Subject: Re: More on the Arlington Cemetery incident
Which is big in this day and age, but not inconsistent with the idea that most of the electorate is pretty much locked in to one party or the other.

I have mentioned this historical event before, but it is so so so on point with this discussion I’ll bring it up once again.

Herbert Hoover was inaugurated in March, 1929. (Inauguration was later then.) In September of that same year the stock market crashed. Over the next weeks and months things got worse. Then worse. Then much worse. Those who watched what happened here in 2008 might have some idea of how bad things got, except in 1929 it was twice as worse .

Thousands of banks failed, and there was no FDIC. Hundreds of thousands of businesses failed, and there was no unemployment insurance. Millions lost their jobs, a there was no safety net. People really did sell pencils or apples on street corners, trying to scrape together enough to buy a meal for their family. Farms were foreclosed, houses were lost, suicide rates spiked sharply in 1930, then higher in 1931, and higher again in 1932.

And this went on month after month, grinding ever more finely, for a full 3 1/2 years, downward, always downward. OK, enough with the scene setting, except it’s not enough but will have to do.

And with all of that, in the 1932 election Herbert Hoover stood for re-election - and got 40% of the vote. FORTY PERCENT. Think about that.

Of course FDR won that election and went on to win several more, and triggered a wholesale realignment of the voting populace. And then *that* realignment went on to become the Great Democratic Party that (mostly) prevailed until the passage of the civil rights legislation in the 1960s - and within a decade the stranglehold was broken with the ascension of Nixon’s overtly racist “Southern Strategy.” FDR’s coalition of Midwest populism, southern racism, and northern and western liberals survived for decades until at last Republicans found the key to pry it open.

We seem to be in an in between state now, with both parties at roughly 45%, plus or minus, but once people are “locked in” it’s really hard to get a realignment. I would have thought a candidate and person as terrible as Trump might have done that, but I guess not.

I wonder how much worse he would have to be, and I hope we never find out.