Mark Twain said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” I think it’s important to keep that in mind as we look at our current political landscape. One difference between the Great Depression and the Great Recession is that Franklin Roosevelt didn’t take power until more than three years had passed from the October 29, 1929 stock market crash. Barack Obama arrived a mere four months after the September 2008 meltdown. While polls show that the people still largely blame President Bush for the economic conditions of the country, he isn’t as uniformly blamed as President Hoover was during the 1930’s.
What rhymes better is the reaction of the Republican Party and its denizens to the Democratic solutions. There is no buy-in on the GOP’s part to the Dodd-Frank reforms. They won’t confirm a head to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They have voted more than thirty times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They blame their woes on political consultants, but they seem to have no recognition that they wrecked this country and that people are pissed about it. People don’t think our excellent adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq were worth the cost, however you might want to define the cost. People sure as hell know that President Obama wasn’t in the White House when the economy turned to shit.
The Republicans dominated federal elections in the 1920’s, but they screwed things up so badly that they barely had a sniff of power in Washington again until the 1950’s. And they didn’t win back total power in Washington until 2002. So, basically, their reaction to Roosevelt was so poorly adapted to political realities that it took them seventy years to recover all the ground they had lost in the 1932 elections.
I think that is about where the GOP is today. They have a nicely gerrymandered congressional map that is helping them cling to a bit of power in the House, and they have the filibuster to contain things in the Senate. But they are behaving like a permanent minority party, just like they did from 1933-1994.
