If you want to look ahead, you should start by looking back.
Let's look all the way back to a richly deserved nadir
of the Democratic Party's fortunes:
the
Republican house hegemony
consolidated
in the post-civil war
"rump nation" election of 1866 --
the election that produced
the 40th house of representatives.
In it, Republicans of all stripes
outnumbered Democrats ditto 175 to 49.
Now that was
one hell of a nice house,
stripped down, souped up,
ravin' and rarin' and ready to fly.
Does the name Thaddeus Stevens ring a bell?
Well,
from early 1867
through three more cycles
and
8 very full years
of free-form romping,
this multi-faceted Republicanism
showed a
America
some of its highest and lowest moments in
congressional history.
A taste of the high side :
the gunpoint occupation of all Dixie,
the local empowerment of the Southern freedmen.
And on the low side:
No distribution of slavers' plantation land,
and way too many
big-time Yankee corporate shenanigans.
Think
railroad giveaways.
Our story starts to get interesting
with the biggest corporate shenanigan of all,
the vicious, huge, and out-of-nowhere
crash of 1873.
The first modern or
Orthrian period
really gets underway
with the next electoral cycle after the crash.
The people, knowing when they feel gratuitous pain,
tossed out the Republicans in droves,
including from the house.
Jes'-folks up north
"soured on Gilded Age business as usual,"
figuring that the congressional Republicans
and their corporate friends
were precisely what had produced the prior year's
depression.
So we got
a Democratic house
for the 44th congress:
- Democratic Party 182 seats ( +94 )
- Republican Party 103 seats ( -96)
A nice object lesson
in
what a mighty swing
a real sharp and nasty
industrial depression can bring.
We'll see this topsy-turvy game
several more times along the way.
But surprise, the donkey proved no redeemer
for northern jobsters
or
hocked northern yeoman farmsteads.
In fact, with
the north's industrial economy
continuing down cripple-stagger lane
for years afterwards --
even after
the folks rose up
and threw out the elephant men --
the northern electorate slowly
but inevitably
discovered Orthrian reality.
That good old donkey
Tweedledee
warn't no damn better
than elephant Tweedledum --
except on race, of course, where the Democrats
were rock-solid defenders of lynching and Jim Crow.
So a step-by-step,
cycle-by-cycle retrogression set in
up north,
though
down in Dixie
the noose-and-sheet party was able to defend its gains.
One consequence of the Republican debacle:
Dixie was now considered "redeemable", meaning it was given back,
step by step,
to its "rightful" Democratic white owners.
But the net of these these two contrary regional trends
nationally was that
the Orthrian do-nothing sellout
lost the donkey votes and seats
faster
than nightriding
could add 'em down south.
The sad donkey declension:
from 182 dem seats
in '74,
to 157 seats
in '76,
to 141 seats
and a whiskery margin of nine
in '78.
For any pair of eyes willing to see
Orthrus was now in the saddle.
The system -- outside the south, at least --
had two heads,
but only one controlling mind and soul:
the mind that watched the stock ticker and
owned a lot of farm mortgages.
So the donkey by sheer whithering-away of hope
became again, in accordance with its deepest nature,
the lesser head of the dog.
They
lost the last few seats necessary
to give back house control
where it rightly belonged
in the election of 1880
with a further drop of 13 seats.
But lo, there was lightning flashing
on the horizon:
next installment, Populism, Coxey, Bryan and the origins
of true Bidness Republican hegemony.