4.4 A Fake Jacksonian Populist

Fear not, the people may be deluded for a moment but cannot be corrupted.

—Andrew Jackson

Trump is not a Jacksonian populist. He just plays one on TV — and in the White House. Many of those who hate Trump now trash Jackson, thinking that will discredit Trump. It does not. It simply reinforces the view of Trump’s base that Trump is another Jackson, who they honor as a courageous war hero and an authentic (albeit right-wing) populist.

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Frame taken the instant Trump became President. WhiteHouse.gov

Despite superficially similar personal characteristics, the differences between their psychologies are enormous. A sociopathic president only champions his country to further his own interests while an ultra-patriot like Jackson would give his life for his country. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ignoring Jackson’s fiery temper or excusing his misdeeds. But Jackson joined the American Revolution when he was 13 while “cadet bone spurs” relied on fake medical reports arranged by his father to gain five draft deferments. In the Battle of New Orleans, 30 years after he fought in the revolution, Jackson defeated the British forces who attacked him with twice as many well-trained troops. The British suffered more than 20 times the number of casualties as the Americans. Trump is no Jackson.

Trump Is a Leader of Jacksonians

Those in Trump’s base are largely part of an ancient Jacksonian folk culture that has been a powerful force in American politics from the beginning and shows no signs of disappearing. And most Democrats have no clue it even exists. This is why the Sanders PACs — Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats and Our Revolution — made fools of themselves in 2018. So let me introduce you to the Jacksonians.

Jackson himself, and the Jacksonian folk culture at the heart of Trump’s base, are descendants of the Scots-Irish who left the lowlands of Scotland for Northern Ireland in about 1600. Life was as rough in Ireland as it had been in Scotland, so in the 1700s, before the American Revolution, about a quarter-million Scots-Irish headed to Pennsylvania and then down the backbone of the Appalachians.

They were Scottish Presbyterians — not the Irish Catholics who arrived much later. Neither were they related to the Deep South’s slave society. At a crucial juncture, they allied with the Yankees to tip the balance toward democracy as our nation was forming. They were fighters. As George Washington was camped out for that terrible winter at Valley Forge, half his men were Yankees and the other half were Scots-Irish. So you can thank the hillbillies, rednecks or White trash, as some now disdainfully call them, for your country.

Historian Walter Russell Mead claims that “Jacksonian culture, values and self-identification have spread beyond their original ethnic limits” and that “Northern immigrants gradually assimilated the values of Jacksonian individualism. Each generation of new Americans was less ‘social’ and more individualistic than the preceding one.”

Although the Scots-Irish are the source of Jacksonian folk ideology, it now has a life of its own, to put it mildly. And although Trump is not a Jacksonian himself, he can still be an effective Jacksonian leader by faking it. The Jacksonian folk culture is what makes Trump’s leadership a powerful force in national politics.

Trump Follows His Jacksonian Base

Andrew Jackson was running for President as a populist, and the Whigs (who later morphed into Republicans) found this so hilarious that they called him Jackass Jackson. So Jackson put a donkey on his campaign poster to remind the millions of White men without property (who had just been given the right to vote) what the Whigs thought of them. He won in a minor landslide, and the donkey became the symbol of Jackson’s new Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party remained dominant in the South and the Appalachia of the Scots-Irish through the 1960s. But much of the Jacksonian element turned Republican under Nixon. With Trump’s election, they now form his base.

But does Trump reflect Jacksonian folk ideology, or does his base reflect Trumps political views? To find out, let’s look at his talking points.

1.   Build a wall to keep out Mexicans, and ban Muslim immigrants.
2.   Support the Second Amendment and gun rights.
3.   Attack the liberal elites, party establishments and Wall Street.
4.   Attack trade deals that help foreigners.
5.   Attack “politically correct” rhetoric in favor of offensive discourse.

