The Long View Is Still Not Long Enough

Name the last election when “the stakes could not be higher.”

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) November 6, 2022

Jim Clyburn on Fox News defends comparing Trumpism to Nazism: "I've studied history all of my life. I taught history. And I'm telling you, what I see here are parallels to what the history was in this world back in the 1930s in Germany." pic.twitter.com/E7iM4eJE0p

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 6, 2022

All due respect to Rep. Clymer, but call me when people are hauling around wheelbarrows full of dollars to buy a loaf of bread and the economy is crippled by a world-wide depression and reparations for the war the U.S. just lost in Europe after starting it in the first place, and the political soil is fertile for a dolchstosslegende. Oh, and our military is broken and our national leader abdicated at the end of the last war, humiliating the country. 

Because the best we do around here is blame immigrants and "communists" for our problems. 

Oh, and Democrats.

And I'm not sure that's working.

There is a reason World War II did not end the same way World War I did, and I don't mean with an armistice.  And conditions are not as bad now as they were then.  There was a great deal more political turmoil in the '60's, with the anti-war movement and the Civil Rights movement.  Then, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were supposed to be "enough" for "black people."  The anti-war movement caused a great deal of turmoil and violence (Chicago '68, Kent State in '70), but never gained enough political power to truly bring that war abruptly to an end.  Nixon slaughtered McGovern in the biggest landslide in U.S. history, and worked to end the war largely because by then, it was clearly unwinnable and everybody was clearly sick of it.  But even giving 18 year olds the vote didn't change American politics.

What has changed American politics is the collapse of the parties as anything but highways to the ballots in all 50 states.  That's really the only function they serve now.  And there our true troubles began.

It's perfectly clear that's not working, either.  Curiously, Hollywood followed the same trend, destroying the "studio system" in the '60's and '70's, only to build a new one on the ruins of the old ones.  All the studio names remain:  Disney, Columbia, MGM, Warners.  Everything's changed, but nothing's really different.

Political parties need to change, too; in order to recover what they served in the system.  Until they do, everyone will think we are in the interregnum where the worst occurs.  But everyone always thinks that.  Nobody was sure the "good guys" would win World War II, until they did.  Nobody was sure how the '60's and '70's (lots of political violence in the latter, an outcome of the former) would work out, and the real answer was:  with Reagan in the '80's and Gingrich in the '90's.  And we're still not done working it out.

As Chou En-Lai reportedly said when Nixon went to China and Chou was asked about the French Revolution:  "It's too soon too tell."