Category Archives: Misc.

This is not the craziest US presidential election

04 Monday Jan 2021

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Some history to put the current US presidential election into perspective. Short take, things were much worse a couple of times in history.

For nearly two decades in the middle of the 19th century, Americans had spectacularly failed to settle any presidential election without resorting to military force. In 1860, the South seceded rather than accept the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. In 1864, 1868, and 1872, as C. Vann Woodward observes in his classic study, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, “the election had turned in the last analysis on the employment of military force, or the threat of it … In the phraseology of the seventies, the question was, had American politics become permanently ‘Mexicanized’ since 1860?”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/when-american-democracy-was-worse/

And in 1800, Thomas Jefferson, who was then vice president and therefore in charge of electoral vote counting, won the presidential election with his treatment of (yes this is true) Georgia’s electoral votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_presidential_election#cite_note-Jefferson_counts-15 and https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/03/how-jefferson-counted-himself-in/302888/

Feel any better now? 🙂