Will the Election of 2022 Be Another Election of 1874?

Many folks on the left have been shocked by how the Republican Party has essentially endorsed the destruction of democracy in this country but will still likely come out on top in this election. Because we so often frame the history of democracy’s destruction through examples in other countries, I think a comparison to our own history should reveal something crucial to us.

Reconstruction’s violent end brought 80 years of brutal white supremacist authoritarianism in the American South, destroying the first attempt at a multi-racial democracy. Its destruction did not come all at once, but one midterm election helped catalyze it.

Democrats took over multiple states and the House of Representatives after the 1874 election. They did so despite being the party of the Confederacy and putting politicians who had fought for it back into public office. They did so after the Colfax Massacre of 1873, when a white supremacist militia invaded the town of Colfax, Louisiana, and took it by force, murdering over one hundred of its Black inhabitants.

There is thus precedent for what is coming on Tuesday when politicians who supported overturning the results of the last election are set to win office around the country. Those who either participated, cheered on, or covered for the January 6 insurrectionsts are about to be rewarded, rather than punished. Right now the best we can do is to get out the vote and limit the damage and keep the modern “redeemers” from getting a stranglehold on power. Even if they don’t win majorities they will still be dangerous. In my darker moments I am starting to think it’s a matter of when, not if.

The election of 1874 came after the Panic of 1873 brought the country’s economy into a depression. (The scandals surrounding Grant’s administration did not help, either.) In such a political climate it’s very difficult for the incumbent party to win. We are not faced with such an economic depression, but inflation and rising prices combined with the residual effects of the pandemic will make it easy for a lot of “swing voters” to pull the lever for the opposition party on those grounds.

The election of 1874 was hardly free and fair, either. White militias used violence to attack and intimidate Black voters. When I hear about armed militia members “standing guard” over ballot drop boxes in Arizona I do not think of Germany in 1933, I think of Alabama in 1874.

Reconstruction ended in large part because most white people, even in the North after the Civil War, did not place a high priority on the freedom of Black people. They were ultimately expendable. Considering that most white people voted for Trump the last two presidential elections, I don’t think that dynamic has changed much. And so we find ourselves, 148 years later, on a knife edge once again., with an unthinkable chasm before us.