Robert E. Wright

If you thought things were crazy on the corporate scene over the last few years, you should check out what happened in 1970. It is the stuff of blockbuster books and movies. The context was a war in which peasants bearing AK-47s backing an authoritarian regime humiliated America. The main difference between then and now was that the peasants then didn’t have much in the way of facial hair and were communists instead of Islamists. The American military savaged the poor suckers with massive aerial bombing campaigns and devastating napalm raids. By the late 1960s, many Americans vigorously protested the war and the way it was being prosecuted.

Just about every US history textbook devotes a paragraph or two to “Coxey’s Army,” a group of unemployed men who descended upon Washington, DC in 1894 seeking to influence national economic policy. That a movement that called itself “The Commonwealth of Christ” ended up in the history books with such a militant label is an object lesson in elite political self-preservation. The government’s reaction to protest at the Capitol then bears some instructive similarities and differences to its reaction in 2021.