With the Democratic National Convention just a month away, it felt like the right time to finally read Lawrence O’Donnell’s compelling book, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (2017).

They’re back in Chicago, after all (though, not for the first time since 1968). History doesn’t repeat—it rarely, if ever, rhymes—but, it sure can get weird. Here are three relevant anecdotes from the book that should help ground things going in.

The first, and my favourite, not least for its brevity, is not something that I can recall having heard before, but is certainly something we ought to adopt as one of those immutable laws of political physics: “The establishment is always the last to know it is wrong.”

The second is that, while the 1968 convention led to significant reform in the party’s nomination process, we forget that primaries are a both a relatively recent, and previously inconsistent, convention (no pun intended):

In 1968, fewer than a third of U.S. states held presidential primary elections. That's not because the primary system was new. It was in decline. Primaries began as the idea of the early twentieth-century political reformers. Wisconsin held the first primary election in 1905. By 1920, about half of the states were holding primaries. Before that, party bosses got together in the fabled smoke-filled rooms to select nominees based on considerations kept hidden from the electorate. Because the nominees weren't democratically selected, reformers asked, how could presidents be said to be democratically elected? Hence primaries. State delegates would still choose the nominee at conventions, but primary elections would guide, and sometimes bind, delegates in that choice.

The third is that, where the sharp exchanges between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal are now legend, what I hadn’t realized is that they’d set the template for televised punditry that endures today and, more amazingly, the reason that came to be in the first place:

Every angry political argument you've seen on television since [1968], every conservative trying to shout over every liberal and vice versa, owes its origin to the simple budgetary fact that ABC couldn't afford major-league convention coverage.

We appreciate WTF with Marc Maron as one of the original podcasts, but I am not sure we’ve properly acknowledged it’s service to history. Marc’s reposted both of his podcast chats with Bob Newhart, on the occasion of his passing. Thank you, Marc. Farewell, Mr. Newhart.