Posted on 09/18/2011 7:01:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Another wave is coming, Washington – and “the ‘ins’ may be thrown out, and the ‘outs’ may be thrown in,” according to Michael Genovese, Loyola University political-science professor.
Genovese thinks the economic and political turbulence of the past 12 years are “eerily similar” to the Panic of 1893 and the unsettling election cycles of 1884 to 1896.
Both eras feature fantastic wealth created for a privileged few, fiercely competitive and highly partisan elections, an ineffectual and seemingly corrupt government, and an angry, disillusioned electorate.
And both have had populist movements – the Progressives of the late 1800s, the Tea Party of today – born of economic dislocation that has pressured the status quo, Genovese said.
“The Progressive movement sprang out of this period,” Villanova University political science professor Lara Brown said of the Gilded Age. “Politicians from both parties promised reform, yet few were able to deliver meaningful changes.”
Progressives, she explained, tried to reform America by “professionalizing and nationalizing government, because they believed the problems (of that time) mostly stemmed from powerful state-based party machines.”
Today, many people perceive the opposite problem: Too much Washington, too many experts.
“Thus, it is no surprise that the Tea Party movement aims to downsize the federal government and to raise up the power of the states,” said Brown, reversing the Progressives’ achievements of more than 100 years ago.
In addition to economic distress, that earlier period was marked by deep public dissatisfaction with the way government worked, or didn’t work.
Back then, to the electoral winner went the spoils of patronage jobs for loyal partisans and pork-barrel contracts for supportive special interests – to a degree far beyond anything seen today.
“The booming industrial revolution led to the formation of large corporate trusts, which generated previously unheard-of profits,” Brown said.
Wall Street fat-cats influenced public policy and generally were believed to have bought U.S. senators; crony capitalism was rampant, and it was bipartisan.
Sound familiar?
“I think the analogy between the 1890s and today is better than the analogy with the Great Depression … that we often focus on,” said Hugh Rockoff, a Rutgers University economics professor. “One of the many similarities is the real estate crisis. There was a subprime mortgage problem in the 1890s that was very similar to what precipitated the recent crisis.”
Before 1893’s crisis, many farmers bought homesteads on the Great Plains with short-term “balloon” mortgages supplied by small local mortgage companies and banks. The borrower paid only the interest for five years – until the principal then came due.
Mortgage companies bundled those mortgages and sold them to investors in New York and London.
The bundles supposedly were insured – all very much like the securitization of mortgages that preceded our recent crisis – but they plunged in value, igniting an international banking panic.
“Industrial production fell … and unemployment rose to double-digit levels,” Rockoff recalled. “It took years to work our way out.”
The 2006 midterm election that threw Republicans out of power in Washington was the first noticeable sign of what has been brewing on Main Street since the electoral mess of the 2000 presidential election: Americans are fed up.
While people call the 2008 presidential contest a “change election,” it was merely a small part of the unsettling of the country, rooted in economic uncertainty that has crippled the middle class.
If Barack Obama’s election truly was the “change” the nation sought, then solid-Democrat New Jersey would not have rebuked his policies less than a year later by electing Republican Chris Christie as governor.
Nor would Virginia have given Republican Bob McDonnell a landslide victory that same year.
And Republican Scott Brown had no political rationale to run for Teddy Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, let alone to win it – but he did.
Despite all of the warnings, the White House was blindsided when Republicans took back the U.S. House in historical numbers in 2010.
Last week, New York voters in a Democrat-stronghold district reminded President Obama that nothing is safe, not even in the Bronx: Republican Bob Turner comfortably won the House seat that text-happy Democrat Anthony Weiner was forced to give up.
Economics drives politics, Loyola’s Genovese says, adding: “If the past is a prelude, another angry election is on the way.”
All well and good but this desease runs deep. The outs that will be the new ins MUST!!! also clean every single agency of all, ALL it’s personel. The cancer runs deep! These agencies and thier employees will work behind the scenes to disrupt, slow down, sabotage the cleanup. They all have to go! Putting a new captain to run the ship when the deckhands are talking mutany will not help to turn this thing around
Angry won't describe it come election day. When they lose, expect riots in the streets.
