There’s a fetish of the current Administration that is not getting enough attention.
That’s the picture of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office.
It’s important because the current President models himself on a man I described 10 years ago as among the Worst Presidents Ever. The years since have only fortified my belief on that point. Jackson was the WORST President ever.
Andrew Jackson was an American Lion in the sense that he was a predator. He was a democrat only when that democracy bowed to his wishes. He let “the people” rule, but only when they did what he wanted.
Jackson was regressive even for his time. While proclaiming himself an advocate of democracy and freedom, this applied only to white men of northern European extraction. He was more than just a slave owner, in that he didn’t just oppress black people. He defied the Supreme Court to launch the Trail of Tears. He encouraged enslavers to move into Mexican Texas, which had banned slavery, and seize it through war as a slave state in 1836.
Jackson created the spoils system, the idea that all government workers should be political hacks. He drowned government in a bathtub, funding it entirely through tariffs, enforced by those hacks, making tax collection into a cesspool of corruption. Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, so that when the market panicked after he left office, the resulting depression lasted for 12 years, until the California gold rush. It was Jackson who made Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, the chief justice.
That’s the President whose picture now hangs in the Oval Office. Anyone defending this President can see precedent in Jackson’s Administration.
A Jacksonian World
Andrew Jackson ruled during the height of the second Great Awakening, a period whose hypocrisy deserves much closer scrutiny from historians than it has gotten. Jackson’s world was the world of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, where selfishness and greed hid behind a façade of religious hypocrisy.
Jackson was, in short, the most anti-American American President ever, before the incumbent. And it’s Jackson’s world the incumbent wishes to recreate, enforced by religious and financial oligarchs.
In Jackson’s time, southern enslavers were the oligarchs. Cotton and tobacco were the dominant industries. Is there really much difference between the aims of today’s Forbes 400 and the enslavers of Jackson’s time? Return to office! 996! All the money flowing to the top, leaving the soil beneath it useless, then moving on.
It’s important to note that the President isn’t the only American who fetishizes Jackson. He’s on the $20 bill for a reason. The Democratic Party he created was the first modern political machine, one that drew its strength from ordinary people. Those same people are in charge now.
My point is we need to stop seeing the current Administration as foreign, as “fascistic” in a German or a Russian or a Chinese sense. Its pathology is entirely home grown. He is us.
