Using History To Predict The Future Is Hard: Election Edition

Specifically, which historical models apply under what circumstances? It’s not always black and white… or is it?

Everybody agrees on one thing; the Democrats will lose Congressional seats in next week’s election. Using history to predict that one is a pretty safe bet. Even the talking knuckleheads on the cable news nets have that piece of the puzzle all figured out.

What I can’t determine ahead of time—and what I think the interesting question is—is, will the Tea Party be absorbed into the Republican machine once it gets to DC, or will the GOP find itself being taken over from the inside once these political neophytes make it into the seats of power? Because there is historical precedent for both scenarios.

Naturally, the 10-gallon ass-hats who run the Republican party are convinced that once the Tea Partiers hit the big time, they’ll be as easily seduced as their predecessors have always been by all the bells, whistles and page-boys accompanying their bump up to the Elite class they used to rail against only months before.

It’s a lovely plan. History suggests it will work.

History also suggests it could be a huge miscalculation. Hindenburg thought he was solving his Hitler problem by absorbing him into a functionary position in the existing government; we all know how that worked out.

And really, does anyone believe that the guy from the Rent Is Too Damn High party is gonna play ball if given the opportunity? Or the dope from my own newly-adopted home state who legally changed his name to Pro Life? I think a lot of these Tea Party candidates are genuine zealots who will stick to their guns once elected, no matter how poorly informed or briefly considered their guns happen to be. I mean, most of them are running on variations of a platform of coming to Washington to tear it down. In their world, firefighters don’t put out fires, they start them.

If you think Congress is deadlocked now, wait till the newly-empowered tea-partying lawmakers begin issuing subpoenas and introducing bills.

My personal guess is that most of them are not going to be so easily corralled and will cause the GOP almost as many headaches as they will the Dems.

The other most likely scenario is even more discouraging for the future of our cute little experiment in Democracy. This one has the Tea Partiers engulfing and devouring the establishment GOP. Unlikely, you say? Other than my Hitler allegory, above, what do I have to buttress this excursion into reckless speculation?

For reasons that are nobody’s beeswax but my own, I’m reading up on Reconstruction (approximately the decade following the Civil War) lately, and it’s impossible to educate oneself on that period without covering the birth of the GOP, too.

Because the Republican party itself came into being rapidly between 1856 and 1860 by supplanting their host party, the Whigs. In the 1858 mid-terms, the Republicans were a self-styled “radical” splinter-group of the long-established Whig party. Two years later, their candidate was on his way to the White House and the Whig Party was on its way to the ashbin of history.



Could this be the scenario set to repeat itself? I tell ya, if the Tea Party offered up an Abe Lincoln in 2012, I’d give him or her a pretty close look, myself. I think that’s unlikely, however, as their candidates generally go out of their way to position themselves as proud Know-Nothings. I think they’re too pleased with themselves for being non-Elites to promote a deep-thinker like Lincoln to the top of their ticket. (You know who I feel sorry for? Mitt Romney. He’s gotta be going, “No, dang it, 2012 was supposed to be my year!”)



It’s funny to read in the history books about “Radical Republicans” as far back as 150 years ago. Yes, that’s the way they referred to themselves. Back then being a radical wasn’t considered a bad thing, probably because their radical ideas centered mostly around opposition to the buying and selling of human livestock.

But—in a nutshell—what happened right after the Civil War was, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Jackson, very quickly returned the planter aristocracy of the Old South to power, and we ended up with 100 years of lynchings, the KKK, ‘Black Code’ laws, Jim Crow and preachers getting shot on motel room balconies.

One of the documentary DVDs I’ve screened has a line that I think sums up the Civil War and its consequences in a nutshell. The historian on camera said, “The north won the war, but the south won the peace.” Big time.

Which led me to reflect upon the allegations of racism that continue to dog the virtually all-Caucasion Tea Party. Can it really be pure coincidence that their movement coalesced and took flight between the time the nation’s first Black president was sworn in and now? Can it be any clearer what “founding principles” these crackers really want to get back to?

Friends, race has been an issue in America since long before its founding. By the time slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1863, it had been an institution for hundreds of years, and a profitable one at that. To put it into context, it would be like the president shuttering all the nation’s gas station’s today. Commerce would, and did, grind to a halt.

Especially in the south, where the defeated citizenry were inclined to neither forgive nor forget. Or even live and let live. The cumulative result being, between the introduction of slavery on our shores and the release of “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” in 1967, hundreds of years of institutionalized oppression had elapsed. How much time has passed between the Civil Rights movement and now? Forty years.

We’ve been culturally bred for centuries to hold people of color as second-class citizens, at best. Forty years of relative enlightenment is a drop in the bucket compared to that.

More importantly, we still have a couple of generations of original haters left alive and kicking. Aging, overweight, undereducated white people… you know, like you see waving Obama-as-Hitler signs at Tea Party events.

We’re kidding ourselves if we think that race in America is a closed book, and there’s got to be some kind of irony at work when the people who understand this the best are the people most disposed to upset that delicately evolving harmony, and best positioned to do further damage to a wound that is only beginning to heal.