Thread by @SlavaMalamud

Watching #ImpeachingHearing and reading James McPherson's definitive history of the Civil War, Battlecry of Freedom, I can't escape a conclusion that crazed, self-righteous politicians hurling themselves on the absolute wrongest side of history is a sacred American tradition.

Consider this, for example. In the years following the independence, slavery was universally considered evil in America, albeit a necessary one. Even the South was mostly of the opinion that it will eventually disappear, though definitely not very soon...

All this began to change once America started expanding and the South was faced with the probability of becoming substantially outnumbered. Looking at a perpetual minority status and the loss of its disproportionately large legislative pull, the South quickly radicalized...

In the span of a couple of decades, the South went from "Slavery is bad, yes, but we need it, and emancipating Negroes now will lead to riots and poverty" to "Slavery is a great moral good, it should be everywhere, it should be forever, it's God's only way!"...

The more marginalized and outdated the South and its "peculiar institution" became the more crazed and divorced from reality Southern politicians got. Nothing but a perpetual stranglehold on power would ever do for them anymore. If America were to expand, slavery had to expand...

By the 1840s Calhoun was declaring that "slavery is a positive good, the most safe, stable basis for free institutions of the world."
An Alabama politician screamed that not being allowed to expand slavery to new territories was "social degradation" to which "death us preferable"

Southerners declared that being equally represented in Congress (their smaller population and economy be damned) was the only condition to staying in the Union, lest "we deliberately consign our children to the flames."
Staying in power by any means. Keeping slavery by any means

At that point compromise became an ever more fictional proposition, though the North tried its damnest, in 1850, to assuage the Southern craziness. But no matter how much they showcased centrism and how moderate their leaders tried to be, South would get more and more nutty.

Of course, since politics were more sectional than partisan in those days, the South meant both Democrats (mostly) and Whigs, but the analogy to today's politics is unmistakable. The willingness to abandon all morals and respect for institutions for the sake of power. Still there

The minority's feverish rallying to their outdated and increasingly marginalized worldview, radicalized exponentially, is still there.
Pretty insane to watch the same thing unfolding in real time.
I hope it doesn't end the same way.