You'd be entirely within your rights to complain I pivot too frequently off Andrew Sullivan to get my posts going - I guess his style just sparks my thoughts more than anyone else. Go figure, as our American cousins would say. Anyway, his most recent critique of "The Great Unravelling" is pretty solid stuff, and reminds us all that history doesn't do convenient narratives so much as it does grinding, repetitive nastiness. Here's the bit that gets me:
...maybe American amnesia will take hold again – and the Jacksonian impulse will once again trump every rational attempt at a foreign policy that isn’t always doomed to repeat the errors of the past. From the way things are going, it’s America’s own history of Jacksonian violence against outsiders that will prevail. We believe we are immune from history – that it can be erased, that what matters is just the latest news cycle and the political spin that can be applied to it. But history will have – and is having – the last word.
Andrew Jackson doesn't get talked about enough nowadays, which is why Sullivan's mentioning of him surprised me a bit when talking about contemporary foreign policy. But it was the nudge that gets the needle into the right groove, since the more I think about it, the more important Jacksonian America becomes when understanding the paradox of America in the world today.
I've been reading James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom recently, and to be honest I hadn't really appreciated what the Democratic Party actually meant in Jackson's day. Defined very broadly, I would now say that it represented the interests of those people who were not doing very well out of the arrival of High Capitalism in America: the farmers, the new factory labourers, a large number of the slave owners, and the generally down-at-heel. Not a particularly stable coalition of course, as the later decades would prove, but for Jackson's populism it certainly served its purpose of ushering in the second great era of American democracy: when the Jeffersonian republicanism of the hardy independent farmer gave way to the new reality of a land with the class structure of a capitalist country and the need to serve its underclass.
There were plenty in the country at the time who decried Jackson as nothing more than a rabble-rouser, "King Mob", and who believed that his populism was directly in opposition to republican values. What is certainly true is that after General Jackson became president, America was a considerably more aggressive nation than it had been. Jefferson had bought the American expansion with the Louisiana Purchase and not a drop of blood spilt; but for Jackson expansion meant the Trail of Tears. Under his disciple Polk it meant Manifest Destiny, it meant the Mexican War, it meant the threat with war against Britain over Oregon. Is populism to blame for this particular mindset? Possibly. The impulse to find a foreign enemy and denounce it and believe America was strong enough to defeat it has long been a motivating factor in American democracy, despite Washington's reprimand that America should not "go in search of monsters to slay". Jacksonian democracy shows a betrayal of that creed barely before the country was out of its cradle.
America was founded by men with a keen sense of history, possibly the greatest of any group of learned men in the Western world in their day. The dreadful irony is that their founding of a country with a constitution designed to protect from the excesses history had taught them about led to a country that thought, at times, it had escaped history. The American story is a powerful one, but we must always remember that stories were, in the first instance, told to get us to go to sleep. The American public today is not so different than Jackson's. There may be no Indian frontier to point to offering riches for the common man, but there is a darkness at the edge of the American sphere into which its soldiers can march, as they did into Mexico and Cuba and Normandy, to confront the evil of the old world and demonstrate that America would not only exist outside it but trump it every time the two came into contact.
I am almost impressed by the speed of Jacksonian amnesia as it works its magic on a war-weary American public. ISIS, like the Mexicans of Polk's day before them, have shown clear provocation to America which can't be ignored. If the founding principles of America are anti-imperialistic, are isolationist, are republican and resist a strong military establishment, too bad. They never lasted that long anyway. Democracy at its heart means populism, and populism means Fox News and the allure of the military band and the forbidden thrill of watching jihadists incinerated by drones on the nightly news. The merry ghost of Andrew Jackson leads America behind him, piping his seductive tunes of endless struggle with the surrounding dark.
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