Just sayin.
Investigators must go through every agency and clean out the political hacks who are guilty of corruption and treason ASAP. IMO and the opinion of many, the Clinton hacks that are still in jobs throughout the government have to go including DOJ, State Department, Pentagon; Dept of Energy, Dept of Education, everywhere. Many Americans know that our entire government has been compromised along with the US Congress and this Administration. Anyone doubt that?
Modern technology enables it. Now THAT is "progressive".
Johnny Suntrade
And if Obama wins by whatever means necessary, then decisions will have to be made about the future of the Republic by those who won't live under a fascist dictator.
The difference now is that all the wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the federal government, either through its confiscatory tax policies with respect to the upper middle class or its extortion of the mega-rich and industry by threatening to attack them with regulations.
If we don’t get Bambi and his socialist ilk out of the WH in this next election, we’re finished and will become just another failed socialist dictatorship. This is actually not a challenge we have had before, and the earlier examples cited by the author don’t even come close.
Actually, “they” haven’t been doing very well under Obama, and I don’t think there will be riots. In fact, I don’t think most of the sponge class will even turn out to vote this time around.
Obama made a few stabs at handing out freebies, and they didn’t work, so now he’s simply moved on to blatantly accumulating stuff for himself and living the high life, just like any good socialist dictator.
Blacks will still vote for him, no matter what, but I don’t think they’re going to turn out the way they did and I also don’t think they’re going to riot if he doesn’t get elected. He’s not worth it.
Genovese thinks the economic and political turbulence of the past 12 years are "eerily similar" to the Panic of 1893 and the unsettling election cycles of 1884 to 1896. Both eras feature fantastic wealth created for a privileged few, fiercely competitive and highly partisan elections, an ineffectual and seemingly corrupt government, and an angry, disillusioned electorate. And both have had populist movements -- the Progressives of the late 1800s, the Tea Party of today -- born of economic dislocation that has pressured the status quo, Genovese said.U.S. National Debt Clock (thanks RightWhale for the link):
365 days x 100,000,000 per day = $3,650,000,000 per year...
“Investigators must go through every agency and clean out the political hacks who are guilty of corruption and treason ASAP.”
It’s a pipe dream to think the place can be cleaned up.
The only solution is a serious downsizing of the fedgov that lays off thousands of federal gov’t employees. That’s the only cure for the current disease, to starve the beast until it shrinks in size. It doesn’t change the inherent corruption, it just makes it smaller in size.
I think you’re exactly right...when Premier Hussein is forcibly extracted from the White House next November, the few remaining Leftists and 99% of the black population in the Country is not going to take it well. The Dhimmies will have whipped up a furor to a froth by then, and anything is possible once the election results are clear.
High winds and heavy seas.....
A lot of these hacks doing jail time might help cure the corruption.
The 1920 election may be the one to look to. We’ve had our progressive period and may be ready for a Harding. But, hopefully, a Harding who won’t appoint arrogant cronies to associate positions.
Just the Wikipedia entry on Harding, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_G._Harding , indicates how little things change in politics.
High winds and heavy seas.....
I think you are right on what is coming, but wrong on the timing.
We have a "double dip" "recession" right around the corner. Economic conditions by next summer will much, much worse than they are today. It will be crystal clear that Obama is going to lose the election. At some point he will decide he has nothing to lose, and play his highest remaining card. He will call his "free stuff army" (FSA) into the streets and they will come.
Look at what's happening already. Obama and the entire Democrat Party are demonizing the tea party, setting us up as the cause of the economic disaster, plus racists and terrorists to boot. Polls show many people believe it. As things get worse the Democrats (including their minions such as the MSM, the unions, and the academic establishment) will all push this meme.
The FSA will believe it, and they are already being primed to take to the streets when they are called. When it happens Obama will pour gasoline on the fire. WE will be the target.
The only question is when. In my view, Obama will not wait until after he has actually lost. Why should he wait until winter to ignite the "main event"? The cold would keep much of his FSA army off the streets.
Personally, I think Obama will call his army out next summer.
What happens after the FSA hits the streets is anybody's guess. Personally, I think "High winds and heavy seas" is a pretty mild way to describe the hurricane that is coming.
One small quibble... NY 9th CD is in Brooklyn and Queens not the mainland Bronx which, unfortunately, remains solidly democrat. In addition Turner won the CD in the Brooklyn part. The Queens section went for Weprin whose family name is still popular (though it’s anyone’s guess as to why).
In that case, more like “Obama was Harding”... :’)
Grover Cleveland, the veto-slingin’ Demwit of the late 19th c (and not one but two of the POTUS of that period) was and is considered pro-business. The Pubbies turned on the so-called Robber Barons and subsumed the short-lived Progressive Party, and yet were divided by the indie candidacy of TR, and helped usher in eight years of minority rule under Woodrow Wilson. Wilson set to turning the country into a single party state, a la the upheavals and political movements in his beloved Europe. That in turn ushered in the short period with three Pubbie presidents, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
I think the fact is, US politics has generally been in upheaval, because the political system of the US is an outgrowth of our wide-open traditions of political equality and dissent. Without it, the institutionalized inequalities would never have been dismantled.
Another, more familiar, period of upheaval was the twenty year span from 1961 to 1981, a twenty year period during which the US had five presidents, IOW, an average of four years in office, and during which time only one president was reelected (and that was Nixon). JFK was assassinated, LBJ was only elected once in his own right and repudiated reelection, Nixon resigned during his second term, Ford was never elected at all, and Carter was repudiated by the people in a resounding and convincing manner.
An example of political continuity, which still sported a ton of upheaval, was FDR and Truman. Truman was elected just once in his own right, and was followed by the MOR presidency of Eisenhower. Ike was recruited by both parties, and went Republican because of his conservative economic views, and as he put it, in order to save the two party system. Richard Nixon may have been saved from political oblivion when he was tapped for Ike’s VP.
JFK beat Nixon in 1960 by an average of about one vote per precinct, running on “window of vulnerability” and “missile gap” and “bomber gap” and “get America moving again”. He held the usual anti-union views, and yet publicly expressed lip-service support for unionized labor (even made at least one contribution to a union strike fund, no doubt to drum up votes). He got Reagan-like tax cuts passed and during his administration spoke of “brush-fire wars” (e.g., Korea and the upcoming Vietnam) and a fierce anti-communist line (again, like Reagan twenty years later).
Ford was from the me-too liberal Wendell Willkie tradition of the Republican Party, despite his WWII navy service. He was the main butt of blame for the economic tailspin directly caused by OPEC’s embargo; in the GR Ford Museum here in GR, there’s a large blowup of a Newsweek cover, showing Ford and Kissinger dressed for combat and storming ashore in the Persian Gulf, referring to the Arabs as “wogs”. He was also excoriated by partisan media shills for the things he did attempt, such as the WIN buttons.
Ford would have been better served (and so would we) had he actually sent US troops to the Persian Gulf to seize the Arabian oil fields, instead of just hunkering down and taking it. As it is, Carter beat him primarily because of his stupid “no Soviet domination of Poland” statement in the debates and because of the pardon of Nixon. In that ridiculous book, “Write This After I’m Gone”, Ford and the author display a distasteful and incoherent animus toward Ronald Reagan, basically blaming Reagan for undermining his reelection campaign, instead of actually assuming responsibility for the sh!++y performance while in office — as well as his foolish choice of VP (the other me-too lib, Rockefeller) and the second VP-related foolishness, dumping Rocky from the ticket to run with Dole.
I cannot disagree with anything you said, and I pray to God you’re wrong...but I fear you are not.
Long hot summer coming.....
You’re all tongue and no groove. ;-)
Well, with that “Obama was Harding” thing, anyway.
I think you captured that neither party can be said to have been a small-government party. Individuals within the parties, perhaps, but the parties themselves take purpose from the prize of governing.
I tend to give Eisenhower a pass on any faults as I can’t imagine anyone else getting us through that period and on to prosperity as he did. And with a minimum of drama. We didn’t go back to being New Deal Nation and we somehow avoided any hopeless military adventures.
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