(01-23-2017, 07:56 PM)Marypoza Wrote:(01-23-2017, 06:21 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-23-2017, 06:09 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(01-23-2017, 05:53 PM)linus Wrote: Did you read that TNR piece asking aloud if Trump will be like Carter?
I'm wondering if a better analogy may turn out to be Andrew Johnson.
I wasn't a political science major and this is the first I heard of "the Politics Presidents Make" but there would seem to be no place in Skowronek’s theory for Andrew Johnson, one of most reviled and least successful presidents, who immediately followed (rather than preceded) a (presumably) "reconstructive" presidency. I'm not going to speculate about what happens, but if Obama turns out to be a genuinely transformative president, in the manner of (but to a lesser extant than) Lincoln and FDR, and Jackson and Reagan, on the right, then Trump may be compared in a certain sense to Andrew Johnson, who gave the South wide latitude to do Reconstruction Their Way, and came to be widely opposed in the North, as well as of course impeached. And he was himself succeeded by someone who sought to extend Lincoln's achievements and legacy, rather than forestall or repeal it.
I have to go to alternate history for any analogy.
What if the America Firsters won the 1936 or 1940 election?
If they'd won the 1940 election, it wouldn't have changed much. Pearl Harbor would still have forced us into the war. There might have been less lend-lease before the war, but not enough for Germany to have successfully invaded the UK.
-- wasn't America 1st Lindberg's group? He was pretty tight with Hitler, my guess is we would of stayed out if WW2, like Spain (Hitler's buddy Franco) or entered it on Hitler's side
Nah, it was definitely more of an isolationist thing than an actual fascist one:
Quote:The AFC was established on September 4, 1940, by Yale Law School student R. Douglas Stuart, Jr. (son of R. Douglas Stuart, co-founder of Quaker Oats), along with other students, including future President Gerald Ford, future Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, and future U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart.[3] Future President John F. Kennedy contributed $100, along with a note saying "What you all are doing is vital."[4][5] At its peak, America First claimed 800,000 dues-paying members in 450 chapters, located mostly in a 300-mile radius of Chicago.[1]
The AFC gained much of its early strength by merging with the more left-wing Keep America Out of War Committee, whose leaders included Norman Thomas and John T. Flynn.
It claimed 135,000 members in 60 chapters in Illinois, its strongest state.[6] Fundraising drives produced about $370,000 from some 25,000 contributors. Nearly half came from a few millionaires such as William H. Regnery, H. Smith Richardson of the Vick Chemical Company, General Robert E. Wood of Sears-Roebuck, Sterling Morton of Morton Salt Company,[citation needed] publisher Joseph M. Patterson (New York Daily News) and his cousin, publisher Robert R. McCormick (Chicago Tribune).
The AFC was never able to get funding for its own public opinion poll. The New York chapter received slightly more than $190,000, most of it from its 47,000 contributors. Since it never had a national membership form or national dues, and local chapters were quite autonomous, historians suggest that the organization's leaders had no idea how many "members" it had.[7]
Serious organizing of the America First Committee took place in Chicago not long after the September 1940 establishment. Chicago was to remain the national headquarters of the committee. To preside over their committee, America First chose General Robert E. Wood, the 61-year-old chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co.. Wood remained at the head of the committee until it was disbanded in the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The America First Committee had its share of prominent businessmen as well as the sympathies of political figures including Democratic Senators Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, with its most prominent spokesman being aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. Other celebrities supporting America First were novelist Sinclair Lewis, poet E. E. Cummings, Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, film producer Walt Disney, actress Lillian Gish and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The many student chapters included future celebrities, such as author Gore Vidal (as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy), and the future President Gerald Ford, at Yale Law School.[8]
A lot of that "Lindbergh was a Nazi!" stuff was retconning after we got into the war and won. America First actually dissolved right after Pearl Harbor and Lindbergh flew in the Pacific theater as a civilian.
It also would have been difficult for America First to have won the 1936 election since the group didn't form until 1940.
So, if you're looking for an actual fascist candidate in 1936 or 1940, you're left with... Pelley?
I dunno, not really seeing the parallel with Trump. Kinda missing the paramilitary organizations, the antisemitism, etc. A lot of this "OMG! TRUMP EQUALZ FASHISM!" stuff is just lazy sloganeering.
Not really seeing the Andrew Johnson parallel, either. No victory in a Civil War, no history of campaigning on the same ticket, etc. I think you're just reaching out of a desire to cast Obama as a coalition realigning, transformational president, in a way that he really wasn't. Politically talented? Reasonably prudent (except where he let people like Powers and Clinton drag him into Libya)? Sure. The inaugurator of a new party system? Don't see the evidence for it. Even if we assume that Trump's presidency will be a failure, I think a better comparison would be with Carter, with Obama playing the Nixon (minus the Watergate bit leading to a President Ford/Biden) to some future liberal's Reagan, a man whose undeniable talents weren't enough to decisively shift the Overton window to a new stable configuration.
Of course, this scenario presupposes that Trump and the Republican Congress will fall out and the country continues to drift, paving the way for the left to make a big comeback in 2020, at the Congressional as well as Presidential level. I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.