But did these come from Trump or from the Jacksonians? To find out, we need a description of the Jacksonians from before Trump ran for office to see if that’s what the Jacksonians already thought. Mead provided such a description back in 1999, so let’s look at what he said then: 

1. [The] Jacksonian community … automatically and absolutely excluded: Indians, Mexicans, Asians, African Americans, obvious sexual deviants, and recent immigrants of non-Protestant heritage.
2. Jacksonians see the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, as the citadel of liberty.
3. Jacksonians are profoundly suspicious of elites.
4. [Jacksonians worry that the government is] giving all our industrial markets to the Japanese?
5. The Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites.

That list, describing Jacksonian views in 1999, predicts Trump’s talking points almost perfectly. So the Jacksonians (with help from Steve Bannon) taught him their views, and those became his talking points. Trump is just following the Jacksonian folk culture.

Left Populism vs. Jacksonian Populism 

To see why the radical PACs imagined they could unite progressive Democrats with Trump’s base, it helps to diagram these two very different populisms — left populism and Jacksonian populism. Left populism presents a simple populist dichotomy. The elite consists of the richest 1% and their political enablers, and the rest are “the people.”

According to the left-populist view, pretty much everyone is part of Us, so Trump’s base is also part of Us. This makes the views of the Berniecrat PACs, Robert Reich and Bernie Sanders seem entirely logical. That’s because the Berniecrats assume the Jacksonian populists see populism the same way Sanders sees it. Big mistake.

Jacksonian populism is a right-wing form of populism that includes an out-group. Notice there are still two main groups — Them and Us — just like there are with left-populism. 

But Jacksonians, like most right-wing populists, split Them into the Elite and the Outsiders — Blacks, immigrants and sexual-preference minorities. The outsiders are excluded from “the real people.” In this way, Jacksonians exclude about half of the Democratic Party from “the real people.” But that’s not all that’s different.

A second surprise is the most shocking. Jacksonians see White liberals and progressives as part of the elite! That excludes the rest of the Democratic Party. In right-wing populism, the elite are usually seen as being in cahoots with the excluded group. Democrats are obviously champions of the poor and minorities. So that makes them part of the elite because White liberals and progressives are in cahoots with the Outsiders. This fits the Jacksonian populist view perfectly. 

The third surprise is the Jacksonian sympathy for the “hard-working” rich. Jacksonians will tell you “they worked hard for their money.” Sometimes they sort of have a point. Consider Steve Jobs and LeBron James. The result is that Trump’s base classifies many billionaires as part of “the real people.” Even Trump, a presumed multibillionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who brags about taking advantage of tax loopholes, gets a pass. Again, this makes a progressive alliance with the Tea Party hard to imagine.

Jacksonian Trumpsters see it working like this: Democrats arrange help for minorities from the federal government, and in return, these “outsiders” vote for the Democrats. Of course, they are right about this. The problem is that they exclude, as outsiders, the groups that Democrats most care about. Socialism tries to overcome this divide between progressives and Trump’s base by focusing on economic disadvantage. But that’s not what the Jacksonians focus on.

The Jacksonians look down on Sanders’ economic focus as crass, and instead focus on the culture war issues listed above — immigrants, guns, snobbish elites (including progressives), foreigners and PC language. If you mistake that for progressive populism, you’re in deep trouble.

And that’s exactly the trouble Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, and his three Berniecrat PACs all got into when they tried to foment a revolution based on the idea that populism is always progressive populism. That mistake confirmed their mistaken Marxist analysis that the working class has class solidarity. They had no theory or understanding of right-wing populism and the culture war, so they assumed the progressives and the Tea Partiers were brothers in populism.

That’s why Robert Reich could imagine that “Tea Partiers joined with millions who called themselves liberals and progressives,” as we saw in Chapter 2. That’s why Sanders’ top campaign staffer Zack Exley could imagine running Berniecrat “Republicans in deep-red areas” to win us a “Brand New Congress” in 2018.

Letting people with such a confused political analysis help set Biden’s campaign agenda is about as smart as asking help from Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway.