The Black Death caused the death of almost one third of Europe's population in the late middle ages. However, one of the results of this was the increasing valuation of labor. As a result, serfs had increasing pressure to escape from the farm and flee to either the cities or to leased lands where they could be properly reimbursed for their work. This led, eventually, to the end of serfdom, as it became simply impossible to prevent serfs from fleeing, and as escaped serfs became valuable enough to wealthy merchants and certain landholders that they were willing to fight for the emancipation of serfs Another outcome was that labor costs rose enough that labor saving devices became more attractive, an innovation which led eventually to the industrial revolution..

So, if we want to help our fellow man, our time would best be spent genetically engineering a plague to wipe out one third of mankind.

What? That doesn't make sense? Of course you are right. It was pure historical accident that the black death spurred the industrial revolution, had things been different, and had thousands of other circumstances also not existed at the time, the outcome could have been completely different. And given the cost in lives and suffering, even if it were guaranteed that a new plague would spur similar progress, there are better ways to do so without all the death and hardship.

However, as stupid as my argument here is, an equally foolish argument is making the rounds, and those making it are being called brilliant and principled. This is the argument being offered up by ardent opponents of McCain, whose desire to remain ideologically pure forces them to argue that Obama will do no harm during his four years, and that by electing a liberal they will drive the Republican party to the right.

However, as both of those arguments have been taken apart again and again, they have now found an alternate argument. Taking my black death argument as a model they argue from one of two historical positions. Either they argue that Carter's presidency, for all its foolishness, did little harm and ended up giving us eight years of Reagan. Or else they argue that Clinton was decried as a disaster, yet it gave us the Republican Revolution of 1994.

Now, let us point out the obvious before I begin. These arguments both are completely oblivious to all the harm done by the two presidencies they consider. Though they do not go so far as to claim that Carter and Clinton did not harm, they do fail to mention that the supposed benefits came at a cost. I have documented the harm Carter did over and over, but I have not done the same for Clinton. I have mentioned the role he played in making America appear weak in the eyes of the world, the way he revived the PLO from near defeat, and many have mentioned the way he both gutted the military and then deployed what was left in irrelevant peace keeping missions, but the harm does not end there. Both North Korea and Iran felt free under Clinton to pursue nuclear programs, while China felt free to both increase their military threat against Taiwan and to develop better nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Lybia and Iraq both pursued their weapons programs unmolested under Clinton and Syria continued and strengthened their hold over Lebanon. In short, Clinton allowed the world to degenerate while simultaneously weakening the forces we had available to deal with any problems that might arise. And if he caused less mischief on the domestic front than Carter did, it was only because of that revolution of 1994, because otherwise Clinton's policies would certainly have veered much more strongly to the left.

Yet those arguing for Obama make no mention of any of this. Their only thought is that Clinton gave us Newt and Carter gave us Reagan.

But will Obama give us a Republican backlash? Or will he drive what remains of the party to the left rather than the right? And in either case, will we be in a position to care?

As in the case of my black death analogy, hundreds of factors combined to give us the Reagan revolution of 1980 and the Republican revolution of 1994. And neither seems to be a good fit to the climate of today.

Despite the mythology of Reagan, the country was not firmly in the grip of "Rockefeller Republicans" until suddenly Reagan appeared. Reagan had done quite well in the 1976 primary. In fact there was a definite move tot he right dating back as far as Goldwater. Even had Nixon and Ford not broken the moderates' hold on the party, it is doubtful that they would have retained it throughout the 1980's. So, Carter or no Carter, we would likely have had a Reagan presidency some time in that decade.

We lack a similar trend today. While the rank and file of the party seem to be mostly conservative, the candidates by and large are centrists and moving slightly to the left. There are also tensions within the party itself which helps exacerbate this, as the social conservatives and economic conservatives happily sell out one another's beliefs to reinforce their own, which ends up with both sides losing as moderates exploit this tension and eliminate both social and economic conservative opposition. So unlike the general rightward drift of the late 1970's Republican party, we see a relatively static party, with the grassroots to the right of the officials, but having no success moving them to the right.

Likewise, it would be foolish to compare Obama to Carter.Certainly, Obama seems to share Carter's naivete in foreign affairs, his willingness to negotiate even when it makes no sense, and a similar disastrous approach to economics, but the circumstances of their presidencies will differ. Carter was a placeholder, elected because Ford had ties to Nixon. Any Democrat could have won.

Obama has different circumstances. While the press makes much of Bush's low approval ratings, they ignore the context. Congress has even lower approval ratings, suggesting government in general is viewed less than favorably. In addition, Bush is not only involved in a war, and constantly assailed by an unfriendly press corps, but he is also at the end of an eight year presidency, when numbers always drop. Considering the abysmal numbers congress has, it would be tempting to say that Bush's numbers are almost good, given the circumstances.

Still, whatever you make of Bush's numbers, he is hardly in the situation Ford was. There is no certainty that the Democrats will win. While the Democrats could have run a doorstop against Ford and won a respectable majority of electors, Obama is actually going to have to fight to win. That alone means this is a very different presidency.

But those differences are not enough, there is one more big factor, we lack a Reagan waiting in the wings. In 1976 there was already a Ronald Reagan. He lost the primary, but he was there. We do not have our next Reagan, as far as I can tell. We have some good men, Hunter, Thompson, Jindall, Tancredo, a few others, but not one of them has all the attributes that made Reagan who he was. And by 1976, Reagan was already showing the president he would become. We have no one who is doing the same today.

So, despite the willingness of many to believe in the Carter analogy to excuse their opposition to McCain, they are wishing for something unlikely to come. There is no placeholder president, no incipient move to the right, and most of all, there is no Reagan standing just off stage waiting to step into the spotlight.

So, for those who are willing to suffer four years of Obama to bring about the next Reagan, I think they will be disappointed. Likely they will get four years of suffering and at the end will be offered the next Chris Shays instead.

But, I am sure some say, what about 1994? Maybe we won't get a Reagan, but we can move the party right, and maybe get a surge of real conservatives in congress.

Before answering, I want to say what I always do, the time to put conservatives in congress is the during the primaries. Why does anyone think that letting Obama become president will make the primary voters behave more responsibly? They had a chance to put conservatives on the ticket this year and did nothing. Why would the victory of the lef tmake the party more likely to put forward strong conservative candidates? Isn't it more likely that, seeing the left win, the party and voters would both imagine the country is moving left and run left leaning candidates?

But, will come the reply, the left won with Clinton in 1992, yet we ran conservatives and won in 1994.

Except that the statement is wrong. In 1994, congress had been liberal for a long time, it had not suddenly become liberal. There had been a few brief spots of Republican control of one house or the other, but the whole thing had been largely left for as long as anyone could recall. Nor did the left win the presidency. Clinton was a Democrat, but eh won by running right, and farther right than most Democrats ever ran. His triumph, instead of a victory of the left, was a victory of the center-right in American politics. When the Republican Revolution came in1 994, it was fighting against a Democrat party which had realized it needed to run right to win, and was trying to unseat long time liberals who had held their seats for a very long time.

Our situation would be different today. In 2006 the Democrats took back their seats from Republicans after a period of Republican dominance. Now, they did so by running right, which minimized the harm done, but the fact remains that Democrats unseated Republicans. The one thing that will be very different is if Obama wins. Obama will not win b y running right, so if he wins, on top of the Democrats retaking the congress, it won't matter if those Democrats in 2006 ran right or not. The message the Republican party will receive is that the country is moving left, and they will follow suit. Seeing a dedicated liberal like Obama winning, after the 2006 losses, will make the party think that rather than a new Newt Gingrich they need a new Lincoln Chaffee.

But that is the problem of learning from history, history does not always highlight what is important. Sometimes we draw the wrong lesson. In this case, seeing a Democrat win followed by a Republican return to conservative principles, while missing all the other causes. By focusing on one single cause, rather than the complex set of events surrounding it, many draw conclusions which not only are wrong, but dangerous. Ideas such as the fact that voting in Obama will do no harm*.

It seems people are so enamored of that Santayana aphorism that they sometimes forget that the past is not always the best predictor of what will come. Sometimes the past really is the past, and the future is something completely different.

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* I keep hearing people argue that "we had bad Democrat presidents before and survived", forgetting that you only get to die once, so by definition we have always survived the ones in the past. If you want to see the stupidity of this, imagine a man who got lucky and had a bullet ricochet off his skull. Would you think him wise to say "I have been shot in the head before and it never killed me"? Then why do you accept the same style of reasoning about politics?

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POSTSCRIPT

My blog index is not completely up to date, but a lot of my essays on the potential harm Obama can do are included. So, rather than asking me "what do you think he's going to do to us", please check out my older essays under the heading "Obama".

Not that I mind questions, I simply think I have probably said it better in those essays than I can in the limited space of  the comment page.