Congress Is Fascinated by a Book on the Post-Civil War Period
A historian with expertise in the post-Civil War era highlights how culture wars influence voter turnout and partisanship. However, he points out that the solutions implemented don’t always achieve their intended effects.
TroibNews 
The era of Trump has clearly signaled the end of the post-World War II political consensus in America. In today's political landscape, elections are increasingly tied to identity rather than individual preferences, reminiscent of the post-Civil War era when it was said that people “vote as they shot.”
This reflection on historical parallels has occupied my thoughts for the past two years, particularly after I read Jon Grinspan’s book, *The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915*. Grinspan, who is a historian at the Smithsonian, explores a time marked by technological upheaval, high immigration, and deeply polarized presidential elections characterized by intense voter turnout and anger that sometimes erupted into violence. He also examines how this tumultuous era concluded with the emergence of reformers who sought to cleanse politics, leading to a more regulated environment that persisted until recent years.
I am not alone in mining the past for insights into the present. Grinspan's work has gained a following among lawmakers eager to navigate this new and chaotic political landscape. Upon retiring in 2023, former Senator Roy Blunt gifted copies of the book to his Republican colleagues. Senator Mitt Romney hosted Grinspan to talk about the book, and Representative Andy Kim, who played a notable role in cleaning up the Capitol post-Jan. 6 riot, also sought the author out.
During a recent visit back to Washington, I had the opportunity to meet Grinspan in his office. He enriched our conversation by showcasing some historical artifacts: Lincoln’s pocket watch, a 19th-century torchlight, and an ABC News commemorative bottle of liquor from the Reagan-Gorbachev Reykjavik Summit — though I must admit, I couldn't resist checking out the last one while exploring the archives.
As throngs of people gathered outside Grinspan’s office on the National Mall for a rally featuring Vice President Kamala Harris, I delved into discussions about his book, the parallels between historical and contemporary political chaos, and why today’s politicians seem so eager for historical perspective.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why did you do a book on this period in history?
A couple reasons. One: It’s not well-known. And I really feel like we have the same discussions over and over again about politics in America and they all start at Reagan. So, what is the deep history of this democracy? We have the oldest, running Constitution in the world. The Democratic Party is the oldest party in the world. The Republican Party is only a little younger. And yet our discussions are 20 years deep, 30 years deep. This is the era with the highest turnouts. It’s the era with really intense participation and engagement. It’s the era with high political violence and partisanship. It just seemed like it's the area that’s talking to now.
And politics is identity.
Absolutely. It’s a diverse nation. It’s also a very shaken nation in the ways that our lives are shaken today. You don’t have the stable institutions of the 20th century, in the 19th century and today. And so people are looking for some new identity. And they grab onto the parties as the thing to do. You go to the Democratic saloon and you drink with the Democrats, or the Republicans, or what have you.
I had a wise politician who was frustrated about his challenges of not being able to run statewide as a Democrat in the South tell me: “We don’t have elections anymore, we have a census.” It doesn’t matter who the party nominates. The candidates are irrelevant. All that matters is the [party] letter after their name. And you just tell me the census data and I’ll tell you the results. That feels a lot like this period too, where you just told me the state and its ethnic and racial makeup, and you could probably tell me the results of the election.
Absolutely. In a way it’s making politics actually converge with culture. One of the things about the 20th century, it doesn’t [converge] that much. The way people talk in the bars is not the way they talk in the White House. We are in an era now and previously where actually politics and culture are more closely tied and reflect each other more. All these animosities we feel in the rest of society are actually showing themselves in the political culture.
The crassness, the crude language.
Yeah. Why should you only behave that way in the saloon and act differently in public? And they’re kind of in an era where they converge more. And then we create these norms in the 20th century of restraint, independence, privacy, don’t talk about politics at the dinner table.
Sex, politics, and religion. Those were the no-no’s.
Yeah. Don’t talk about those, I shouldn’t know how you vote, I shouldn’t be able to guess what party you support.
It’s the sort of WASP-ization of politics, right?
Yeah. You could write a book called the WASP Renaissance. Because a lot of those people in the late 19th century feel like they’re losing control of society. Their great grandparents founded this country and then you have these Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, whatever people who are working class and didn’t go to Harvard and they’re voting in bigger numbers.
There are always going to be more voters, if it’s just by the numbers, who are not wealthy than who are wealthy.
They don’t even use summer as a verb.
