As we take down the confederate flag, lets give Jackson his due as founder of the republican Party
Photo: Tennessee State Library and Archives, Record Group 82, Department of Conservation Photograph Collection. NOTE: Apparently Tennessee remembers Jackson but not his Black slaves!
Eight years ago a Clinton backer, complained that Obama was “usurping the historic Democratic Party, dating back to the age of Andrew Jackson, by rejecting its historic electoral core: white workers and rural dwellers in the Middle Atlantic and border states. … Out with the Democratic Party of Jefferson, Jackson, F.D.R., Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, and in with the bright, shiny party of Obama.”
He was right.
What this critic and the Republicans fail to understand was that the long era of Jacksonian politics in the US has already ended. There is no longer a common cause between poor white folks in the South and progressive causes in the country as a whole. The end of the era of Jackson, make Barack Obama a transformational president. President Obama, our 44th President is now one of the few Presidents who .. for better or worse .. symbolized a major change in the USA. My own list:
Washington, sic.
Jefferson, defined democracy
Jackson, religious fundamentalism, white populism, imperialism
Lincoln, a union as a continental power
T Roosevelt, America as a world power
FD Roosevelt, America as the world’s superpower
Johnson, Civil Rights
Reagan, return to Jackson
Obama, America as one power among many
The comparison with Reagan is telling. Reagan’s Republican Party, with tis southern strategy, represented what I hope is a last ditch effort to resurrect the party of Jackson.. a party based on demagoguery, religious fundamentalism, a belief in the innate superiority of white America, and America’s imperial destiny. Jackson built his career as a war hero becoming as a war criminal as President. Jackson’s achievements as President rested on ousting the North Eastern and Virginia intellectuals who had run the US since Washington and replacing them with political appointees, the progenitors of the Democratic Party that went on to to destroy the Bank of the United States, invade Texas and Florida, foment the Mexican Wars, create the Confederacy, and follow the fall of slavery by the hateful story of Jim Crow and the KKK.
Like all demagogues, Jackson saw himself as the voice of the people “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” while, again like modern demagogues and their corporate sponsors, personally benefiting from slavery, bank expropriations, theft of land from American Indians and invasion of Florida, Texas and other Mexican territories. To this day, nearly all state Democratic parties celebrate their history every year at “Jefferson-Jackson Day” dinners. Jackson’s racism and imperialism has been hidden while his opposition to America becoming corporate was so strong that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the guru of the Kennedy years, presented Jackson’s “restrain[ing] the power of the business community,” as the “the basic meaning of American liberalism.”
Schlesinger’s view of the party of Andrew Jackson is now as as anachronistic as Jefferson’s views of African slaves. It is hard, in the era of Obama to remember that white supremacists and civil-rights activists shared the Democratic Party that elected Kennedy.
Ironically, the parties have shifted their turfs. If we look at the US on the even of the election of Abraham Lincoln, it looks like today’s map with the identities of the Republicans and the Democrats switched.
Jackson’s role as the Father of the Republican Party is easily seen by his policies …he favored the gold standard, opposed a National Bank in favor of private banks owned by his partisans, supported states rights, believed in racial superiority, and was himself a fundamentalist Christian. Like Reagan, Jackson celebrated his own lack of education.
The contrast with Obama is extraordinary. Even within the Democratic party, political types see the President as too professorial, too alienated from the white working class, insufficiently populist — that is, too un-Jacksonian. Democratic former Senator Jim Webb, now a Presidential candidate. calls on to his party to “return to its Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Andrew Jackson roots.”
Obama has called his doctrine, “leading from behind.” That term obviously applies to our foreign policy, one that recognizes that the world is no longer an American empire. Instead we live in a multilateral world with two great global powers and several regional powers. Jacksonian and Reaganite ideas of America having a global right of rule are quaint. Such ideas are absurd because 21st century commercial competition requires investments of funds in infrastructure, education and research.. expenses that can not be met if our national resources are funneled only into our military. Perhaps the most historic example of this Obama Doctrine is the TPP. This agreement, despite the Jacksonian opposition from his own party, means that the US will now partner with the major economic powers around the Pacific in a trading union that leaves out two other powers … Russia and China. Nothing since the Louisiana Purchase has had an equal significance.
Obama’s domestic agenda has similar “leadership from behind.” While the right has failed in 50 Congressional efforts and two Supreme Court efforts to overturn Obama care, the left has bemoaned that we do not have universal healthcare. What the left “misunderstands” is that the Affordable Healthcare Act is quietly transforming the US into a place where we have an American healthcare system. With that system in place, America will be able to manage healthcare in a way we never could with the mess we have had before. Obama has made us a better nation.
Obama’s critics have a point. Obama is not like Jackson or Reagan, nor is he like the two Roosevelts. He is not a great charismatic speaker. Rather he is the quiet representative of real change that recognizes the inevitable “new” USA .., a post imperial world power in a world where colonialism is no longer possible, a multiethnic society that is trying to weld together a great mix of cultures into a new American identity, a world power amongst several world powers.
Modern Americans should look on Jackson with revulsion and the Democratic Party should realize that a quiet Black man, the first son of an immigrant to become our President , is already one our greatest Presidents. Jackson, would never understand.