Although Andrew Jackson defended his own authority with resolute determination, he did not manifest a general respect for the authority of the law when it got in the way of the policies he chose to pursue. This character trait, already apparent in his military career, continued to manifest itself during his years in the White House. Jackson's removal of the federal deposits from the Bank of the United States proved but one of a number of presidential actions illustrating his impatience with legal restraints. His reactions to the Supreme Court's decision on Cherokee rights, to abolitionist use of the mails, and to the epidemic of public violence that raged during his presidency all contribute to the pattern. Old Hickory's admirers, in his own time and since, have extolled his willpower and leadership. Yet, although he set an example of an activist presidency, Jackson's administration was also an unusually divisive one. He remains the only president to have been formally censured by the Senate. No wonder the opposition party took up the name that traditionally stood for resistance to abuses of executive authority: "Whigs."Jackson's personal attitude toward the law bore a decided congruence to the broader relationship of his [Democratic] party to the American legal tradition. . . Democrats could close their eyes to the problems of pervasive lawlessness and violence that plagued American society in their time. In the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, violence in the Jacksonian period expressed "the pathology of a nation that defied control, governed by an ineffective leadership, impatient with authority, bedeviled by the internal heterogeneity, and above all cursed by an ancient and gloomy wrong": slavery.Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 to 1848, 2009, p. 411.
If you want to understand the roots of contemporary American divisiveness, read Howe's book. It's the story of how an ethos of loutishness came to replace a basic American decency that was supported by an ethos of republican civic virtue and reverence for the law. It's the story, in other words, of how the America that Andrew Jackson represented came to displace the America that John Quincy Adams represented.
Two primal archetypes that shape the American character emerge during these decades in the political sphere. On the one side, the Progressive, future-oriented, sane, decent Whigs (and later Republicans) represented by figures like Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and the young Abraham Lincoln. None were morally pure or flawlessly consistent, but they were all in varying degrees anti slavery, anti-Indian removal, anti Mexican War, anti-nativist. They were more open to women’s suffrage. They were, though, fundamentally decent human beings who were at the same time pragmatists who wanted to preserve the union in the face of the fundamentally indecent, if not delusionally insane, mentality that was organizing the politics of the South. This is the archetype of the educated Yankee elite—the Transcendentalists, the Northern progressive evangelical Christians, first-wave feminists, and abolitionists.
It continues to be the archetype that governs the thinking of most decent, educated, coastal, Americans, and those who live in the blue counties on the election maps. It is universalist and rules- and process-oriented. It believes in "improvement", that individuals and societies can be better than they are. John Quincy Adams is the exemplar here. He had wildly ambitious plans for 'improving' American society that were about a hundred years ahead of his time.
On the other side, were the localist, anti-economic development, anti-education, pro slavery, ruthlessly anti-Indian, anti-Mexican, pro-war, white supremacists for whom Andrew Jackson is the exemplar. Jackson pushed Adams out of office in the 1828 election, and Jacksonian loutishness came after that to govern the politics of the Democratic Party—both North and South. This is the mentality shaped the politics of Calhoun, Polk, Tawney, van Buren (and later Tammany Hall), Tyler, and later Andrew Johnson, and just about everybody who thought of himself as pro-slavery in the South or a man of the people in the North. It continues to be the archetype that largely shapes the thinking in the South, the Mountain West, Scots-Irish Appalachia, and some urban, white-ethnic areas in the North. These are all bastions of the tribalist Jacksonian mindset.
Because this mentality is so deeply racialist and/or tribalist, it means that decency is something that is only owed to other tribal members. If you're not with us, you're the Other, the enemy, and if you're the enemy, we owe you nothing, and we couldn't care less if you live or die, and if you get in our way, we'd prefer you dead. It is static, change resistant, and caste-oriented, and so it resists anything that might be de-stabilizing--like educational, social, and economic programs that might "improve" the lives of those in the lower caste, especially if they're not white. Its resistance to the idea of progress or improvement is premodern and, imo, largely derives from a deep Calvinist suspicion in the utter depravity of unregenerate humans who cannot by definition be improved. It has little or no interest in 'justice' as a transcendent, norms-challenging ideal. It cares only about preserving traditionalist norms, and will push back viciously against anyone who seeks to subvert those norms, no matter how unjust, especaily regarding the Other. For the Jacksonian, someone like Atticus Finch is not a hero. He's a villain because he is a traitor to his tribe.
