xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

It appears that the (at the time) upcoming 2012 election has put Randall into a political state of mind, as this is the second comic in a few weeks that has dealt with political history (1122: Electoral Precedent). As with that comic, this comic goes through the entire history of the U.S. Federal Government. Also notably, Randall makes a number of observations that are akin to the type of observations Randall denounces in 1122 (e.g. for 1928, Randall notes that no Republican has since won the presidency without a Nixon or a Bush on the ticket). Just around the election he posted two more comics related to this: 1130: Poll Watching and 1131: Math.

U.S. Federal Government

In the U.S. Federal Government, one of the checks and balances is a bicameral United States Congress, which consists of two "houses": the Senate, its "upper" house; and the House of Representatives ("the House"), its "lower house". The Senate consists of 2 senators elected from each state (thus 100 total), while the House consists of 435 voting representatives (a number decided upon in 1911 by law) whose apportionment is split between the states proportional to their population; although each state gets at least one (the House also has non-voting representatives from non-state territories like Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia). Every ten years, the House is reapportioned based on the latest census. The most populous state as of 2012 is California which has 53 seats in the House. Senators serve 6-year terms with elections held every 2 years for one-third of the seats. Members of the House (called Representatives or Congressmen/women) serve 2-year terms with all of the seats contested every 2 years.

In order for a bill to become a law, it must be passed by both the House and the Senate. In a way, this theoretically ensures that the bill is supported both by the majority of states (the Senate), and the majority of the population (the House). The President may then sign the bill into law, he may "veto" the bill, or he may do nothing, in which case it becomes a law if and only if Congress is in session after a waiting period of 10 days (not including Sundays).

Political ideologies

In politics, there is a scale that represents the political beliefs of a politician. The scale goes from "left" to "right" of "center" — which generally describes a balancing point of beliefs (sometimes called "left-wing" or "right-wing").

The "left" is a general belief in social justice, and is sometimes associated with socialism. Modern left-wingers generally prioritize equality, and support policies like welfare and government-subsidized healthcare. This trends toward having a larger federal government. In the U.S., "liberal" is a term often used to denote left-leaning tendencies.

The "right" generally believe in personal responsibility and individual liberty, which is often termed conservative. This trends towards having less regulation and thereby a smaller federal government. The goal is to keep the nation stable, and reducing the interference by the government with a person's wealth. This ostensibly means lower taxes, because the government does not provide as much.

Politicians typically align themselves into groups of similar beliefs and positions called "parties". In the U.S., there have generally been two dominant parties, although there have been times where three or more parties have shared roughly equal influence and support. In today's politics (which is apparently known as (the second part of) the fifth era of political parties, or Fifth Party System, as noted on the outside edges of the comic) of the two current primary U.S. political parties, the Democrats are the left-leaning party, and the Republicans are the right-leaning party. The dominant parties are generally considered "moderate" in their left- or right-wing leanings, as either party appears to requires the support of a majority (or a few percent under) of voters to win. However, this is complicated by a process called gerrymandering where election boundaries are redrawn to allow a political advantage to the party currently in power. Thus a popular majority state wide or any ratio of votes to representatives will not necessarily be reflected in delegates awarded, an example being the Republicans' REDMAP 2012 report ([1]). Smaller parties often run candidates with more extreme views, but such candidates rarely win, due to a more limited number of possible supporters ensuring that even a relatively large minority would have zero chance of representation. (see Duverger's law).

The comic

The comic effectively consists of three separate charts: The left- and right-hand charts are the main charts; they represent the Senate and House respectively, and purport to show the left- and right-wing leanings of each legislature through U.S. history. There is a legend on the right that sets out fairly clearly how the charts work, but basically Randall has split each wing into three levels including the very moderate or "Center" right or left, and the more extreme or "Far" right or left, as well as the average left and right without prefix. A dotted yellow line represents the balance of power in each legislature, and white lines represent the leanings of certain notable people including presidents.

Some presidents are not indicated, because they were never senators or congressmen (most of these were state Governors, such as Clinton, Bush and 2012 candidate Mitt Romney). As may be noted from the chart, Barack Obama is considered "left" while Paul Ryan is considered "far right". It's also notable that the "center right" ideology appears to be completely eradicated from the House and is waning in the Senate (although a similar trend is shown around 1900 with the centrists making a comeback thereafter).

On either side of these charts, there are descriptions or explanations for expansions and contractions of each ideological group.

The center chart appears to primarily act as a timeline. Each president is listed with their leanings indicated by a left or right arrow. Wars are shaded in grey. Other notable events are also indicated. On either side of the center chart (although somewhat mixed in with the aforementioned Senate/House explanations), there are also references to the primary parties of each era showing how they evolved (left-leaning parties on the left, and right-leaning parties on the right).

Finally, there's a little extra commentary on the right side, below the legend.

The title text

The title text refers to two political parties in American history: the Federalists and the Jacksonians.

Note that this means the two parties are not strictly contemporaries. There are features of both the modern Republican and Democratic parties in each, so depending on the topic presented, it may take a long time to figure out that they are not these modern parties until the topic of discussion changes. They do, however, make a nice dichotomy.

The Federalists are one of the oldest political parties in American History. Federalists were seen as conservative in their time, and similarly to modern Republicans much of their support came from bankers and businessmen and they were committed to a fiscally sound and government, but on the flip side they favored a strong central government, regulation of industry, a national banking system, and were protectionistic.

The Jacksonian party is one of the four branches of the Democratic Party that developed during the political chaos after the Federalist party died out in the War of 1812. The Jacksonians were considered liberal for their time, they believed in one man, one vote, regardless of standing, and their mascot was a donkey and they're the ancestors of the modern Democratic Party, but on the flip side they did not want a strong national government and believed that the government should have limited impact in the regulation of industry, going so far as to end the bank of the United States, and were fiercely expansionistic.

Network news channels regularly feature talking heads, supposed 'experts' who offer their opinion on the topical political stories. Where these talking heads are strongly aligned with a particular party, and are unconcerned with anything other than winning, they could be described as a partisan hacks.