How this financial crisis and this election signify the end of an era

Financial Panic

How our current crisis is not 1929, it's 1873.  So I read this article yesterday:  


http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=477k3d8mh2wmtpc4b6h07p4hy9z83x18  

Which is an excellent summation of the point.  

And it clicked for me why I feel so much more comfortable with my understanding of the current financial problems.  And why it worries me so much.  Because when I was in college I focused a lot of attention on the Populist party, and the general concept of populism.  

Here's a decent summation of the history of the Populist Party:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States)  

Simplistic narrative of how the Populists originated from the Panic

The thing is that the party developed many of it's founding ideals as a result of the Panic of 1873 and resulting Depression.  And what caused the Panic and Depression was a contraction in the money supply and contraction of credit.  Which is really an explanation of what the worst case scenarios we have been hearing in response to the current financial crisis.  

Now I don't know if the recently passed bail out bill will stave things off.  I certainly hope so.  I do know that I trust Obama to take a closer look at this and come up with good working solutions to the recession far more than I trust McCain.  

One of the interesting side effects of the Panic of 1873 and resulting Depression was the effect it had on politics.  Not only did it lay the seeds of the Populist Party.  More immediately it spelled doom for the Republican Administration, ending Reconstruction, and resulting in the return of the Democratic Party to power. 

Which leads to this article, and my next point:

How this bail out signals the end of an era

Which basically points out how all of this, the Panic, the recession, the bail out, is all a testimony of how the political culture and speaking points of the country are finally moving away from the Reagan Revolution talking points.  And I think that is true, I think this election is marking the end a political era in this country.  Sometimes it take a major historic change to really change the fundamentals of politics.  

I am going to talk in real broad strokes here but here's my thinking:

The Panic of 1873 and resulting Depression, coupled with widespread government corruption, the influence of the Gilded Age Robber Barons and a public tiring of the Reconstruction led to a major change away from the Republican Party specifically and generally away from the influences of the Civil War.

The Great Depression of 1929-1939, led to an end of the Business comes first era of Republican politics and the advent of the New Deal Democrats, typified by a confluence of  organized labor, social liberalism and big government.

Watergate, Vietnam, Oil Crisis of 1973, Malaise and Iran Hostage Crisis all resulted in the shattering of the above era.  Reagan is the Icon of this era, when even a Democratic President stood for lowered government spending and regulation.  

And last you have the 2 wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the Financial Crisis providing the impetus away from the era of less government and back to people looking to government to resurrect the economy and also to some extent the culture and political discourse.  

The above is just very broad strokes, there's a lot in there.  But I think it is a decent framework to hang on for why we are seeing such a change in this election.  The influences of the digital age are really bearing fruit.  The Obama organization really shows how politics can and will change with the rapid technological advances.  And it is not insignificant that the likely symbol of this will be a man of mixed race, fulfilling 50 years of racial promise, of a country and culture finally moving beyond race as an issue.