Lew, we may see ballot law “blowback” leading to the disintegration of the Republican Party. The egregious ballot laws the Rep/Dem Duopoly have sustained for decades against third parties and independent candidates may bite them in the butt. If Trump becomes the presumed GOP nominee after Super-Tuesday, will a large faction of the Party’s elite oligarchs and their minions go renegade and support an Independent insurgent candidate? Will even a failed attempt to foster such a coup within party ranks destroy the GOP as a major party contender on the national level?
Because of the Trump candidacy which has changed the political landscape I see an emerging parallel between the election of 1896 and that of 2016. Like Murray N. Rothbard and other keen observers, I view the presidential election of 1896 as a major watershed political event. It created a significant political realignment from what political scientists and historians describe as “the third party system” (the period from 1854 to the mid 1890s), characterized by the rise of militant American nationalism after Lincoln’s war of coercive unification and reconstruction against the South, and a plutocratic corporatism under the domination of the Republican oligarchs controlling the US Senate. (see Murray N. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy).
1896 was not merely between the Republican William McKinley and the Democrat William Jennings Bryan on the issue of the Gold Standard versus “Free Silver.” It also had the covert dynamic of the Democrats enveloping, co-opting and destroying their Western and Southern agrarian and Northern working class rivals, the Populists (This brilliant strategy is outlined in Walter Karp’s seminal must-read book, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic. Although electorally disastrous in terms of votes received, the Bryan campaign ended organized Populism as a political party. The McKinley GOP campaign united the nation’s plutocratic rivals of Morgan and Rockefeller in an effort to also destroy Populism. Urban northern workers were presented pink slips in their pay envelops prior to the election warning them that they would be fired if Bryan was elected. Renegade Silver Republicans broke party ranks, as did Gold Democrats. (See Ferdinand Lundberg’s masterpiece in power elite analysis describing the 1896 campaign, America’s 60 Families, .pdf). Like Rothbard in his Wall Street book above, he is especially profound in detailing the internecine war between the Morgan bloc and their Rockefeller, Harriman, and Kuhn Loeb rivals and their political surrogates.
This pivotal election ushered in “the fourth party system,” (from 1896 to 1932), dominated again by the Republicans except for the two terms of Woodrow Wilson. This was the Progressive Era. The central domestic issues concerned government regulation of railroads and large corporations (“trusts”), the money issue (gold versus silver), the protective tariff, the role of labor unions, child labor, a new central banking cartel, corruption in party politics, primary elections, direct election of senators, eugenics and racial segregation, efficiency in government, women’s suffrage, and control of immigration. Foreign policy centered on the 1898 Spanish–American War, Imperialism, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the creation of the League of Nations.
4:10 pm on February 27, 2016
