I enjoy history, but the disadvantage of being a history buff is getting flashbacks to centuries past whenever I read the news. History repeats itself, often at the hands of people who failed to learn its lessons. Some current issues are movies we’ve seen before and can be amusing (or depressing) when you know the likely ending.
Impeaching Cromwell
Right now there’s a big controversy over whether the Democrats can impeach Donald Trump even though he’s no longer President. Pundits and lawyers are debating nineteenth-century legal precedent for and against impeachment. But there’s a clear precedent in English law in the case of Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell was a disruptive guy. He led the English Civil War against the Deep State that deposed and executed King Charles I, and ruled the country from 1653 until his death in 1658. When the Royalists returned to power in 1660 they were infuriated that Cromwell had died from natural causes. So poor old Oliver’s corpse (yes, his corpse!) was disinterred from Westminster Abbey, hung in chains and beheaded. Sounds like the Royalists were really afraid of the guy and wanted to make absolutely certain he wouldn’t hold a rally or go on 17th Century social media. So the Democratic restoration probably is on solid historical ground.
Saving democracy from the Reichstag fire
In 1933 a fire at the Reichstag, the German parliament building, was blamed on a Communist plot to overthrow the government. Some have compared this to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.The Nazi government responded to this threat to democracy with the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which clamped down on on civil liberties big-time. They harnessed the power of the entire government to restrict freedom of speech and assembly, overrule state and local governments and root out domestic terrorists. That would never happen here, of course.
One drop of blood
Separating people by race always has run counter to human nature because people tend to assimilate, intermarry and breed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries some Southern states tried to enforce racial segregation and bar interracial marriage by classifying anyone with “one drop” of African-American blood as Black. This practice ended because it was wildly impractical and and ran counter to the desire for equal opportunity embodied in the civil rights movement.
Now the one-drop theory has been resurrected by our race-obsessed identity politics and culture. Thanks to DNA testing, someone like Elizabeth Warren can self-identify as a member of an oppressed minority group and claim favored treatment on the basis of equity.
Yet multiracial people have been the fastest-growing demographic in the United States since the 2010 census. Racially mixed marriages and adoptions are commonplace. We still need to stamp out the vestiges of racism, but in the long run politicians may find it harder to divide Americans by race when we’re all in the same melting pot.
Sedition is trendy again
Until a few weeks ago, sedition was a musty historical footnote or obscure Jeopardy question. Now half of Washington is guilty of it. Broadly defined, sedition is incitement of rebellion against the state. Current United States law, however, protects free speech and narrows sedition to a specific conspiracy to overthrow the government.
It was not always so. In 1798 President John Adams pushed through the Sedition Act that made it a crime to criticize the President. Several newspaper editors were convicted, and an outspoken local crank who posted a sign got a stiff jail sentence. Protests broke out across the country and led to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Congress went back to the sedition well in 1918, when Congressional Democrats passed President Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act and more than 2,000 Americans were prosecuted for speaking against World War I. The law was repealed later that year after Republicans won the mid-term elections.
So if we see pressure from pundits and politicians for a tougher sedition law in the U.S., remember that we’ve tried this before and it did not end well.
Wanna buy some tulip futures?
GameStop, Robinhood and Reddit did not exist during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th Century, but tulips were a really hot investment. Yes, tulips. Flowers, for crissakes. The Dutch invented commodity futures markets and tulips became a prized luxury item in a prosperous country. As growers developed more attractive and exotic varieties, the market for tulip bulbs heated up. In 1637 some single tulip bulbs were priced astronomically higher than their intrinsic value: as much as 10 times the annual earnings of a skilled artisan.
Lots of people bought in, made money, and quickly lost it when trading collapsed and they actually had to take possession of the damned bulbs. So they were poor again but, unlike the GameStop investors, had really nice gardens. Could have been worse: Hedge funds did not exist in the 17th Century and nobody was shorting tulips.
