Where Does History Begin?

He who controls the past, controls the future, and he who controls the present, controls the past.-Orwell

I keep asking myself, 'why study history?' And keep coming back to this line from Nineteen Eighty Four. Along with Santayana's also relevant line that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it and Twain's remark that history does not repeat but it rhymes. Unfortunately, quotations are a kind of blunt tool and professional historians try not to use them. Aspiring academics will often deride quotations as an amateur's crutch once they reach a certain level of proficiency in a given discipline. But quotations from famous thinkers often contain strong ideas that can be conveyed without elaborating with great detail. It may be a fallacy, appealing to authority, but it also serves as a kind of shorthand to cut to the chase in this format. So I hope you can pardon me this indulgence as I get to the point.

It has been a real issue, to decide where to begin any narrative about history that has bearing on the present. Most books about WWI for example, treat Woodrow Wilson's administration as though it were completely normal and not in fact the unique product of a three way race for president in the US. To tell that story though, a writer would have to trudge back to 1860 and discuss the rise of the Republican Party to convey why having a northern Democrat holding the office was an anomaly. Taken from one point of view, the Wilson administration was schizophrenic, at first promising to uphold the nonpartisan Progressive worldview of modernizing the economy and government, then promising to keep the country out of the war. Events forced the president to reluctantly declare war, then going full throttle not only to physically prepare the armed forces for that war but aggressively proselytizing the largely pacifist population into anti-German anger and hysteria. Then finally falling apart after the equally aggressive campaign to force the US to join the League of Nations.

Arguably, the Democrats running the country from 1912-1920 could have done better. Would WWI have turned out differently if William H. Taft had won reelection? It is likely he would have if Teddy Roosevelt had not run a third party campaign and split the GOP. But Wilson is what happened, maybe he should never have been president, but an uncommon set of circumstances arose to make it seem like Progressive Democratic governance was the norm in most portrayals of WWI in media of all sorts. While WWI is not as popular as the sequel among "historians" in the tavern, this may be where the myth about not trusting Democrats in foreign policy began. The outcome of WWI on world history is monumental but other actions of the "Progressive" Wilson administration are arguably more consequential for domestic policy. Things like the Red Scare, mass deportations of recent immigrants, the prosecution of socialists and pacifists for disagreeing with the war, the first government propaganda machine to manipulate public opinion, the crushing of unions and unrest after prematurely abandoning economic controls and leaving everyone to fend for themselves in the chaotic market.

Events like these are still with us, most recently with George W. Bush's administration, which also talked up idealism in the abstract about military intervention bringing about a democratic transformation in the Middle East. The bushies also demonized opponents, unleashed a massive propaganda campaign against domestic enemies, crushed unions and working people, enriched all the wrong people through cronyism, and left office after collapsing the economy. Woodrow Wilson let loose a torrent of anti-democratic (note small "d") government action that has been repeated since, but all people want to talk about him today is his virulent racism. We do a disservice to history if we delegate the past to Hollywood or the History Channel and not stand up to the pea-brained historians at the tavern, and say "no, you do not get to preach to me or others when you have no clue what you're talking about." The same is true of being too conscious of identity politics and write off a complex episode of our history by saying that the president was a racist and that is all you need to know.

People are not binary creatures but complex mixtures of good and bad. And yes, this is all relative. It is a sign of maturity to see beyond the simple good or evil and look for the shades of moral ambiguity or complexity. To take our example further, Woodrow Wilson was certainly a racist, but he also held genuinely idealistic principles of expanding democracy, reducing armed conflict, diplomacy over war, modernizing the state, and so on. The "vision thing" was good but the methods used in pursuing it were terrible. However, bush had no idealistic principles, everything he did was for the selfish pursuit of power and plunder. It has rarely been so easy to spot evil as it has been since 2000.

But again, where did that evil begin? If you work backwards it is very hard to spot where the republicans went crazy. There was no indication of how far Woodrow Wilson would approximate the authoritarian empires he ultimately defeated. But is there any doubt that any republican seeking the office of the president today would gleefully pursue authoritarianism? This year, looking at Presidents Day and thinking about how insane the presidential campaign is already, we should be prepared to examine everything we can from history and speak up when something smells bad.

Show Me The Corpse.

This morning Driftglass wrote a great piece for his usual Sunday Morning Comin' Down column. He normally discusses the lousy quality of guests and discourse on the network Sunday morning news shows. But this time he went into great detail about how Trump has forced the issue of just how bad Dubya's occupation of the presidency was, how Bush was on his way to deification in the mold of Ronald Reagan until...

