A Few Thoughts On The Speaker Vote

Coverage of the vote for US Speaker of the House has been remarkably shallow. Breitbart observes, "No speaker race had lasted 15 rounds or more in 163 years, according to House records." Simple arithmetic puts the last time that happened in 1860, which Breitbart's own crack writers failed to acknolwedge. Hmm. What happened the next year? Any students know?

Following the 2020 election, some commentators compared the debate over the outcome to 1876, which resulted in the Compromise of 1877, whereby Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House on the understanding that he would remove federal troops from South Carolina. This effectively ended Reconstruction, which was one of a series of events that bookended the US Civil War. My own view for a while has been that the US is approaching a need to resolve issues nearly comparable to those that caused the 1861-65 Civil War, although I don't think armed conflict will be involved.

If we look at events that led up to the Civil War, even leaving out those before 1850 like the Missouri Compromise, we find an intriguing list, including the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Pottawatomie Massacre, the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown's Raid, culminating in Lincoln's election as president in 1860. I think we've been seeing an equivalent series of unsuccessful attempts to reach equivalent unsuccessful compromises over key issues, leading up to a final confrontation that forces a resolution.

What that resolution may eventually be isn't clear, and what the key issues are is just as unclear, although they probably arise from some of the same issues that led to the Civil War, which aren't necessarily just the status of African-American slaves. One outcome of the war was emancipation of the slaves, but another, possibly more consequential, was the integration of the southern agrarian economy into the northern industrial economy and the elevation of the northern industrialist class, grown rich from the war, into a de facto aristocracy.

The key issue extending forward from the Civil War and Reconstruction isn't actually racial. It's a problem Marx saw at his particular stage of industrialization, the problem of the Lumpenproletariat, a highly visible petty criminal underclass that was separate from, and did not share interests with, the working class. In Europe, this wasn't a racial issue except that it did embrace some semi-racial groups like gypsies. In the US, there's been a tendency to assume that the petty criminal underclass is exclsively made up of racial or semi-racial minorites, which has resulted in the need to characterize some people who aren't petty criminals as "white Hispanics", while some African-Americans who sympathize with the underclass accuse others who don't of "acting white".

The problem is that this isn't a racial issue, and this is at the root of the present developing crisis, which is the rapid expansion of the urban petty criminal underclass. Subcategories of the problem include the homeless population and the uncontrolled influx of ever more powerful drugs. Occasional observers have remarked that the alliance of the Democrat party with the current African-American political grievance establishment has hurt the African-American population far more than the Ku Klux Klan could ever have imagined, and resolving the problem of the petty criminal underclass will probably require a depature from current racial political alignments. The US Republican Party is currently somewhat better aligned to pursue a solution, as in fact it was in 1860.

Right now, there seems to be a consensus that the group of 20 or so insurgent Republicans forced some sort of minimal compromise on the Republican political establishment, and that Donald Trump played some role in bringing it about. Whether this will be reflected in a further rehabilitation of Trump as a political force after a remarkably bad two years since his 2020 defeat remains to be seen. Indeed, it also remains to be seen whether the resolution of Repubican conflicts in this election for Speaker is anything but yet another in a series of unworkable efforts to avoid an inevitable confrontation.