Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Just for fun, here's a thread of possible historical analogies for the 2020 election.

In decreasing order of recency...

2/First theory: "2012 = 2020".

Obviously, this theory is favored by the right. In this analogy, the Dems have defined themselves as resistance to Trump, the way the GOP defined itself as resistance to Obama after 2008...

3/In this theory, the Justice Dems are the new Tea Party - an upstart grassroots opposition movement that fights with the party establishment and pushes leaders to resist the president to the max.

The blue wave of 2018 would, of course, be analogous to the red wave of 2010.

4/If 2020 = 2012, the Dems will nominate someone like Romney - a moderate party elder who gets pushed into taking more extreme positions than he'd like. Probably a woke Joe Biden. But in this analogy, the Dems' Romney isn't exciting enough, and Trump gets 4 more years.

5/The next theory is "2020 = 1980".

This is the Skowronek theory of presidential cycles:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1118888932442140672

6/In this theory, the conservative political program that began with Reagan has now reached its point of exhaustion, and the GOP's bizarre last gasp - Trump - will be defeated like Carter was defeated.

And the new president will be the "Reagan"/"FDR" of a new left program.

7/If 2020 = 1980, then we should expect to see the "Reagan of the Left" emerge - an inspiring leader who will energize the country behind a bold program of leftward economic reform and liberal values.

This would pretty obviously be either Warren or Sanders, I think.

8/The next theory is "2020 = 1972".

In this theory, embraced by some on the right, left-driven social unrest has roiled the country much as in 1965-1972.

9/In this theory, Trump would then be the new Nixon - a reaction of the "silent majority" against the outpouring of cultural liberalism ("wokeness") and economic leftism.

10/If 2020 = 1972, we should expect to see the Dems, driven to the left by the weakening of central party control (superdelegates), nominate a new McGovern - a candidate that's farther to the left than the country is willing to embrace, and who gets wiped out in the election.

11/The next theory is "2020 = 1932", in which case we're ready for a new FDR to rally us around a bold new interventionist program. But this is actually pretty similar to the Skowronek "2020 = 1980" theory.

12/Next, we have one that's not from America: "2020 = Weimar 1936". In this analogy, Trump is the new Hitler, and 2020 will see electoral cheating and violence put an end to America's democracy, inaugurating a new dark age of fascism and repression.

13/There's one other theory I haven't seen many people discuss: "2020 = Spain 1936".

This was when Spain's fledgling republic elected a moderate liberal government, and rightists in the military refused to accept a verdict and staged a coup, igniting the Spanish Civil War.

14/In this analogy, Dems win in 2020, but conservatives refuse to accept the verdict and manage to stage a coup, leading to a new civil war - which the right, gaining more support from the military, wins, though at terrible long-term cost to the entire country.

15/Of course there are other possible historical analogies - many countries, many historical political contests.

The thing is, it's highly likely that none of these historical analogies are good guides to the future, and that 2020 will be very different from anything in history.

16/The human mind loves pattern recognition, even when the patterns aren't really there (this is called "apophenia"). Even if history doesn't really rhyme, our ears strain to hear the rhymes anyway.

17/So far, 21st century America has had some episodes that looked like they might be eerily similar to others in the 20th - the Great Recession looked like the Great Depression, Iraq looked like Vietnam, etc. - but the new episodes ended up playing out fairly differently.

18/It's quite possible that Trump and his challengers aren't really that similar to anything that America has seen before, and we're left groping in the dark without any applicable historical analogies to light the way ahead.

(end)