Sean Wilentz, Whigs and
Democrats
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
There's an article by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz in Sunday's NY Times titled "Bush's Ancestors" that tries to draw analogies between the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs with the two major parties of today, as the article's title implies. Perhaps it would have made more sense to title it "Bush and Kerry's Ancestors".
Wilentz informs us, for example:
A century and a half
before Reagan's election, the Whigs worked out the basic ideas of supply-side,
trickle-down economics. They acclaimed the romance of risk and private
investment and a compelling but simplistic view of
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16essay.html
Wilentz does not exactly make clear whether there was anything more than demagogy at work in Andrew Jackson’s “attacks on the privileged classes.” Since an analogy was drawn with what Bush described as Kerry’s attempt “to wage class warfare to get ahead,” one must ask whether Wilentz believes that Kerry was a latter-day Eugene V. Debs, not to speak of FDR. If so, it was lost on pundits such as Thomas Frank who wrote an ocean of words lamenting Kerry’s refusal to do exactly that.
Although I have not read Wilentz’s book (and don’t have plans to), the Nation Magazine review by Anatol Lieven indicates that Wilentz is not exactly a gushing cheerleader for Jackson in the style Arthur Schlesinger Jr. made famous. Levien writes:
Wilentz's treatment of the Jackson era bears
comparison with a classic of American historical scholarship, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Age of Jackson, published six decades
ago. Like Schlesinger, Wilentz
takes Jacksonians' commitment to democracy seriously
and, like him, finds the roots of democratic radicalism in popular struggles,
especially on economic matters, led by the "city democracy," not by
Western frontiersmen. But Wilentz's account also
shows how the writing of history has changed since 1945. Schlesinger
ignored Indian removal, a central event of the 1830s. Despite his overall
sympathy for the Jacksonians, Wilentz
offers a powerful indictment of the policies that produced the Trail of Tears.
Even more striking, Wilentz places the issue of
slavery at the center of his account. The rise of American democracy, he shows,
went hand in hand with the expansion of slavery and the consolidation in the
South of the most powerful slave society the modern world has seen. The
conflict between the slave South and free-labor North over the meaning of
American democracy eventually led to civil war.
full: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051031/lieven
While Wilentz is certainly an improvement over Schlesinger, you have to go to Harry Braverman who wrote the following critique of Jacksonianism when he was an activist in the Trotskyist movement:
In order to govern the
bourgeoisie “by their white slaves,” the planters from
The Jackson and Van Buren groupings, joined by a clamorous farmer element led by such men as Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Colonel Richard M. Johnson, formed a national grouping in the Democratic Party which conducted politics by carefully watching the movement of the popular masses. Their activity, well-adjusted to the new currents which the old time politicians could scarcely comprehend, much less navigate, raised behind them a sweeping national mass movement. Here the great achievement of Jacksonianism emerges. It inaugurated in national politics that pattern which has endured to the present: the rule of an exploiting class concealed behind the appeal to the common man.
The rule of an exploiting class concealed behind the appeal to the common man? Wilentz is right about one thing in his metaphor-mongering. Based on this criterion, Andrew Jackson was the John Kerry of his day.