But, it's how I see things.
1876 was a curious year for the election. We had our highest voter turnout as a county (81%) but we also saw many of those votes turn out to be rendered useless by Congress. How did that happen, you ask? Allow me to tell you the story of the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1877. The race between Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Samuel J. Tilden of New York was close... too close, in fact. Neither man won enough of the electoral votes (because, in case you didn't know, your vote almost, sort of doesn't matter in the electoral college system) to win the office, with 20 electoral votes held in dispute in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Each party claimed that their man had won those states, and eventually a deal was struck. The Republican Hayes was essentially gifted the office of President (even though he didn't win the popular vote!) for the guarantee that the Republicans would essentially stop Reconstruction, the attempt to rebuild the South following the Civil War's conclusion in 1865 into something, well, less horrible and without Jim Crow. As Vox explains, the Republicans were moving away from their radical, Lincolnesque roots and wanted some of that sweet, sweet donor money, so they decided to take the bait and move to what was considered the center. As Ken Burns put it in his documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History:
Corruption had been a central issue in the Presidential election of 1876. Republicans abandoned the struggle over the status of Freedmen in the south in the interests of a more lucrative ongoing battle with the Democrats over the spoils of office. Everything seemed to be for sale. And bosses in both parties were determined that it stay that way.
As a result, African Americans in the South would have to endure another 100 years of bigotry until finally fighitng for their freedoms in the 1960s... and of course we know that everything has been peaches and cream on that front ever since.
So the formerly liberal Republicans sold out and become tools of the corporate state. Meanwhile, the Democrats were already a coalition of the of the Patrician south, willing to also sell out to preserve what remained of the "Southern Way of Life," leading to the Gilded Age of amazing prosperity for the super duper rich while the vast majority of the country enters what's known as the Long Depression. Now, if this is starting to sound very familiar, just with the D's and R's switched, that's what makes this lesson so important. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr, father of our 26th President, said of the political climate around that time that he felt "sorry for the country as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time."
Curiously, the only reason we know Democrats as the social justice party is because FDR and LBJ alienated that southern Democratic base (causing them to switch to the Republicans) by actually, you know, deciding that all people deserve to be treated decently, and that all men are created equal. In this new Gilded Age of corruption, pay to play, special interests and Super PACs, it's up to the DFL to keep waving the banner of Progressivism as we slog through the maniacal partisan muck. No matter how conservative the national Democrats might lean or how full-on fascist the Republicans get, we must continue the movement forward for our nation and its people into what Hubert H. Humphrey once called "The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights." The time may come where the DFL becomes its own national, progressive party, showing that what works in Minnesota can work for the nation. Most importantly, one of our founding principles of the next few years must be that there is a difference between a (D) next to your name and a (DFL).
Someone has to do it. For the DFL, our time is now.
At Your Service,
Doremus Jessup