They don’t. They don’t even have summer houses. That’s what Teddy Roosevelt’s dad said. When he was running for nomination [as Collector of Customs in the Port of New York] he loses the nomination. Doesn’t get confirmed. He dies a couple months later. But he writes a letter to Teddy Roosevelt saying I’m really glad I didn’t get that gig because I would never have been able to go out to your house on Long Island in the summer. The Irish ward boss doesn’t have a house on Long Island.
Politics is the outlet. It’s the avocation, the vocation, it’s everything.
And then they built this culture of restraint, of civility. And it’s got a lot of good things. But it’s a creation.
And there’s an artifice to it, too. By the 21st century, all these politicians are using these phrases like “the distinguished gentleman” or “my good friend.” Or they’re acting overly decorous in a way that reflects a 20th-century black-and-white film of America. No one talks like that anymore in real life. And Trump comes along, and he’s the first politician who sounds like how people actually speak. He’s not doing the “My good friend across the aisle” bullshit anymore.
Yeah. There are a lot of voters — I don’t want to judge them — who would rather their politician talk like somebody on reality TV than somebody in Parliament 100 years ago. So maybe they just expect politics to look like the rest of their lives.
How many times have we all heard: “Why do you like Trump? ‘He says what I’m thinking.’”
I don’t quote him much, but Steve Bannon said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” The same bad behavior you see in the supermarket, you see in Congress.
But where it gets more alarming is when it goes beyond the rhetorical, because we start imitating the culture. Not just rhetorically, but in terms of violence, in terms of settling disputes through weapons.
The president always has been expected to act with virtue, with restraints. Even in the bare-knuckle, ward boss politics of the 19th century — the president was like the national grandfather who’s supposed to be likable, polite, dignified. And now we have this world where the president isn’t expected to act that way. And they have ten times the power in the nuclear weapons or whatever that they had previously. So we have this 19th-century private behavior, 20th-century imperial presidency, locked up in the most powerful person on the planet. Also, if the politics is a result of what’s going on in our culture, we can’t actually expect any politician to solve this problem. We blame the politicians for not being able to solve our problems, when it’s so much bigger than one office.
I think the next book I might write is on political bosses. When you read about the old bosses, you think they’re these big guys who ran the country. They’re really surfing on top of a wave. They’re dependent on the winds of the public. The senators who decry this stuff, they don’t have much agency to change all that much.
In the 19th century, though, pre-television, pre-motion picture movies, no pro sports. Politics was literally the only game in town.
The only national event is the presidential election. It's also how you get all these jobs and money.
It’s entertainment. It’s identity. And it’s a job. It’s money, it’s cash.
And these people are hungry for it. A lot of them, recent immigrants, people who have moved across the country, they had some old culture, they had some old ritual.
This is the way of belonging.
Absolutely, feeling like they're a part of it. And having some power in a system where they have no power. If you’re a middle-aged worker and you’re working in a factory all day …
You were saying a minute ago, that once again, politics has become a way of expressing belonging. Organized religion has waned. Technology has separated us physically in a lot of ways. Here’s one way we can find belonging and meaning.
Yeah. And all these clubs emerge in the 20th century, people joined the Boy Scouts or the Lions.
Now, I think we all know people like this, they’ll retire, or they’ll lose their job, or they’ll get divorced. Or they’ll have some new thing in their life that makes them isolated. And they’ll get really into watching MSNBC or Fox News or whatever. And six months after that thing that isolates them, they’ll be so much more partisan and amped up about politics because it’s always waiting for you. It always wants your attention.
Your book, though, is not a nostalgic tale. You deal with the upsides and the downsides of both the pre-reform era and the post-reform era. It’s not a fairy tale. There are upsides to a private ballot booth. There are upsides to reform. There’s more control, it’s more sanitized. But turnout collapses.
And it collapses most among vulnerable people. Among poor people, uneducated people, immigrants, younger people, African Americans. It collapses among all the populations who are easiest to cut off and the electorate you get is richer, whiter …
The reform, on one hand, improves the system. But on the other hand, it also limits the system and narrows it.
In 1876, over 80 percent of voters went to the polls. A generation later, in 1924, only 49 percent — half of those who could vote — could even bother to go to the polls. And remember, that’s eligible voters. But those eligible voters typically live in households with mothers, daughters, sisters, people who can’t vote but they still care. And they still argue about it at the taverns, at the dinner table, and at the workplace.
Participation was high because people saw the stakes as being high. And they saw this wasn’t just pistachio vs. strawberry. It was, no, no, if we don’t register our vote, the bad guys are going to win.
Yeah, every election is: “This is the last one. This is the one before the next Civil War.” Two hundred, 150 years later, you can see how silly it is every time they say: “This election will decide the future.” And we hear this in 2024, 2020, 2016. And they all do, kind of. But none of them do, at the same time. It’s like we’re in a loop and we’ve been in this loop before.
Do you take solace from the fact that the period you wrote about was rowdy, it was violent, it was really challenging at times, people died — but we got through it? Or do you view that as an ominous warning sign?
Other people take solace in it. I was surprised by how many people were like “I thought this was a hopeful book and I found it kind of nice to think that things have been bad in the past but we’ve gotten out of it.” Some people look for inspiration. That’s not what I want from history.
You view it as more of a warning sign?
No, I view it more as cultural change over time. I tried really hard to not favor one over the other. It’s more exciting, the first one, right? This rowdy, big public, violent book about politics. It’s more fun to write about. It’s harder to get people excited about civility. But I wouldn’t want to vote in 1880. I’d rather vote in 1930 or whatever. So, which world do you actually want to live in? And the answer is neither. They both have strengths and weaknesses.
Because one was all too real. And the other was sanitized, but that was the problem. It was sanitized.
Yeah. It was deliberately sanitized. They sanitized it, they got rid of the parts they found impure. I think when people were marching around in 2016 and 2020 saying this is not normal, they had this unarticulated vision of what a normal election had looked like. What a good election looked like. What good politics looked like.
Tell me about the reaction to this book. Why do you think lawmakers have taken to this book? I know Senators Blunt and Romney read it.
I’ve also had some nice conversations with Jim Cooper, who was a representative from Tennessee, [New Jersey and California lawmakers] Andy Kim and Mark DeSaulnier. If anybody is supposed to have agency and control, it’s politicians. We assume they have some sort of leadership. But they’re as at sea as the rest of us. And a lot of them, especially people who have been around for a while, they’ve seen this sea change and they don’t quite understand it, either.
They’re looking for answers.
Senator Romney asked me, ‘How do we make it better?’ or ‘How did they make it better in the 1890s?’
But the answer is that they sanitized it. It wasn’t necessarily better. It was cleaner. Less folks were engaged.
When people say our politics are broken, it assumes there was a time when they were unbroken. And really they just broke it differently in different eras. And there’s never been a perfect election or a perfect republic. It’s always going to be deeply flawed. The other thing is, if I were a politician, maybe there’s a sense of guilt. They’ve watched things get worse, and they really have very little ability to make it better. They’re trying to understand where this comes from as a personal question.
But you were struck by people thinking it was a happy story.
I just think we have these two completely bipolar versions of American history. One is that everything’s been perfect and we had this wonderful heritage. And the other is everything’s evil and horrible. And this is a way to show that this is a system that never has fully worked but also isn't evil and the end of the world. I just think that’s dissatisfying.
So what prompted the reform? This is now the end of the 19th century. What prompts the reform?
A lot of it is class conflict. Upper middle-class people who do not like this big, working-class democracy. It’s loud and messy — and these new immigrants, they’re the bad ones. They’re coming from Italy or Russia or whatever. When an elite population feels like it’s losing control of society, it can really act out. The people who, in the beginning of the 19th century, felt like they ran the country, if you look at who’s making money and winning elections in 1880, 1890, it looks like these bosses and these new populations and these tycoons. They’re not who was supposed to run the country.
So, there’s a backlash. But at the same time, there's a really good reason to want no violence in an election. So it’s not like these guys are horrible, evil. The people with the really bad motivations are tied up with the people with the best motivations. And that’s a progressive era thing.
Now, it feels as though we’re at the end of another era of reform; the post-Watergate reforms are eroding, the FEC is a shadow of itself.
No one who wins this election is going to have a landslide, take over Congress, and be able to pass laws. We’re locked in this cycle of these really close elections, like the 1880s and 1890s, when a couple thousand voters decide things and then they lose in the next election.
We don’t have blowouts.
In the Gilded Age and today, when these elections are going to be really close, they’re going to be undone two years later, four years later. That’s the other thing that’s most similar is just — we’re in a loop with no resolution. And everyone thinks every election will be decisive and will obliterate the enemy.
And it’s because we’re using the political system for something it’s actually really bad at. We’re using the electoral system to resolve a culture war, and it never can. The electoral system is good at putting people in power to pass or block legislation. It’s terrible at deciding what pronouns we should use or whatever. So, we’ll never be able to resolve it because we’re using a stapler as a telephone. It’s just not designed for what we’re asking it to do for us. It’ll never be satisfying.
Olivia Brown contributed to this report for TROIB News
This reflection on historical parallels has occupied my thoughts for the past two years, particularly after I read Jon Grinspan’s book, *The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915*. Grinspan, who is a historian at the Smithsonian, explores a time marked by technological upheaval, high immigration, and deeply polarized presidential elections characterized by intense voter turnout and anger that sometimes erupted into violence. He also examines how this tumultuous era concluded with the emergence of reformers who sought to cleanse politics, leading to a more regulated environment that persisted until recent years.
I am not alone in mining the past for insights into the present. Grinspan's work has gained a following among lawmakers eager to navigate this new and chaotic political landscape. Upon retiring in 2023, former Senator Roy Blunt gifted copies of the book to his Republican colleagues. Senator Mitt Romney hosted Grinspan to talk about the book, and Representative Andy Kim, who played a notable role in cleaning up the Capitol post-Jan. 6 riot, also sought the author out.
During a recent visit back to Washington, I had the opportunity to meet Grinspan in his office. He enriched our conversation by showcasing some historical artifacts: Lincoln’s pocket watch, a 19th-century torchlight, and an ABC News commemorative bottle of liquor from the Reagan-Gorbachev Reykjavik Summit — though I must admit, I couldn't resist checking out the last one while exploring the archives.
As throngs of people gathered outside Grinspan’s office on the National Mall for a rally featuring Vice President Kamala Harris, I delved into discussions about his book, the parallels between historical and contemporary political chaos, and why today’s politicians seem so eager for historical perspective.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why did you do a book on this period in history?
A couple reasons. One: It’s not well-known. And I really feel like we have the same discussions over and over again about politics in America and they all start at Reagan. So, what is the deep history of this democracy? We have the oldest, running Constitution in the world. The Democratic Party is the oldest party in the world. The Republican Party is only a little younger. And yet our discussions are 20 years deep, 30 years deep. This is the era with the highest turnouts. It’s the era with really intense participation and engagement. It’s the era with high political violence and partisanship. It just seemed like it's the area that’s talking to now.
And politics is identity.
Absolutely. It’s a diverse nation. It’s also a very shaken nation in the ways that our lives are shaken today. You don’t have the stable institutions of the 20th century, in the 19th century and today. And so people are looking for some new identity. And they grab onto the parties as the thing to do. You go to the Democratic saloon and you drink with the Democrats, or the Republicans, or what have you.
I had a wise politician who was frustrated about his challenges of not being able to run statewide as a Democrat in the South tell me: “We don’t have elections anymore, we have a census.” It doesn’t matter who the party nominates. The candidates are irrelevant. All that matters is the [party] letter after their name. And you just tell me the census data and I’ll tell you the results. That feels a lot like this period too, where you just told me the state and its ethnic and racial makeup, and you could probably tell me the results of the election.
Absolutely. In a way it’s making politics actually converge with culture. One of the things about the 20th century, it doesn’t [converge] that much. The way people talk in the bars is not the way they talk in the White House. We are in an era now and previously where actually politics and culture are more closely tied and reflect each other more. All these animosities we feel in the rest of society are actually showing themselves in the political culture.
The crassness, the crude language.
Yeah. Why should you only behave that way in the saloon and act differently in public? And they’re kind of in an era where they converge more. And then we create these norms in the 20th century of restraint, independence, privacy, don’t talk about politics at the dinner table.
Sex, politics, and religion. Those were the no-no’s.
Yeah. Don’t talk about those, I shouldn’t know how you vote, I shouldn’t be able to guess what party you support.
It’s the sort of WASP-ization of politics, right?
Yeah. You could write a book called the WASP Renaissance. Because a lot of those people in the late 19th century feel like they’re losing control of society. Their great grandparents founded this country and then you have these Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, whatever people who are working class and didn’t go to Harvard and they’re voting in bigger numbers.
There are always going to be more voters, if it’s just by the numbers, who are not wealthy than who are wealthy.
They don’t even use summer as a verb.
They don’t. They don’t even have summer houses. That’s what Teddy Roosevelt’s dad said. When he was running for nomination [as Collector of Customs in the Port of New York] he loses the nomination. Doesn’t get confirmed. He dies a couple months later. But he writes a letter to Teddy Roosevelt saying I’m really glad I didn’t get that gig because I would never have been able to go out to your house on Long Island in the summer. The Irish ward boss doesn’t have a house on Long Island.
Politics is the outlet. It’s the avocation, the vocation, it’s everything.
And then they built this culture of restraint, of civility. And it’s got a lot of good things. But it’s a creation.
And there’s an artifice to it, too. By the 21st century, all these politicians are using these phrases like “the distinguished gentleman” or “my good friend.” Or they’re acting overly decorous in a way that reflects a 20th-century black-and-white film of America. No one talks like that anymore in real life. And Trump comes along, and he’s the first politician who sounds like how people actually speak. He’s not doing the “My good friend across the aisle” bullshit anymore.
Yeah. There are a lot of voters — I don’t want to judge them — who would rather their politician talk like somebody on reality TV than somebody in Parliament 100 years ago. So maybe they just expect politics to look like the rest of their lives.
How many times have we all heard: “Why do you like Trump? ‘He says what I’m thinking.’”
I don’t quote him much, but Steve Bannon said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” The same bad behavior you see in the supermarket, you see in Congress.
But where it gets more alarming is when it goes beyond the rhetorical, because we start imitating the culture. Not just rhetorically, but in terms of violence, in terms of settling disputes through weapons.
The president always has been expected to act with virtue, with restraints. Even in the bare-knuckle, ward boss politics of the 19th century — the president was like the national grandfather who’s supposed to be likable, polite, dignified. And now we have this world where the president isn’t expected to act that way. And they have ten times the power in the nuclear weapons or whatever that they had previously. So we have this 19th-century private behavior, 20th-century imperial presidency, locked up in the most powerful person on the planet. Also, if the politics is a result of what’s going on in our culture, we can’t actually expect any politician to solve this problem. We blame the politicians for not being able to solve our problems, when it’s so much bigger than one office.
I think the next book I might write is on political bosses. When you read about the old bosses, you think they’re these big guys who ran the country. They’re really surfing on top of a wave. They’re dependent on the winds of the public. The senators who decry this stuff, they don’t have much agency to change all that much.
In the 19th century, though, pre-television, pre-motion picture movies, no pro sports. Politics was literally the only game in town.
The only national event is the presidential election. It's also how you get all these jobs and money.
It’s entertainment. It’s identity. And it’s a job. It’s money, it’s cash.
And these people are hungry for it. A lot of them, recent immigrants, people who have moved across the country, they had some old culture, they had some old ritual.
This is the way of belonging.
Absolutely, feeling like they're a part of it. And having some power in a system where they have no power. If you’re a middle-aged worker and you’re working in a factory all day …
You were saying a minute ago, that once again, politics has become a way of expressing belonging. Organized religion has waned. Technology has separated us physically in a lot of ways. Here’s one way we can find belonging and meaning.
Yeah. And all these clubs emerge in the 20th century, people joined the Boy Scouts or the Lions.
Now, I think we all know people like this, they’ll retire, or they’ll lose their job, or they’ll get divorced. Or they’ll have some new thing in their life that makes them isolated. And they’ll get really into watching MSNBC or Fox News or whatever. And six months after that thing that isolates them, they’ll be so much more partisan and amped up about politics because it’s always waiting for you. It always wants your attention.
Your book, though, is not a nostalgic tale. You deal with the upsides and the downsides of both the pre-reform era and the post-reform era. It’s not a fairy tale. There are upsides to a private ballot booth. There are upsides to reform. There’s more control, it’s more sanitized. But turnout collapses.
And it collapses most among vulnerable people. Among poor people, uneducated people, immigrants, younger people, African Americans. It collapses among all the populations who are easiest to cut off and the electorate you get is richer, whiter …
The reform, on one hand, improves the system. But on the other hand, it also limits the system and narrows it.
In 1876, over 80 percent of voters went to the polls. A generation later, in 1924, only 49 percent — half of those who could vote — could even bother to go to the polls. And remember, that’s eligible voters. But those eligible voters typically live in households with mothers, daughters, sisters, people who can’t vote but they still care. And they still argue about it at the taverns, at the dinner table, and at the workplace.
Participation was high because people saw the stakes as being high. And they saw this wasn’t just pistachio vs. strawberry. It was, no, no, if we don’t register our vote, the bad guys are going to win.
Yeah, every election is: “This is the last one. This is the one before the next Civil War.” Two hundred, 150 years later, you can see how silly it is every time they say: “This election will decide the future.” And we hear this in 2024, 2020, 2016. And they all do, kind of. But none of them do, at the same time. It’s like we’re in a loop and we’ve been in this loop before.
