Both Judges and the Judged: On Certain Parallels between Jacksonians and Trumpists

Comparing the current presidential administration to the tenure of Andrew Jackson is not particularly original, but that does not mean that we can take in all the parallels at a glance. One of the strongest connections I see lies in the confusion over the basic nature or composition of the coalitions which brought either man to power. The interminable dispute over whether or not there was true working-class support for Jackson’s Democrats in the late 1820s and 1830s was perhaps the driving question of scholarship on that historical period from the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Age of Jackson (1945) through at least the publication of Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic in 1984, after which point the cultural turn directed research on this period more towards the effects of “the market revolution” on society and particularly on communities of working people. Similarly, although the evidence seems to be fairly clear that the heart of Donald Trump’s base beats in white suburbia, the popular image of the typical Trump voter as a member of the white working class persists.

But there are even deeper ties to be explored, I believe. I was recently re-reading Marvin Meyers’s The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (1957), and so much of it struck me as quite viscerally apt as a description of our present. The principal riddle that Meyers tries to solve is summed up in his phrase for the typical Jacksonian—the “venturous conservative.” Centering his analysis of the Jacksonian movement on the hatred of the Bank of the United States, Meyers shows how much of Jacksonian ideology was dedicated to the promotion of laissez-faire under the guise of a re-establishment of the old republican verities of stability and order. This agrarian/republican defense of liberal capitalism is a paradox that excellent scholars today are still unpacking (Michael Zakim’s Accounting for Capitalism from earlier this year is a brilliant treatment of this central contradiction), but Meyers captured it whole:

Logically and historically the laissez-faire principle led toward the city, the factory, the complex market and credit economy; the simple agrarian republic of virtue could not stand against it. But the Jacksonians, I think, held their paradox in suspension, aided by a selective vision of the world and especially by a theory which made certain privileged institutions and practices exclusively responsible for problems which we know to have [had] a broader provenience. (204-205)

Although Jacksonians and Trumpists are not alone in possessing “selective vision of the world,” the parallel is, I think, quite strong, especially if we think—as Meyers does—that underneath the Jacksonians’ selective vision lay a nauseous sense of clear-eyed self-indictment. Jacksonians at some level recognized their deliberate and enthusiastic collusion with the social forces—the market revolution—that invalidated and eroded the arcadia to which they clung in rhetoric and belief. “Americans who followed the Jacksonian persuasion with their votes, a number varying from just under to more than half, were in some degree censuring their own economic attitudes and actions… in significant measure the Jacksonians were at once the judges and the judged” (121, 139).

Meyers’s analysis requires a certain skepticism, therefore, that Jacksonism was genuinely a working-class movement (a reading that many in 1957 still found plausible). The electorate was closely divided, and although rich men were disproportionately anti-Jackson men, the converse was not necessarily true: “the observers of America at work insist upon the substantial uniformity of economic attitudes throughout the population, and report exceptions mainly for small ethnic, regional, or occupational clusters” (139). The age of Jackson was not a battle between the classes and the masses.

“The political analysis of Jacksonian Democracy would be simpler and clearer if this were not so, if the Jacksonians could in fact be taken for innocent—still better, struggling—victims of external social changes,” Meyers muses.

Accepting the notion of their deep involvement in the process, however, one begins to believe in the reality of this Jacksonian society with its vast energies and driving hungers; with its vertiginous changes and its vertigo; with its brilliant hopes, its backward longings, and its raw conscience. The ambiguities in Jacksonian appeals and policies—the mixed themes of liberty, equality, and republican virtue—express the disturbed reaction of many citizens to the processes behind the Monster [symbolized by the Bank], reactions intensified and confused by a common participation in responsibility. Here in particular one approaches the large meaning of the corporate monster in Jacksonian politics: a gigantesque figure upon which men could focus their discontent with society, and with themselves. In the plainer language of Poor Richard: “Mankind are very odd creatures: one half censure what they practise, the other half practise what they censure; the rest always say and do as they ought” (141).

To apply Meyers’s keen insight to the present, what needs to be changed? That is, of course, the $64,000 question (not adjusted for inflation). Here is a hypothesis.

What stands in for the Jacksonian “Monster,” the hypostasis of all those commercial transactions which Jacksonian voters were bringing about while staunchly fretting over their looming intrusions into daily life? It is the “American carnage” of Donald Trump’s inaugural. It is an image of the American heartland as a wasteland of violence and economic stasis, of drugs and doldrums. It is a landscape that is not simply post-industrial, but post-livable. It is a town that you hope your children flee from, even as you chide them for abandoning you. (It is also the children who end up living with you because they cannot get a job good enough to make rent in the big city.) It is the town that you yourself want to move on from even as you lament the loss of community, of the neighborhoods you grew up with.

Fifty years hence, the opioid epidemic may occupy the central role in this drama the way that the Bank War dominates the Jacksonian movement in Meyers’s account. Trumpists like Governor Paul LePage in Maine are so desperate to locate a foreign origin for the crisis—in Mexico ultimately, although often enough the blame goes first to more urbanized and racially diverse blue states like Massachusetts—that again we may reasonably ask whether they are not “at once both judges and the judged.” Not only are they judging their own fecklessness in stemming the epidemic, but the roots of the crisis lie so blatantly in the horrific madness of a largely deregulated pharmaceutical industry and in the broader thralldom of health care to capitalist imperatives that we can again only diagnose the Trumpist obsession with tying immigration to the drug trade as a species of self-incriminating projection. “They” are not “bringing” drugs; we are making them. And making the conditions for abusing them, making fast and secure the knots and ligatures that bind us to the epidemic’s desolation.

There are, of course, numerous other ways to decode the paradoxes of Trumpism: in place of the opioid epidemic, we could perhaps talk about the bad conscience of imperial wars or the stoutly hysterical denialism of climate change as examples of people trying to exorcise the very demons they worship. But nothing, I think, strikes as close to the lived experience of Trump voters like the ravages of the opioid epidemic, with its intricate connections to larger fears of declining white demographics, to violent crime, and to rural and suburban decay. If we wish to put our finger on the key to the guilt being swallowed by Trump voters the way that Jackson voters swallowed their commercial complicity, we will do well to put the opioid crisis square in the center of our vision.