Of late I’ve been hearing a great deal about just what is going to happen after the 2024 election. Most of it is quite negative for the ’libertards’ and the Democratic Party. Some even talk about the coming total dominance of of the GOP and Donald Trump. I’d like to take sometime to look at it a little differently. From the view of a student of the American Civil War and the decade that proceeded it.
While most Americans know that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President few know that the Republican Party did not exist in 1850. Only ten short years before Lincoln’s election. Nor do they know of just how troubled the politics of the US was in the 1850’s. Many of the issues we are dealing with today we were dealing with then. Immigration, race, states rights, and political corruption, just to name a few. All of these issues, and how they were dealt with can give us some clues as to what is going to happen now.
The 1850s was the true spread of new communications technology that greatly increased the speed and easy of communications with the spread of three innovations…..The steam Boat, The railroads, and finally the telegraph. Let’s just look at two, Trains and the Telegraph. With the spread of trains that could reach the unheard of speed of 50 MPH. Just think of it, in one hour you could travel the same distance that would have taken you two days hard travel by foot or horseback. The telegraph had even bigger effect as news could spread across the country in hours instead of weeks. Just think of it, what happened New Orleans in the afternoon would be in the morning edition of the Boston newspapers. We in the 21st Century like to marvel out how much Smartphones, Social Media, and the internet have changes (speeded up) our world. But rest assured our ancestors of the 1850s were just as amazed as we.
This is why I feel that we can learn a lot from a careful study of the USA in the 1850’s. We gone thru this before. The problems we face now have antecedents then and the solutions they found, no mater how good or bad they were can help us make sense of what is happen now and what we can and should do and not do. So that said, lets get on with my ideas of what is to come.
First and foremost by the election of 2032 the Republican party will no longer be a major player. Like the Wigs of 1860, they will still exist here and there but they will no longer be one of the big two. What the new party will be like I have no clear idea. Just like in 1852 few, if any, people would predict just what the Republican party of 1860 would be like. I am confident that it will consider itself ”Conservative” what ever that means.
In the area of political corruption I fully expect the problem of gerrymandering will ether be solved or its solution identified and being worked on. The same with the issue of ’Dark Money’. I hope that the ’Dark Money’ solution will entail dealing with the gross miss-use of LLCs. As always corruption is always found in both business and politics and therefore the solution(s) will be in business and politics.
Well, that’s all for now. To those who were expecting ideas on how to deal with the problems show here, sorry. I’m having enough of hard time trying to clearly identifying the problem. I do promise to continue my research into the 1850s in hope of identifying possible solutions. Hope you, dear reader have been encouraged to do the same.