Dubya started to lose.  And lose badly. He lost two wars,  He lost the economy,  He lost a major American city,  He lost the Congress.  And he lost all those things and so many more in a way that showed the world that the Dirty Hippies had been right about Dubya all along  He really was a criminally incompetent dry-drunk halfwit.  He really did appoint politically-connected idiots to run vitally important parts of the government.   He really was in the thrall of genuinely evil men who operated him like a marionette and made themselves fabulously wealthy thereby.  The base of his party really were raving lunatics, bigots and imbeciles.

All absolutely true. And all absolutely meaningless. If the failures of their god-appointed prophets were somehow enough to shake the faithful, then how could 58,343,671 Americans actually pull the lever for McCain/Palin? You know the answer. Fascists and Authoritarians can always define themselves by what they hate, and what they are against. So why would it matter that one king failed? A mere two years later enough of these 58 million Republicans that went undercover as the tea party showed up to retake the House of Representatives and put villains like Scott Walker into the governors' mansions around the country. Thus ending the tiny two years of Republican exile.

A token truth and reconciliation debate within the GOP primary where the actual, real world crimes and incompetence of Dubya's administration are discussed, solely in terms of which faction of the party will lead the faithful back to power, will not end the Republican Party.

This is the part that confuses me. Driftglass makes this assertion:

The Republican Party is dead, dead, dead and it's various factions have Balkanized into a clutch of squabbling tribes each with its own code of conduct, elaborate rituals and taboos, each laying claim to be the One True Conservative and ransacking the rubble of the Party of Lincoln for the Reagan Arkenstone, and each denying any knowledge of or responsibility for That Which Came Before. (Emphasis mine)

 How does a political party die? I know the causes of death for the empirical, historical political parties in America; the Federalists attempted to be an aristocratic party representing the propertied classes in one section of the country (the Northeast) and as the country grew beyond the coasts there was no way for them to expand, and the Whigs could not face the slavery question and actually did balkanize into know-nothings and free soilers etc. But what would death look like for the GOP today? After the scrum of the primaries is over, every single fox news robot is willing to crawl through broken glass to vote for their nominee. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be raised and spent by super PACs, not to define the "conservative" message but to demonize Democrats and Liberals. Disgraced reptilian party figures will still be gleefully invited onto the news programs to spew lies and slander. The Democratic Party's messaging machine will still be a fart in the wind. The Democratic nominees will still try to get the media to fight their battles for them. The voter suppression measures that Republicans put in place to specifically stop Democrats from voting will still be in place, and no one will say anything meaningful about it. It will simply be "the will of the voters" and Democrats will still offer concession speeches with faith in their hearts that the system works.

Maybe Driftglass is working from a three dimensional chess perspective and I'm missing something. And I do not want this post to sound like I'm criticizing him, as Mulder would say "I want to believe." If someone could explain to me how the whole, writhing mess falls over the cliff and we are finally rid of the "conservative movement" and its husk, I am all ears. After all, even Herbert Hoover has had his reputation repaired. You already have certain individuals on the left saying ridiculous things like "even George W. Bush" as in even George W. Bush refused to demonize the religion of Islam. No, we need to keep fighting or someday apologists will be rehabilitating President Cruz' image as the strong man who purged the rot from our system and bring God back into public life.

No More Naders

I just admitted in my last post that I was one of the three million odd voters who made it possible for George W Bush to steal the presidency in 2000. We are so close to the same scenario in 2016 that I am really scared. I really felt like the way to build on the peace and prosperity at the end of the Clinton administration was to get behind a genuine liberal like Ralph Nader. While I fantasized a little about him actually winning and what that would look like in reality, my main goal was to make a protest kind of statement that the Democratic Party cannot take "us" for granted. It was cringe-worthy watching Al Gore capitulate to his campaign consultants. First he was all wooden and passive aggressive with the smirking chimp, refusing to actually attack back and more importantly just "me tooing" all the right wing frames about taxes and immigration, etc. Then he picked Lieberman as his running mate and refused to campaign on the successes of the administration he was part of. Gore did not take advantage of having Bill Clinton stump for him, and ran against his boss by making his infinitesimally small contribution to the election narrative all about morals and his supposed superior family values. In short Gore played to the right wing's perception and did not look at the really existing state of the union.

