Narrow your use of the past to find a good guide to political turmoil in 2016. I point you to a period of 25 months–from spring 1854 to summer 1856. That’s the interval between the passage of an explosively controversial law (the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and the birth of a political party that grows so quickly it nominates a presidential candidate two years later (John Fremont in the 1856 presidential election).

All it took was 25 months to go from nothing to something, from zero to a substantial and significant presence and impact.

I’ve maintained that we’re watching the explosion and implosion of that same Republican Party first conceived in 1856. Like a star dying and another being born, the blast will shatter the existing entity into a million fragments. Some of those fragments will re-form into a new and different thing composed of pieces from the previous whole.

For those skeptical of my suggestion–and I fully respect the presence of differing views on this–I offer this question for consideration: do things in 2016 change more slowly than they did in 1854-1856?

The implications of saying that the Republican Party will continue as it has is akin to saying that change is more stable now than it was then.

I tend to doubt it.

Last thing–the image above is of a meeting by the first self-proclaimed Republicans.