Sean Wilentz, Whigs and Democrats

 

Posted to www.marxmail.org on October 17, 2005

 

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 America as, in one widely used Whig phrase, "a country of self-made men." These views would reappear in Reagan's and Newt Gingrich's celebrations of a coming "opportunity society," later reformulated by George W. Bush as the "ownership society." The Whigs also dismissed the Jacksonians' attacks on the privileged classes as demagogic - much as Bush, running in 2000 as a unifying "compassionate conservative," labeled his opponent's criticisms of corporate power and tax breaks for the wealthy a mean-spirited effort "to wage class warfare to get ahead."

 

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 Jefferson’s day on, built a northern party machine of a type familiar to this day in the Democratic Party. Politicians of the modern type began to make their appearance. Aaron Burr had been Jefferson’s chief lieutenant on the Northern field. Martin Van Buren, operating through the Albany Regency and Tammany Hall, was Jackson’s man Friday. Each was awarded the Vice-Presidency. Van Buren exemplified the increasing importance of the Northern auxiliary when he succeeded Jackson to the Presidency.

 

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.