Obviously the Clinton years were not perfect, but there was enough good there to build on in a Gore administration. The alternative was just unbelievable. But I, and many people like me who voted Green based on hope and an imperfect understanding of that really existing state of the union, did not have the cautionary tales of the past in living memory that could have given me perspective. I was only barely aware of Reagan's October surprise and Nixon's ratfucking skulduggery. I did not even understand the horrible implications of George H. W. Bush's "Willie Horton" campaign. Clinton's indiscretions did not bother me, but his violation of the war powers act in the Balkans and his continued pursuit of "free trade" that threatened my livelihood did. Gore's seemingly obsessive and puritanical drive to exorcise all the moral demons of his boss while not addressing the economic and social issues I cared about was a real turn off.

Okay, that was sixteen years ago. Today we have Bernie Sanders playing the role, however obliquely, of Ralph Nader. By 2004, it was clear that Nader's subsequent run for president was all about Ralph and the movement I thought I was a part of was dead. Now it was a matter of saving the republic and I enthusiastically supported John Kerry after he won the nomination. A common trope I heard from supposedly serious people was that you don't switch horses mid-stream. When I would answer "even if the horse jumped in that stream against your will and was trying to drown you in it?" The reply would generally be some sort of ad hominem about my intelligence, maturity, or liberalism. Such high thinkers my pals.

Nader was third party from the beginning, it was all about showing the Democratic Party that they couldn't take us for granted and we weren't going to accept republican lite. "They aren't entitled to anyone's votes" was the common refrain from Naderites, meaning the Democrats. Now, you had to be a political junkie to realize just how awful George W. Bush was before he stole the presidency. This time around there is no question that any republican winning the presidency would be an absolute disaster. And the left candidate is a long-time elected official who caucused with the Democrats for his entire tenure in congress but was never dependent on or beholden to them as Clinton style DLC triangulation tried to co-opt the republicans. Sanders is running for the nomination of the Democratic Party and has not threatened to go the third party route if he doesn't win. Therefore anyone is free to vote for him now and still have time to support Hillary Clinton if she wins instead. No problem right?

Now the joke of "don't switch horses mid-stream" is on us. As in, we either do the almost impossible task of electing a Democrat to succeed the Democratic President or we all drown. There has been so much talk about supposed Berniebros who trash Hillary Clinton all the time and refuse to vote for her under any circumstances. I have yet to witness one myself, all the Sanders supporters I have encountered seem passionate but reasonable and share my goal of keeping the republicans out at all costs. The only person I know personally to make the "I won't vote for Hillary no matter what" speech was a middle-aged woman who as far as I know is a life long true socialist radical, not a "bro." I suspect that a good percentage of these "bros" are paid or unpaid GOP trolls posing as democratic socialists and making loud noises for purity. And in the age of social media this kind of fraud is extremely plausible, it only takes a few articulate trolls making tirades to convince the weak-minded to follow them.

I for one am not going to make the same mistake in 2000. Here's my unfortunately titled post on Bernie Sanders from last May, I still believe in it. Now if we can all just act like grownups and not make hissy fits and tantrums while debating who should be the leader of the free world we might not wake up the morning after the election to PRESIDENT CRUZ.

Caution

The Iowa caucuses are finally here and I am gloomier than ever. There are going to be a lot of angry people by the end of the day. There will be gloating, there will be smugness, there will be threats, and there will be nonstop chatter from the news networks about horse races and momentum as our quadrennial contest for the chief executive of this land finally gets real. For a serious person, there are a few choices you can make. One involves reading the results of this older form of democracy and being happy that your candidate won. Or perhaps  disappointed that your candidate lost. But not forgetting that we are on the same team. Another is to get the results and immediately take to social media and go on a tirade against the other side no matter what the outcome. Either way, being a serious and responsible person means not voting for Republicans for president at any level.

I have been hearing for a while now about the people that supposedly will not support the eventual nominee of the Democratic Party if it is not their preferred candidate and really brushed it off as hearsay. I mean who is that stupid that they could make that claim and stick to it? Then I remembered that my first time voting for president I drew a little line across the optical scan card for Ralph Nader and put it in the box. Oops. So all I ask, as always is some humility and understanding. We are all so different in who we are and where we came from and where we are going that judging or scolding or other crap is just pointless. Counterproductive too. The more people tried to convince me that voting for Nader was bad, the more I dug in my heels. I rationalized that one, I had never voted before so taking a chance on a third party candidate wasn't going to shift a formerly reliable Democratic vote away from the Democratic nominee. Two, America was doing pretty well at the end of Bill Clinton's administration, there's no way people will want to take a chance on the dink from Texas. Three, Wisconsin is a pretty solidly Democratic state so Al Gore will get the electoral votes even if I don't vote for him. And finally, I was in a punk state of mind and got all my news from Jello Biafra, or at least my ideology. 

