These Unprecedented Times
Stop looking for analogies. Start looking at the field.
In baseball, there’s a metaphorical “book” of plays that you should use to counter other plays. Most professions or games have something similar—normal plays to be executed with ordinary effort.
Politics can be the same. The blocking and tackling of constituent service for governing, of fundraising and door-knocking for campaigns, all of these are fundamental skills that need to be done adequately to well. They can be practiced and honed, and when done poorly you notice, but they can be pulled, ultimately, from a normal playbook.
Yet politics is also the art of the exception. When do you throw the rulebook away and when do you improvise? Every play in the book, after all, was originally an innovation, and even if the book is thicker now—maybe because the book is thicker now—innovations can still pan out.
Political commentary especially suffers from the possibility of conflating the normal and the exceptional. Confusing the two can lead to misapprehensions and missteps—that much is obvious. Yet for all that there’s a standard set of political references that commentators are drawn to.
We’ve seen 1968 invoked a lot this year, mostly poorly. The campus encampments and protests of Israel’s war in Gaza called the protests of 1968 to mind, but aside from both involving university students there were very few similarities. Not only did universities respond more … forcefully in 2024, but the stakes and the tactics were much different. To be blunt, nobody protesting or sympathizing with protesters was worried that they would be drafted into the war.
Similarly, you’ll hear a lot in the coming days about LBJ’s decision to stand down in 1968. Yet the parallels one can draw are not really good guides to what’s happening now. For one, LBJ withdrew during an active Democratic primary season; for another, the Republicans had not yet chosen their ticket yet; for still another, there was the Vietnam War, which exacerbated all feelings and gave the new Democratic presidential candidate a significant burden to carry (while also fueling another round of protests).
More erudite commentators will likely talk about the 1876 or even the 1920 soft campaigns of U.S. Grant and Woodrow Wilson, but these parallels are even more remote (before a certain period in U.S. history, the conditions become so dissimilar that you might as well draw on the Ming court or the Byzantines for your parallels).
Basically, we’re out of the normal playbook of commentary. All the analogies will break even more easily than normal because the United States hasn’t seen a contest like this, and anything that’s kind of like it is going to be different in fundamental ways. How fun! We get to see the fate of the world determined by a brand-new race with no rules.
In these unprecedented times, in other words, it’s probably of less use to look to history for guidance. And when you do look to history, you shouldn’t assume that because Y followed X the last time something like X happened, that means that Y will also lead to Z. Events are fluid and chance happens to everyone; it could be that the previous X→Y→Z chain was the fluke and in reality X→Y→Q is more likely. One reason that normal playbooks work is that they cover normal situations that recur all the time. This ain’t one of those.
Unprecedented times require us to look at the situation as it presents itself, not to the referents we draw upon from the history that’s familiar to us. We have now something that is much closer to a European-style contest, with 106 days until the election. Neither campaign is in great organizational shape and both are in flux. The Labor Day and after period will be a series of heightened contrasts—all the more because the likely Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, will be younger, female, and nonwhite than the now-most-superannuated candidate in the race, and I suspect her running mate will pose a similar contrast to their counterpart, JD Vance, even if not in the same demographic senses.
It’s a new ballgame. The times, they are unprecedented. Look to the present to see how the future will go.