Theodore White and read every campaign history I could lay my hands on, I remember doing a rather long paper on the 1976 presidential election campaign. It’s probably stuffed in a box around here somewhere. That was the first election after Watergate, and the Democrats had blown the GOP to smithereens in the previous midterms. Watergate, you’ll remember. If you were a Democrat and breathing you were elected that year. And as 1976 approached, the excitement was too much for many Democrats and fifteen of them declared themselves candidates for president, and another sixteen considered but decided against it, which means at one point over thirty Democrats were picturing themselves in the Oval Office, signing bills and giving orders. I’ve seen no list yet of the Republicans who were thinking about running this year but changed their minds. But if the last four Republicans expected to announce this year do join the herd, they will have officially beat by one candidate the Democrat’s total in 1976, which I believe was the most ever. That was a helluva campaign on the Democratic side, the 1976 nomination race. Fast paced, fluid, full of surprises. The histories–I remember reading two of them, though the titles escape me–read like fast paced novels. The underdog, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter, won in a happy ending that made Americans feel warm all over. It was the most exciting election since 1968, the histories of which (An American Melodrama was one) also read like a novel, though a tragic one, full of death and betrayal, the ending just sad. Continue reading →

Cuba libre

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Alpha 66 is not happy.

Alpha 66 is not happy.

The U.S. embargo of Cuba is pretty inexplicable. We have close relations with Viet Nam. We may have more direct connections with North Korea than we do with Cuba. Why have we continued this ridiculous embargo and non-recognition so long? Fidel tossed Batista (and the Mob) out in 1959. That was 55 years ago.

Because of Florida, that’s why. Specifically because of Florida on two days every four years. One of those days is the Republican presidential primary. The other is the day we vote for president. By an accident of political geography, it’s been impossible for a presidential candidate to say that as president he would lift the embargo and exchange ambassadors with Cuba without committing political suicide. Continue reading →

Republicans can’t live forever

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Scanning Google News this morning I saw this:

Half of Republicans back limits on carbon emissions, poll finds.

That’s a shocker of a headline, considering how the GOP leadership talks. They’re still pretending that this global warming thing is no big deal, that it’ll blow over. But it looks like the GOP rank and file is not so deluded (or bought) and is beginning to turn around. I haven’t seen the polling data, but my guess is that it’s probably not so much a change of heart among GOP global warming deniers. It’s just that the old timers are dying off and the younger ones being more realistic. The GOP is a very old party as far as member age goes, and they are experiencing a rapid die-off of their original Reagan voters. It will probably begin changing its ideology quickly as the old timers disappear. This happened to the Democrats too, with the end of the New Deal generation. As the FDR voters began dying off, the conservative vote grew in proportion. The New Democrats, far more accommodating to the Reagan Administration than the New Dealers ever would have been, replaced them. We know how that turned out. But now it’s the Republican’s turn to die off…though it’s taking longer as old people live longer now than in 1980 (a whole election cycle longer, in fact.) Periodically in American history there will be these decisive “sea change” elections when the population dramatically changes party and ideology. 1932 was one, 1980 another. Generally things change again as that original sea change generation dies off. We’re on the cusp of that now. Obama’s re-election was proof that it was beginning. Millennials are the most leftist generation there has been in this country since 1932, far more leftist than the vaunted baby boomers (that is, those of us born between 1946 and 1964 and who split close to 50/50 between liberals and conservatives). Within a decade it will be the Millennials’ turn to reset the American political landscape for the next half a century, and that is catastrophic news for conservatives. All those rotten hipsters we are decrying all the time, they’re gonna be the salvation of the country. They will be the ones who demolish the Reagan Revolution and reduce income disparity and get this country back on track. It ain’t gonna be us baby boomers. Half of us voted for Reagan, twice.

hipster beards

Say what you want, but they never voted for Reagan.

 

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