Fox News, the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, et al., are all very much in that Jacksonian stream. They are all moral louts, but they don't see themselves that way. They think of themselves as noble and generous to friends and family, as people who try to live right in their personal lives, and if they are violently antagonistic to non-tribal members, well that's a toughness that necessary for survival in a cruel world. But this morality, while it might be justified as necessary for survival on the frontier, no longer makes sense.
As individuals most of these people are not louts, and they are decent in their day-to-day behavior. But they align themselves with an American tradition that is deeply, loutishly dysfunctional insofar as it shapes a politics for the 21st Century. And when push comes to shove, people who find themselves more comfortable in this stream than in the liberal one, will vote for the Jacksonian lout rather than the decent Whig. And so the basic archetype plays out--Jackson wins again over Adams over and over again. This isn't about policy or about differences in political philosophy; it's about tribal loyalties and alignments.
So if you read Howe's book you’ll see why this tribal mentality governing GOP politics today hasn’t changed fundamentally from the mentality of its ancestors in the 1820s. It’s remarkable that such a primitive way of thinking could survive despite all the massive changes that have occurred in the last 200 years. But I think that the kind of disorienting change the country has undergone forces people who need outside cultural cues or authority figures to tell them what’s ok, and they tend to look to the ancestors to find an anchor, a place to steady themselves against the effects of ontological dizziness. It doesn’t matter that the ancestors were loutish white supremacists.
The difference between Liberals and Conservatives, imo, is not that as individuals the first are morally superior to the second, but that Liberals have adapted better to a dynamically changing reality as it is given to us in late modern capitalism. To adapt so easily is not without moral peril: They are, I would argue, too comfortable with the spiritual/cultural impoverishment that late capitalism has made normative. Too many Liberals have no sense of how impoverished their lives really are, and that they are in Kierkegaard's despair that does not know it's despair. Nevertheless, I believe that a move forward is more likely to come from this cosmopolitan, educated class. Already many sense the inadequacy of Liberal assumptions, and are groping their way out of them. This groping is, I believe, the only way forward, and it will have the most significant cultural impact because more likely to be honestly and thoughtfully achieved.
Conservatives, on the other hand, understand that something is missing, and they long for a rich cultural vitality they know cannot be found within a Liberal ethos. But the problem for conservatives lies in that they are looking for love in all the wrong places, and it tends to lead them into abusive relationships with nasty, violent types who present themselves as knowing more than they really do. These violent types are not interested in persuasion; they want to ram their values down your throat because they believe it's Us against Them, and it's eat or be eaten. It's white people vs. the Other--whether the Indians or Blacks or Mexicans, and now Muslims--and the traitorous white Liberals who side with these Others. This is why they are the "real" Americans and Liberals are not. Liberals are traitors, and yet they have the smug audacity to think they are morally superior?! How dare they!
Conservatives in this Jacksonian stream cannot tolerate the moral ambiguities that come with pluralism, and so they see themselves involved in a zero-sum culture war. This explains Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. Apparently it explains Bill Barr. For this reason conservatives pose a far greater danger to our ability to live together in peace. Peace for them is only possible when the Other and the Liberals who defend them are annihilated or subjugated. I know--the political correctness of the Left derives from an a similar inability to tolerate moral ambiguities. But we have much less to fear from overly sensitive snowflakes than we do from gun-toting right-wingers who think they are doing God's will in imposing theirs by any means necessary. The former might be annoying, but they are not joining militias.
Andrew Jackson's behavior, attitudes, and politics were truly despicable, even by the measures of his own time. Many of his Whiggish contemporaries were appalled by him, but he was for many Americans "Old Hickory", a great American who deserves to be on our twenty-dollar bill. And that Americans chose him over Adams in '28 was the beginning of the descent into mainstreaming American political loutishness. And while louts we shall have always with us, the more decent among us need to robustly push back against them and any claims they have to be the only real Americans. There's another tradition of decency that we can all draw upon that is equally and more desirably American.
Here's Howe on Frederick Douglass, another exemplar of this better American imagination of itself:
Douglass wished to see himself as a man who transcended racial differences, a "Representative Man" in the Emersonian sense of one who demonstrated the potentialities of human nature. He shared the Transcendentalists' celebration of a human nature common to all races and nationalities and, like them, hoped America would be the place where the common nature would achieve its fullest expression. As Emerson put it:In this continent, --asylum of all nations, --the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, all European tribes, --of the Africans, and of the Polynesians will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature.Douglass, like Emerson, put his faith in an American melting pot, out of which would spring a new humanity. (Howe, WHGW, p 655)
That's about as un-Jacksonian and un-Trumpian as you can get. It was a minority position in Emerson's and Douglass's day; it should be common sense now.