Skip to main content

Those Rightward Shoves

Warren G Harding-Harris & Ewing.jpg

A complete list of the Rightward Shoves in US political presidential history, according to the cyclical theory I described recently.

John Adams elected 1796. One term.

28 years later....

John Quincy Adams, elected (by the House of Representatives) 1824. One term.

32 years later....

James Buchanan elected 1856. One term. Union dissolved on his watch.

Then history does a bit of a stutter step. A civil war and its aftermath messes up the cycles a bit. Grover Cleveland is elected for the first time in 1884, 28 years after Buchanan. On schedule if we consider that the shove. He is defeated in 1888 (due to electoral college arithmetic) and triumphantly re-elected for a non-consecutive term in 1892. The subsequent cycles work out properly if we count the second Cleveland victory as the shove.

So count both 1884 and 1892 as necessary.

28 years later after the latter....

Warren G. Harding elected 1920. Dies in office. Portrayed above, he was the first of three Republicans.

32 years later....

Dwight D. Eisenhower elected 1952. First of two full terms.

28 years later....

Ronald Reagan elected 1980. First of two full terms.

36 years later....

Donald Trump elected 2016.





Comments

  1. In what sense were the Adamses on the right? I know little about them, other than that they were the only Presidents among the first six who were not Southern slave holders.

    Same question as to Buchanan: All I know about him is that, like his predecessor Franklin Pierce, he was a Northerner but sympathetic to slavery. So how did he move rightward?

    ReplyDelete
  2. At the time of the first Adams' election, France was the center or revolutionary activity in the world. Adams' foreign policy was Anglophilic, and to that extent revolution-containing. Jefferson of course would change this, and under Madison we'd essentially become military allies of the French in the final stages of the Napoleonic War, getting our capital city burnt in the process.

    By the second Adams' day, the breakdown of left/right by French-English sympathies is obsolete. But I think it fair to say that his supporters considered him a link back to the good ol' days, a barrier against dangerous Jacksonian trends such as suffrage for all white men regardless of wealth or its absence.

    Buchanan was inaugurated at almost the same moment that the Supreme Court announced its Dred Scott decision, for which he was an enthusiast. IIRC, he made a statement during his inaugural address that indicated he knew how the forthcoming decision would go -- he was 'in on' the rightward shove the court was about to administer.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So let us try to generalize a bit. A leftward move has generally involving widening the circle of rights-bearing beings. More specifically, it has involved expansion the circle of suffrage-exercising beings (almost definitionally a smaller included circle). In foreign policy, this means allying one's country with other countries, or even with movements in other countries, that are seeking to do the same.

    The first Adams fits the rightward tag because of his foreign policy. The second Adams because he and his Whig party were comfortable with property qualifications for the franchise. The Dred Scott decision, and by extension Buchanan, because of its even then shocking pronouncement that even free blacks have no rights that any white man need respect -- a blunt narrowing of the wider of the two circles.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Copyeditor! "A leftward move has generally INVOLVED a widening of the circle of rights-bearing beings.... expansion OF the circle of suffrage-exercising beings...."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak