For the better part of spring, I’ve been immersed in the troubling events of an election year — 1860, to be precise. The similarities between then and now are increasingly disconcerting.

James Buchanan epitomized the career politician, with a decade in each house of Congress, sojourns as U.S. minister to Russia and Great Britain, and four years as secretary of state. He had the politician’s ambition to please everyone, and it led him to regard the loudest constituencies as the most deserving.

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