Watching history repeat
I enjoy history, but the disadvantage of being a history buff is getting flashbacks to centuries past whenever I read the news. History repeats itself, often at the hands of people who failed to learn its lessons. Some current issues are movies we’ve seen before and can be amusing (or depressing) when you know the likely ending.
Impeaching Cromwell
Right now there’s a big controversy over whether the Democrats can impeach Donald Trump even though he’s no longer President. Pundits and lawyers are debating nineteenth-century legal precedent for and against impeachment. But there’s a clear precedent in English law in the case of Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell was a disruptive guy. He led the English Civil War against the Deep State that deposed and executed King Charles I, and ruled the country from 1653 until his death in 1658. When the Royalists returned to power in 1660 they were infuriated that Cromwell had died from natural causes. So poor old Oliver’s corpse (yes, his corpse!) was disinterred from Westminster Abbey, hung in chains and beheaded. Sounds like the Royalists were really afraid of the guy and wanted to make absolutely certain he wouldn’t hold a rally or go on 17th Century social media. So the Democratic restoration probably is on solid historical ground.
Saving democracy from the Reichstag fire
In 1933 a fire at the Reichstag, the German parliament building, was blamed on a Communist plot to overthrow the government. Some have compared this to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.The Nazi government responded to this threat to democracy with the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which clamped down on on civil liberties big-time. They harnessed the power of the entire government to restrict freedom of speech and assembly, overrule state and local governments and root out domestic terrorists. That would never happen here, of course.
One drop of blood
Separating people by race always has run counter to human nature because people tend to assimilate, intermarry and breed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries some Southern states tried to enforce racial segregation and bar interracial marriage by classifying anyone with “one drop” of African-American blood as Black. This practice ended because it was wildly impractical and and ran counter to the desire for equal opportunity embodied in the civil rights movement.
Now the one-drop theory has been resurrected by our race-obsessed identity politics and culture. Thanks to DNA testing, someone like Elizabeth Warren can self-identify as a member of an oppressed minority group and claim favored treatment on the basis of equity.
Yet multiracial people have been the fastest-growing demographic in the United States since the 2010 census. Racially mixed marriages and adoptions are commonplace. We still need to stamp out the vestiges of racism, but in the long run politicians may find it harder to divide Americans by race when we’re all in the same melting pot.
Sedition is trendy again
Until a few weeks ago, sedition was a musty historical footnote or obscure Jeopardy question. Now half of Washington is guilty of it. Broadly defined, sedition is incitement of rebellion against the state. Current United States law, however, protects free speech and narrows sedition to a specific conspiracy to overthrow the government.
It was not always so. In 1798 President John Adams pushed through the Sedition Act that made it a crime to criticize the President. Several newspaper editors were convicted, and an outspoken local crank who posted a sign got a stiff jail sentence. Protests broke out across the country and led to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Congress went back to the sedition well in 1918, when Congressional Democrats passed President Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act and more than 2,000 Americans were prosecuted for speaking against World War I. The law was repealed later that year after Republicans won the mid-term elections.
So if we see pressure from pundits and politicians for a tougher sedition law in the U.S., remember that we’ve tried this before and it did not end well.
Wanna buy some tulip futures?
GameStop, Robinhood and Reddit did not exist during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th Century, but tulips were a really hot investment. Yes, tulips. Flowers, for crissakes. The Dutch invented commodity futures markets and tulips became a prized luxury item in a prosperous country. As growers developed more attractive and exotic varieties, the market for tulip bulbs heated up. In 1637 some single tulip bulbs were priced astronomically higher than their intrinsic value: as much as 10 times the annual earnings of a skilled artisan.
Lots of people bought in, made money, and quickly lost it when trading collapsed and they actually had to take possession of the damned bulbs. So they were poor again but, unlike the GameStop investors, had really nice gardens. Could have been worse: Hedge funds did not exist in the 17th Century and nobody was shorting tulips.
Share this: