Thread by @davidfrum

This below point is being repeated a lot, but I think some who repeat it are in danger of misunderstanding its significance. A short historical thread ...

https://twitter.com/theDanaDecker/status/1374246395155079169

The Democratic party of the 1880s offered a haven to unreconstructed neo-Confederates, in alliance with corrupt urban machines. Although it took care to nominate untainted men like Grover Cleveland at the top of the ticket, down below - very different story. 1/x

The electoral power of the 1880s Democratic party depended on violent voter suppression in the South - and flagrant voter manipulation in the cities of the North. There's also reason to believe that Democrats benefited more from female disenfranchisement ... 2/x

... because Democrats were perceived as the party more supportive of the liquor traffic. We can see for certain that as soon as women got the vote in federal elections, Republicans won a sequence of huge victories (1920, 1924, 1928) - and Prohibition became law. 3/x

Anyway, back to the 1880s. The Democratic party of those days played a crooked electoral game. Anti-black voter suppression in the South brutally depressed Republican votes in that region. Urban machines stealthily inflated Democratic votes in the North. Atop all that ... 4/x

... the then-dominant Republicans had committed to a super-deflationary monetary policy in 1873.

I'll skip the technicalities, but the plan implied cutting wages in half and doubling the burden of farm debt.

That decision devastated down-ballot GOP in elections of 1874. 5/x

The monetary policy of 1873 doomed Southern Reconstruction after 1874. Result: By the 1880s, Democrats could imagine winning unified control of the federal government for the first time since the 1850s. But that win, if won, would rest heavily on force and fraud. 6/x

So there was the context for Republicans seizing a rare opportunity in later 1880s to rig the US Senate as a redoubt against neo-Confederacy. Not exactly fair, no - but neither was it fair when GOP lost Southern House seats and Electoral Votes to intimidation of black voters 7/x

Why repeat all this dusty history?

If you read the short Twitter version of what happened in 1889, you're in danger of absorbing too-simple a moral lesson.

The GOP Senate plan of the late 1880s was restorative political justice, compensating for abuses by the other party. 8/x

Americans face an analogous problem in the 2020s. Since 2010, Republicans have waged a highly successful rollback of the voting rights revolution of the 1960s. And it's worked for them, as the attack on voting rights worked for Democrats in the 1880s. 9/x

It's probably not feasible to rewrite the whole US electoral system to make it as representative as electoral systems in other peer democracies.

Germany, France, etc. adopted their present constitutions AFTER they committed to democracy; the US, BEFORE. 10/x

But Americans in the 2020s can feasibly revise *some* elements of their voting system to compensate for defects *elsewhere.* It's not a perfect solution. Like the Senate-rigging of the 1880s, it may have unintended/undesired consequences down the road. Who can foresee? 11/x

But within the context of a voting system as radically unrepresentative as the American voting system has become - something must be done. If the ideal is unfeasible, then settle for the feasible. 12/x

The lesson of the Senate carve-up of 1889 is not "Republicans are cheaters." Despite my jokes about merging states into South Saskatchewan, the lesson isn't even really that we have too many Dakotas. The lesson is ... 13/x

... that the democratic idea always faces powerful resistance, that periodic reform is necessary to defend democracy against those who dislike it, and that sometimes the only available defenses are very, very imperfect - like the carve-up of 1889. 14/x

That was them and then. This is us and now. They made mistakes. So will we. The key thing is to keep moving toward the democratic idea, against the always so powerful currents that push societies away. 15/x

The US would have been better off if it could have avoided *both* the deflation after 1873 *and* the ensuing Senate-rigging of 1889. But that outcome surely lay beyond the possibilities of their time. Let's focus on the possibilities of ours.

END

Footnote to those with access to JStor: Milton Friedman agreed that return to gold in 1873 was a mistake. jstor.org/stable/2937754… (Corrected link)