The 1824 Election And Plans B, C, D. . .

Robert Barnes's offhand remark anout the 1824 and 1876 elections brought me to think for rhe first time about actual US elections that weren't resolved in the Electoral College as outlined in Article II, Section 1 and the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution. The 1824 election is so far the only one that was resolved in the House as specified in the Twelfth Amendment. As I said yesterday, of the two candidates with the most votes, John Quincy Adams was selectd over Andrew Jackson, who went on to win the 1828 election.

All four of the candidates in 1824 were Democrats, by the way. Exactly what went on in the House is a different subject that I won't discuss here, except to say that 1824, being pre-Reconstruction, must not have been governed by the same behind-the-scenes forces, such as the post-Civil War industrial fortunes, that governed 1876-77.

But let's look at the bigger picture. In its first 100 years, the US had not two, but three elections that weren't resolved via the Article II,Section I straight electoral vote that's taught in civics class. These were `1824, 1860, and 1876. The proximate cause of the Civil War was the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, which the Confederate states didn't recognize. Thus each of those elections was resolved in a different way, which we might call Plans B, C, and D.

But then it took another 123 years, up to the election of 2000 and Bush v Gore, for a presidential election to be resolved in a way other than straight Article II, Section 1. The country weathered assassinations, scandals, depressions, and two world wars without the need to deviate from the civics class procedure, which had been a fairly regular thing by 1876. Why is this? The issue of slavery had been resolved ten years earlier via the Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederate surrender, and the Fourteenth Amendment, but apparently there was unfinished business.

And when the unfinished business was resolved, there was effective political stability for more than 100 years. Nothing perfect, mind you, but in the Ferdinand Lundberg paradigm, a plutocracy based in post-Civil War fortunes achieved a concursus bonorum that did impose order, especially over the immigrant population of the late 19th century. In fact, the consensus was also able to accommodate the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. To the Progressives, the Rockefellers were major villains, but they prospered throughout.

Lundberg, though, is anything but a systematic thinker. Exactly how this was done is still something of a mystery, and it's hard not to think the plutocracy was assisted by a highly capable and well-paid managerial class. Look at Henry Clay Folger, who, while president of Rockefeller's Standard Oil, was nevertheless just hired help in Lundberg's paradigm, but he became a major collector of Shakespeare manuscripts who endowed the Folger Shakespeare Library.

But the election of 2000 looks like it may have been a signal that the 1877 settlement that appears to have initiated the period of plutocratic stability that Lundberg discusses is reaching the end of its useful life, and however the 2020 election is resolved, many commentators have said that whichever candidate wins whatever process resolves the current impasse, half the country will come away believing the winner was not legitimate.

But after all, this will just be a continuation of the situation we saw in 2016, where a Deep State, acting on behalf of what Ferdinand Lundberg would insist was the post-Civil War consensus, refused to accept Trump's election, which itself was anomalous, since he won an electoral majority but lost the popular vote.

This suggests a realignment has been taking place, but it's nothing new. The Civil Rights movement, which began in the late 1940s and achieved great success in the 1950s, revived the Reconstruction agenda. In the 1970s, the South switched sides from Democrat to Republican and thus effectively accepted Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, barely exists now. That issue was finally settled.

What else is happening?