Jello taught me a lot about politics and though I have left most of the radical ideas behind, punk rock leftism was part of my political socialization. I grew up learning a little from my union member father and grandfather that the Democratic Party represented the working man. Even my foreman at the factory told me that the republicans would burn the poor to keep warm in winter. But I had served in Clintons army and was not happy with the way it was being downsized. Our commanders seemed obsessed with throwing out as many soldiers as possible, sometimes really messing up their lives in the process. And since I worked in manufacturing I was not a fan of NAFTA either. So I was going to protest by voting for the greens, that'll show 'em. 

We all know how that worked out. So please, spare everyone the tantrums. And keep in mind that despite being the minority party the GOP controls congress, the Supreme Court, and most states. The presidency is the last holdout of non-crazy and if we don't get out the vote for whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ends up being it could be the last election we ever have. There are no elections or loyal opposition in the kind of America trump or Cruz have planned. 

Where we are now.

My last few posts have attempted to put some of the historical ugliness of American presidential campaigns into context for understanding the ugliness of today. (here, here, and here) While it would be impossible to detail all of the empirical events of even one campaign, it is important to try and pull out as many comparisons as possible. What I would like to demonstrate is that the somewhat idealistic perception that politics should be about persuasion and democratic process, that politicians are better than schoolyard bullies, and that we as a nation are somehow now grown up is an illusion. The perception had some merit after WWII, divisive figures like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon on his worst days could be seen as aberrations or exceptions to the rule of professional, mature leaders taking responsibility for America's place in the world. However, the polarization and breakdown of compromise, to say nothing of bipartisanship that has accelerated since 1980 makes the case that it is almost the opposite that is true. The New Deal coalition that saw us through the Great Depression, World War II and Cold War was the actual aberration.

So if we start at the assumption that politicians are corrupt and irresponsible, and that the special interests they represent are incompetent, greedy, selfish, short-sighted, and have no actual allegiance to the United States, then at least we have a basis or starting point. At the same time we should not fall into conspiratorial thinking, both-siderism, or fatalism that it is all just an act. This is just as dangerous as idealistic naivete. Then, if we find a leader who bucks the corrupt and cynical status quo it will be possible to raise expectations a little. But there is the strong possibility that the "establishment" or whatever the forces that restrain democracy happen to be called at the moment, will simply swallow anyone like that.

What then is the proper balance? There are obviously forces that resemble conspiracies in America, but degenerating into frothing-at-the-mouth Alex Jones disciples who see everything as a vast and coordinated conspiracy to destroy freedom or reduce you to slavery while ignoring the empirical reality that most of these conspiracies can be explained by simple greed or incompetence does no service to a good and just society. Alex Jones and his minions do a great job of keeping people distracted by "chemtrails" and lizard men though. People that might otherwise work toward solving problems more out in the open. You are not that clever fellas, so knock it off with all the false flag accusations.

It is both easy and frustrating to study "conservatism" in the contemporary United States. Because, simply put, there are no ideas. Intellectual historians half a century from now are going to look back at our last half century and be completely baffled. The Republican Party platform is the incoherent rambling of a mental patient, all their policy positions are utter failures and contradictory. Abroad the bullying swagger of militarism has not solved a single problem and at home the country is like a devastated peasant society as Noam Chomsky has put it. James Galbraith spends an entire chapter in his book The Predator State detailing how free market fundamentalism has been tried and has failed completely in every metric.

The entirety of the right wing message is deceit. They threaten the American people based on lies; on economics, "if we raise the minimum wage the economy will collapse!" on foreign policy, "ISIS is here already!" on elections ""if we don't make the right choice in November, then we will be attacked again". They lie about history "the civil war was not about slavery it was about taxes and overreaching federal power". They lie about ideology "it was the democrat[sic] party that voted against civil rights" and my favorite "it was called the national socialist party!" They have turned Christianity into a religion of war and hate, selfishness and greed. And now, finally they have proven that the "political correctness" tyranny that they constantly rail against is completely toothless by bringing racism back into the open and paying no price for it.

Then there are the rest of us, who have not been able to make a dent in the right-wingers delusions or hate. The majority, or nearly so, of Americans have remained politically inert. How many millions of regular Americans feel the hurt inflicted by corporate greed? How many of them then fall into the right wing trap of blaming government, their government, for the suffering causes by big business? Even with a vibrant network of liberal bloggers, pod-casters, and websites the voice of the left in this country is still a whisper in the hurricane of Fox News et al. One of the most interesting and least talked about aspects of political debates as far as I can tell is the collapse of the Republicans as the party of business. They seem to be less able or willing to cater to business' real needs and instead seem to have become the short-sighted and pale imitation of what a working class person thinks he would need to do in power to please businessmen. Or maybe the deepest, darkest id of the businessman. But government shutdowns and credit downgrades do not help private businesses. Though American business has been spectacularly incompetent, corrupt, and short-sighted in the twenty first century. At least at the top, these business leaders seem incapable of doing anything more than buying elections and stealing from the public to pad their enormous salaries. Maybe I'm wrong, it doesn't seem to be a topic of much interest. 

Democracy is messy, always has been. Democracy is hard, it is a continuous struggle. In an ideal world, democracy allows the best among us to compete for the honor of serving the public but we don't live in that ideal world. That is the play-land of an educated, secure, middle-class society that is both informed and active in politics. What we have instead is a frightened, angry, ignorant, and insecure mass of people barely making ends meet who are often falling prey to the worst among us. So, anyone reading this that cares about democracy and building a just society where extreme inequality is a relic of the past has their work cut out for them. But the future starts now. We can make the "good old days" the reality instead of the aberration but it is going to take sustained effort

Readingcomprehensionmatters

As of 1:15 pm on January 25 this post by something called Americanlivesmatter had 8,725 "likes" 31,091 shares, and 1,200 comments. Every time I think we have reached peak stupid, something like this shows up. The comment above the picture had this to say:

The man who had in the title of his political movement 'socialist' actually proved himself to be a fascist when the young people of his nation gave him the reigns of power. Of course, the man who advertised that he was socialist proved to be a fascist. Yet the best that this generation can hope for is socialism in the hopes that the man who says he is a socialist really is a socialist. The lamest generation is the one where 'enlightened' Americans embraced socialism over the Constitutional Republic which was created by the Founding Fathers of the United States of America... as long as you add the word 'democratic' in front of it.

I can't even anymore. These are the same morons who claim to have read Orwell's 1984, you know, the book that laid out how totalitarian governments name things the opposite of what they are? This meme is so stupid my only conception of how it is getting around is that the morons who shared it understand that the logic displayed here defies imagination. It must be a put on, this must be just another way of sticking it to the liberals. Otherwise, how do they even manage to cross the street without stopping in front of semi trucks to lick the pavement?

We have been here before. Part III

I became somewhat distracted yesterday by the Cruz/Trump feud, it is just so delicious that two of the most despicable "politicians" in America have finally found each other and started doing the only thing conservatives [sic] do well, destroy everything. So, to return to the 1928 presidential campaign between Al Smith and Herbert Hoover we also return to detailing the city/rural clash. (pp. 229-232)

Until the 1920s, city and rural values had not clashed head-on in the national political arena. For more than a century, American politics had been dominated by the country; no asset was greater than that of birth in a log cabin. Even when, in the years after the Civil War, the United States moved rapidly from an agrarian to an industrial nation, its chief political figures were cut from the familiar mold. They were farm boys, or men from the small town, or, if they came from the city, they had not cut their ties with rural America and were as acceptable to the crossroads town as to the metropolis. In the 1920s, for the first time, a man who was unmistakably of the city made a bid for national power; in the career of Alfred E. Smith and the campaign of 1928 all the tensions between rural and urban America reached their highest pitch. "For the first time," wrote the New Republic, "a representative of the unpedigreed, foreign-born, city-bred, many-tongued recent arrivals on the American scene has knocked on the door and aspired seriously to the presiding seat in the national Council Chamber."

Born in 1873 in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, Smith lived the life of a boy in a great city. Instead of currying his pony or shooting squirrels on a smokey October afternoon, Al climbed among packing crates and boxes along the waterfront. Instead of playing one o'cat in the old apple orchard, he cuffed handballs against a warehouse wall.... 

Smith personified the desire of the sons of urban immigrants to make a place for themselves in the world, and politics was one of the few avenues of social mobility open to them. Smith was not the first to discover this. He was part of a tradition at least as old as the election of the German immigrant John Peter Altgeld to the governorship of Illinois in 1892, a tradition that embraced in the early years of the century Irish boys like David I. Walsh in Massachusetts and Joe Tumulty in New Jersey. But he was the first to ask acceptance by the people for the highest office in the land. It was for this reason that Smith was taken to heart by the Irish of the Northeast; he was a test case of how far an Irish Catholic boy from the big city could go, and how soon. "Al Smith," wrote William Allen White, "must rise or fall in our national life, if ever he should enter it, as our first urbanite."

One of the ablest state officers in American history, a man with an impressive record of electoral success, four times chose governor of the most populous state in the country, Smith was the logical candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1928. Despite lingering bitterness over the Madison Square Garden convention, even many of the old McAdoo supporters recognized that if Smith could not win in 1928, no Democrat could....

 When Coolidge announced laconically, "I do not choose to run," the Republicans turned to Herbert Hoover, born in Iowa, as their presidential candidate and named Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas as his running mate. For the first time in history, both candidates of a major party hailed from west of the Mississippi. After a rewarding career as a mining engineer and promoter in every corner of the earth, Hoover had first caught national attention in the war years as Food Administrator and administrator of Belgian relief. John Maynard Keynes observed that he was "the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation," while Justice Brandeis remarked that he was "the biggest figure injected into Washington life by the war." As Secretary of Commerce, Hoover epitomized the new capitalism, with its emphasis on efficiency, distribution, co-operation, and "service." Smith could make the appeal of a humanitarian and a friend of business interests at the same time; it was his misfortune to run against a man in 1928 who could make precisely the same claims and did not have Smith's liabilities.

The Democratic party faced a dilemma. If it attempted to compete with the Republicans by showing it was just as conservative, it had little chance of success, because the GOP had established itself too firmly as the party of business. On the other hand, if it attempted to take a more radical line, it ran smack against the circumspect mood of the decade. Either way, it was licked. It could hope for success only through a change in the national temper, something it could not bring about on it's own.

What can we make of this excerpt? To start, we have our own tradition of the country dominating the city in the spirit of outsiders coming to Washington to mess with the establishment. Since at least Jimmy Carter's improbable rise to the Democratic nomination in 1976, the narrative has been of a white knight riding in from the provinces to tame the nest of vipers in the Capitol. And governors have been the prime farm team for the parties to out provincial the other side. It was only the extraordinary circumstances of 2008, when both candidates were sitting Senators, that the mold was somewhat broken. But even then Barack Obama was a first term Senator and many commentators framed his rise to contrast that of Hillary Clinton as a man in touch with the people.

And like the raucous campaign of 2008, the back and forth increasingly dirty exchange between Obama and Clinton, the Democratic Party was a chaotic mess in the 1920s. The Democrats were divided on how to be a national party, who's interests it should represent, what the ideal party leader looked like, and what the platform should be. The Republicans were, as Leuchtenburg notes, the party of business and therefore could put up any successful businessman and remind the voters that they were the grownups who did not represent the crazies down south and would not lead the country on a foolish, idealistic crusade like Woodrow Wilson. The actual status quo was pretty good for the people who were the base of the GOP, the only people in America who were suffering during the Twenties were immigrants, minorities, women, farmers, workers, and so on. Not "us" so they could be ignored and disregarded.

Al Smith may have been as close to the ideal spokesman for the city, and for the beginnings of the more diverse America that grew steadily into the present and beyond. But Smith was not good for anywhere else, and without a platform that could really differentiate him and his party for the voters, they were "licked." Today the disproportionate electoral power of rural America is an annoyance that the minority GOP has used to great affect, but in the Twenties the battle was still being waged. The Democrats of that era had nothing like the gerrymandering, messaging, or sheer audacity to abuse public offices for partisan gain. Sure, they may have been just as corrupt but without manipulating districts and voters the way today's conservatives do, combined with the fact that government did much less that could be sabotaged or stolen, meant that the minority party of the past was simply that, the minority party whose ideas rarely had a chance to shine. This story will be continued as we learn more about the key this election will be played in. The way that present rhymes with the past is cloudy, certain elements may look relevant now and be meaningless in a few months.