[To say that
this year’s midterm
elections are significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the
case. But crucial as they are, they won’t be the first such significant
midterms, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other major midterms, leading up
to a special weekend post on this year’s results. And oh yeah: vote!]
On how Congressional
elections can reflect and even amplify societal collapse.
I know that’s a
really bleak lead for an Election Day post, and I promise I didn’t intend for
that to be the case; the posts in this series are chronological, and I also
didn’t know what I wanted to say about each midterm election when I picked them
as post topics. But in truth, I do believe (and full disclosure, I’m writing
this post in early September, exactly two months prior to Election Day, but I
can’t imagine this perspective changing much and certainly not for the better
between now and then) that the 2018 midterm elections do have the potential to
contribute significantly (well beyond normal midterm elections, that is) to
whether the country moves in a better or worse direction going forward. Am I
saying that the country might devolve into civil war in the next few years if
the midterms go badly? Not necessarily—but it’s worth noting that a few years
before the Civil War, a series of regular and special midterm elections between
August 1858 and November 1859 did in fact contribute to the gathering
momentum toward and even causes of that most divisive and tragic period in
American history.
What makes the
historical comparisons tricky, though, is that the most straightforward way to
describe the results of those elections would be to say that a progressive
party opposed to a historically awful President gained partial control of
Congress. Former Senator and Secretary of State James
Buchanan had been elected president in 1856, and had spent the next two
years doing everything
he could to support a Southern, slaveholding, and white supremacist agenda
(including, perhaps most egregiously, lobbying
the Supreme Court to rule in Dred
Scott v. Sanford [1857] that slaves were legally property and not human
beings). Buchanan’s extremism alienated fellow Democrats (especially Northern ones
like his primary opponent
Stephen Douglas), and those tensions, along with the vote-splitting presence
of small but influential political parties like the anti-immigrant Know
Nothings (renamed the American
Party for the 1856 election) and the anti-Buchanan Southern
Opposition Party, allowed the very new, anti-slavery
Republican Party to gain its largest number of Congressional seats yet
across these two years of midterm elections. The Republicans didn’t win quite
enough seats to have a majority in the House of Representatives, but the
presence of those smaller parties nonetheless gave the Republicans a plurality
and a chance to exercise significant Congressional power in opposition to
Buchanan’s agenda.
While that
sounds like a good thing, the Civil War arrived less than two years after the
last of those special elections in November 1859. I’m not suggesting that these
Congressional Republicans did anything in particular to hasten the war, or even
that they necessarily could have prevented it; the die might well have been
cast by 1858 (or perhaps even as early as the “Bleeding Kansas”
conflicts of 1854-1856). Instead, I would argue that the extremely divided
and fractured nature of these Congressional results reflected those deepening
sectional and national divisions—but also, perhaps, exacerbated them. More
exactly, I think a greater sense of solidarity and coalition among the various
opposition parties—certainly between the Republicans and the Southern
Opposition Party, for example, which could have better supported the
nascent and vital Southern Unionism that continued throughout
the Civil War—might have allowed for more effective resistance to Buchanan
and his pro-slavery and white supremacist efforts. Which is to say, on Election
Day 2018 I hope we resisters remember not only what we’re fighting against, but
that we’re all in it together.
Next midterm
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?
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