David McElroy

Barack Obama acts as though he believes he’s auditioning for a role as Franklin Roosevelt during the 1936 campaign. Given the high degree of economic ignorance in the country today, it’s not surprising that people don’t know to be scared of repeating this ugly history.

Think about this scenario. A Democratic president is finishing his first term. He inherited a serious economic downturn that he blames on his Republican predecessor. In his first four years, he’s gotten sweeping social legislation passed that will radically affect the lives of Americans and major sectors of the economy. This legislation extended federal power in unprecedented ways. Republicans vowed that they shared the same goals, but didn’t want to go as far and wanted to roll back some of the programs. The economy isn’t turning around fast enough, so the president wants to raise taxes on “the rich” to pay for his programs to create jobs, which he claims are ending the economic downturn.

So which did I just describe? FDR in ’36? Or Obama in ’12? The answer, of course, is that it’s both. The parallels between the 1936 election and the 2012 election are a bit scary if you think about them.

Listen to a Roosevelt campaign speech from the days leading up to the November 1936 election. This link will play audio of a speech in Massachusetts in late October 1936. (It’s the link on the left side of the page.) Roosevelt talked of “fairness” in taxation, in much the same ways that Obama does today. FDR engaged in the same kind of class warfare to win re-election that Obama is trying to play today.

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If you have a couple of iPads lying around and you want to make a very cool and geeky costume for tonight, I have just the right idea for you. Get started now. You still have time. (Note that each has to be an iPad 2 since the first generation didn’t have a video camera.)

Few people like to take responsibility when their lives go off the expected path and end up in a ditch. So what do we do? Instead of finding the real source of problems, we have a strong tendency to find other people to blame.

The ancient Hebrews had a practice that we get our modern word “scapegoat” from. (The word was actually a mistranslation from the Hebrew, but that’s another story.) To oversimplify it a bit, basically the Hebrews would keep a record of their sins all year and then they would “transfer” that sin to the goat — before driving it out into the desert wilderness to die alone. In this way, the people were considered to be clean from their sins.

The ancient Greeks had a practice that was a bit the same, but was closer in spirit to what we do today. When there was a disaster of some sort — famine, invasion or plague, for instance — the Greeks would choose a pharmakos, who was a slave, a cripple or a criminal who was cast out of the community as a sacrifice to quiet the gods. (There’s scholarly debate as to whether they were actually killed or simply expelled from the community.)

Throughout history, humans have chosen people to blame. When bad things happened in some communities — such as a crop failure or a baby dying — unpopular women were sometimes accused of being witches and were burned as punishment. In other cases, entire groups of people were blamed. For much of history, Jews in Europe were blamed for a variety of problems. For instance, because Jews as a group did well financially, people who didn’t do as well blamed them for their problems, ascribing all sorts of negative character traits to the more-successful Jews.

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