Do you take solace from the fact that the period you wrote about was rowdy, it was violent, it was really challenging at times, people died — but we got through it? Or do you view that as an ominous warning sign?
Other people take solace in it. I was surprised by how many people were like “I thought this was a hopeful book and I found it kind of nice to think that things have been bad in the past but we’ve gotten out of it.” Some people look for inspiration. That’s not what I want from history.
You view it as more of a warning sign?
No, I view it more as cultural change over time. I tried really hard to not favor one over the other. It’s more exciting, the first one, right? This rowdy, big public, violent book about politics. It’s more fun to write about. It’s harder to get people excited about civility. But I wouldn’t want to vote in 1880. I’d rather vote in 1930 or whatever. So, which world do you actually want to live in? And the answer is neither. They both have strengths and weaknesses.
Because one was all too real. And the other was sanitized, but that was the problem. It was sanitized.
Yeah. It was deliberately sanitized. They sanitized it, they got rid of the parts they found impure. I think when people were marching around in 2016 and 2020 saying this is not normal, they had this unarticulated vision of what a normal election had looked like. What a good election looked like. What good politics looked like.
Tell me about the reaction to this book. Why do you think lawmakers have taken to this book? I know Senators Blunt and Romney read it.
I’ve also had some nice conversations with Jim Cooper, who was a representative from Tennessee, [New Jersey and California lawmakers] Andy Kim and Mark DeSaulnier. If anybody is supposed to have agency and control, it’s politicians. We assume they have some sort of leadership. But they’re as at sea as the rest of us. And a lot of them, especially people who have been around for a while, they’ve seen this sea change and they don’t quite understand it, either.
They’re looking for answers.
Senator Romney asked me, ‘How do we make it better?’ or ‘How did they make it better in the 1890s?’
But the answer is that they sanitized it. It wasn’t necessarily better. It was cleaner. Less folks were engaged.
When people say our politics are broken, it assumes there was a time when they were unbroken. And really they just broke it differently in different eras. And there’s never been a perfect election or a perfect republic. It’s always going to be deeply flawed. The other thing is, if I were a politician, maybe there’s a sense of guilt. They’ve watched things get worse, and they really have very little ability to make it better. They’re trying to understand where this comes from as a personal question.
But you were struck by people thinking it was a happy story.
I just think we have these two completely bipolar versions of American history. One is that everything’s been perfect and we had this wonderful heritage. And the other is everything’s evil and horrible. And this is a way to show that this is a system that never has fully worked but also isn't evil and the end of the world. I just think that’s dissatisfying.
So what prompted the reform? This is now the end of the 19th century. What prompts the reform?
A lot of it is class conflict. Upper middle-class people who do not like this big, working-class democracy. It’s loud and messy — and these new immigrants, they’re the bad ones. They’re coming from Italy or Russia or whatever. When an elite population feels like it’s losing control of society, it can really act out. The people who, in the beginning of the 19th century, felt like they ran the country, if you look at who’s making money and winning elections in 1880, 1890, it looks like these bosses and these new populations and these tycoons. They’re not who was supposed to run the country.
So, there’s a backlash. But at the same time, there's a really good reason to want no violence in an election. So it’s not like these guys are horrible, evil. The people with the really bad motivations are tied up with the people with the best motivations. And that’s a progressive era thing.
Now, it feels as though we’re at the end of another era of reform; the post-Watergate reforms are eroding, the FEC is a shadow of itself.
No one who wins this election is going to have a landslide, take over Congress, and be able to pass laws. We’re locked in this cycle of these really close elections, like the 1880s and 1890s, when a couple thousand voters decide things and then they lose in the next election.
We don’t have blowouts.
In the Gilded Age and today, when these elections are going to be really close, they’re going to be undone two years later, four years later. That’s the other thing that’s most similar is just — we’re in a loop with no resolution. And everyone thinks every election will be decisive and will obliterate the enemy.
And it’s because we’re using the political system for something it’s actually really bad at. We’re using the electoral system to resolve a culture war, and it never can. The electoral system is good at putting people in power to pass or block legislation. It’s terrible at deciding what pronouns we should use or whatever. So, we’ll never be able to resolve it because we’re using a stapler as a telephone. It’s just not designed for what we’re asking it to do for us. It’ll never be satisfying.
Olivia Brown contributed to this report for TROIB News
