Jay Cost reminds us in a National Review Online column that over-the-top, doom-and-gloom predictions are nothing new in American politics.
2017 was a year of great political anxiety. The American Left has been consumed by a dark view of our future — a Trumpian dystopia — that has induced them to “#Resist” our would-be tyrant in an effort to return America to the proper path. …
… Funny how the country always seems to be at stake, one way or another. My guess is that 2018 will hold more of the same. As the midterm approaches, leftists’ desire for victory will inspire them to rail more loudly against Trump, while Trump’s backers will warn of all the awful things to befall the United States should Nancy Pelosi reclaim the speaker’s gavel.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we have experienced it all before. This last year seems to have been a replay of 2009, albeit with the teams switched, and I expect 2018 to feel a lot like an inverted version of 2010.
In fact, this us-versus-them rhetoric is quite common throughout American history, as have been the apocalyptic undertones. At the Progressive party’s convention in August 1912, for instance, Teddy Roosevelt closed his speech declaring, “Fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!” At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, William Jennings Bryan cast the gold standard as an attempt by eastern financiers to crucify western farmers on a “Cross of Gold.” The 1850s and 1860s were full of apocalyptic views on politics and society — in both the North and South. The Whig presses of the 1830s cast Andrew Jackson as a would-be tyrant. In the 1790s, James Madison wrote that Alexander Hamilton — his erstwhile partner in framing a new government — was fomenting a quiet revolution to replace the republican form of government with monarchy.
