Tuesday, January 19, 2016

"Andrew Jackson is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore."

(Minor edits for typos.)
Walter Russel Mead on Jacksonianism in today's politics: Andrew Jackson, Revenant - The American Interest.

It's no surprise that Obama hates Jacksonians; this is the clearest explanation of that. Maybe it took the guy who first wrote about Jacksonianism* to state it so clearly.

The hate and the disdain don’t spring from anything as trivial as pique. Historically, Jacksonian America has been the enemy of many of what President Obama, rightly, sees as some of America’s most important advances. Jacksonian sentiment embraces a concept of the United States as a folk community and, over time, that folk community was generally construed as whites only. Lynch law and Jim Crow were manifestations of Jacksonian communalism, and there are few examples of race, religious or ethnic prejudice in which Jacksonian America hasn’t indulged. Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress.

Just as bad, in the view of the President and his allies, Jacksonians don’t have much respect for the educated and the credentialed. Like William F. Buckley, they would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the phonebook than by the Harvard faculty. They loathe the interfering busybodies of the progressive state, believe that government (except for the police and the military) is a necessary evil, think most ‘experts’ and university professors are no smarter or wiser than other people. and feel only contempt for the gender theorists and the social justice warriors of the contemporary classroom.

Virtually everything about progressive politics today is about liquidating the Jacksonian influence in American life. From immigration policy, touted as ending the era when American whites were the population of the United States, to gun policy and to regulatory policy, President Obama and his coalition aim to crush what Jacksonians love, empower what they fear, and exalt what they hate.



*And the other schools of American political philosophy, Jeffersonianism, Hamiltonianism, and Wilsonians, in Special Providence.

1 comment:

Old NFO said...

Yep hammer meet nail... And he's tried his damnest for 7 years...