Election: The other times Americans were fed up with politics as usual

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Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater greets supporters during a whistle-stop tour of Rock Island, Illinois, Oct. 3, 1964.

The other times Americans were fed up with politics as usual

As our editorial this week points out, the 2016 presidential election feels less about Republicans and Democrats, the traditional left versus the right, and more like a battle of insiders versus outsiders, or the establishment people who benefit from the status quo versus the ones disenfranchised by it. That’s what makes this contest so riveting.

But has a presidential race like the one we are experiencing happened before? Here are moments in American history when politics-as-usual was disrupted, and how they’re related to this year’s events.

1792

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Political parties are not mentioned in the Constitution, and in his farewell address to the nation in 1796, George Washington shows his contempt for them. He says, "However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." In 1792, the Federalist Party had been founded by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams to support a strong central government, which the Anti-Federalists soon came into being to oppose. What's extraordinary is that the oldest single issue that separated our original parties, the relative strength or weakness of the federal government, continues to be a major issue today.

1860

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In two conventions in 1860, the Democratic Party splits and offers two regional candidates for president. Republican Abraham Lincoln is elected (the party was started in 1854), and the Civil War begins the following year. The two parties that survived when the nation was reunited in 1865 are the two that dominate today.

1912

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Woodrow Wilson benefits greatly from a split in the Republican Party. Former President Theodore Roosevelt runs for president as a Progressive, or "Bull Moose," frustrated that his friend and successor, William Howard Taft, has not continued the antimonopoly and trustbusting of Roosevelt. Democrat Wilson wins with just 42 percent of the popular vote. In 2016, support of big business versus support of the working man is again at the heart of our political upheavals, and never more so than with Bernie Sanders and his anti-Wall Street cries.

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1932

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In the most important election of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt's landslide win over President Herbert Hoover overturns conservative economic policies and sets the stage for the New Deal initiatives that will begin to create the social safety net we know, and continue to debate, today. FDR also brings to the Democratic Party many black voters who had been loyal to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.

1948

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Southern whites frustrated by the increasingly anti-segregation policies of the Democratic Party, including the desegregation of the armed forces, and unwilling to back the party of Lincoln, get behind South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats, who win four states but do not keep Harry Truman from being re-elected. This is the beginning of the racial politics that in 1968 will lead to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace's American Independent Party presidential run, in which he carried five states, and the "Southern strategy" of racial division used by Richard Nixon's campaign the same year.

1968

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Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York is assassinated in June in after winning the Democratic primary in California. Twelve weeks later, 10,000 protesters disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but can't stop the establishment from nominating Vice President Hubert Humphrey over anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota, for the presidency. Republican Richard Nixon defeats Humphrey in the general election that year. By 1972, anti-war activists push the Democratic Party to left, successfully nominating George McGovern for president. McGovern runs against Nixon as an outsider on an anti-war platform and loses 49 states, devastating the influence of the liberal wing of the party.

1992

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Billionaire presidential candidate H. Ross Perot gets 18.9 percent of the vote in the general election, making him the most successful third-party candidate ever. Bill Clinton is elected president over incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush. In 1996, Perot runs again as the Reform Party candidate, but receives only 8 percent of the vote.