This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 12, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown. The past isn't a perfect guide to the future,

but what can we take from the wild elections and political party crack-ups of the past.

Anthony Comegna is assistant editor for intellectual history at Libertarianism.org.

He spent years studying the politics of the 19th century, that history offers lessons for the weird election

year we now face.

We spoke Wednesday.

We have witnessed a lot of parallels drawn between this election and as a historian what do you viewing

this election think of in the past that says oh well this election is actually

really like this other election.

Yeah, we always hear 2016, it's going to be like 1896, or it's going to be, how geez, 1852, 1848.

I tend to think, I've heard several others to,

1912, I think.

I tend to think that it strikes me like all of our craziest elections rolled into one,

which speaks to the novelty of new events.

That nothing that happens in the present or the future is going to be exactly like

what happened in the past, where we're dealing with the new context.

Now it does strike me though that institutionally we're dealing with similar mechanics

that we've seen before.

Now while that won't tell us exactly what's going to happen, it will certainly give us an

idea of what we're looking at and where we might be

headed if X, Y and Z factors hold.

So it strikes me a lot that we're working with the potential crumbling of the party system as it stands.

...