"The Core 200-Year Mission of Democrats"

"When Democrats advance equal dignity and rights for everyone—and focus primarily on the economic interests of working people—they win. When Democrats divide themselves and other Americans along regional, class, and ideological lines—or bicker internally over cultural divisions and downplay unifying economic policies—they lose."

John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot reviews Michael Kazin's What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.

And Ruy Teixeira describes the Democrats of the past year as "How Not to Build a Coalition."

While Teixeira also states that Democrats should always ask themselves, "What Would the Working Class Say?"

"Jackson's Out, the Franklins Are In"

"In recent years, Joe Biden has also become vocal about racial issues, citing the horrors of the Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally in 2017 as his motivation for jumping into the 2020 presidential contest, and calling in his inaugural address for confronting the threat of 'white supremacy.' In response to the civil unrest last year prompted by police brutality against African Americans, Biden made a point of rejecting calls to defund the police but made promises to push for criminal justice reform. Both as a candidate and in his first days as president, Biden has challenged Americans to live up to their ideals, including the proposition that 'all men are created equal.' Ben Franklin's story, therefore, from slaveholder to staunch antislavery advocate, can help remind us of the power and importance of living up to the revolutionary promises of the founding."

Daniel N. Gullotta and Kelsa Pellettiere at The Bulwark discuss "[h]ow to understand President Joe Biden’s choice of Oval Office art."

"It Cannot Be Blindly Quoted, as a Visionary Paean to Simple Virtues"

"And yet it's easy to forget that Democracy in America was not written under President Lincoln, but under President Jackson, in the America of the Trail of Tears, and it can only feel strange that a book from this moment in time is the one frequently hailed as capturing some of America's finest characteristics. True, Tocqueville, an abolitionist, both condemned African-American slavery and Native American dispossession, and did so eloquently. Yet his democracy stops long before them, in his elegiac passages of the happy slaves at work in the fields, or in his conviction that 'the Indians will never civilize themselves, or that it will be too late when they may be inclined to make the experiment.' One would happily toil, one would quietly vanish—that was Tocqueville's shrug."

Ben Judah at The American Interest questions blithe understandings of Alexis de Tocqueville.

President Crass

"Growing up in a blue-collar family that had supported FDR and Truman, I remember well that my family and our blue-collar friends shared the broader disdain that many Americans felt for 'the egghead Stevenson, as opposed to the Republican candidate, the more down-to-earth Dwight Eisenhower. One of the favorite refrains in our blue-collar milieu about men like Stevenson and other 'eggheads' was that they never got their hands dirty.
"In 2016 Trump benefitted from a deep strain in the American character. It was influenced by our frontier experience and contempt for the 'tenderfoot,' by the spread of Jacksonian democracy and populism, by the free-wheeling capitalism of the Gilded Age, by our respect for practical men like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindberg, for common sense and 'the school of hard knocks' as opposed to book-learning and being 'overly educated.'"

Walter G. Moss at History News Network argues that "[u]nfortunately, the crassness and anti-intellectualism of President Trump are not aberrations in our culture, but a reflection of our darker side."

"Represents a Sharp Break in Our National Political History"

"Never before has American democracy been so debased that roughly one-third of the nation can dictate its politics. (Even the slave power oligarchy of the 1850s managed to mobilize electoral pluralities and majorities.) Never before has an American Administration lied as continuously and as brazenly as Trump and his minions have, not simply as self-protection but as calculated insults to reason, gaslighting not just the nation but the entire world. Never before has an Administration’s supporters—today, the ruling one-third of the country—shown such an ardent willingness not merely to accept its mendacity but to get off on it, to the point of thrilling to possible criminal interference in our national elections by a hostile nation, so long as it gives the finger to the other side. Finding similarities in our past to this state of affairs brings to mind the French proverb, that to understand everything is to pardon everything—only, in this case, to analogize too much is to understand too little."

Sean Wilentz at Democracy says that Donald Trump is sui generis.

"Trump Administration Announces New $20 Bill Design Honoring Harriet Tubman's Owners"

"Mnuchin then sought to assuage any concerns about the decision, assuring those in attendance that the Trump White House was already looking into ways to preserve Andrew Jackson's likeness by having it replace Abraham Lincoln on the $5 bill."

From The Onion.

"Trail of Fears"

"Like Jackson, he is a wealthy Washington outsider posing as a champion of the people. He does not recognize the legitimacy of the political system, as Nixon did, because he is not a creature of it. He will not go quietly, if it comes to that. We may be fast approaching another 'question of public faith,' in the words of Archibald Cox's great-great-great grandfather. But as in Jackson's time, there is no political center to curb the power of the president. There is only extremism and chaos."

Kevin Baker at The New Republic argues that "Donald Trump operates in a political landscape that is far more similar to Andrew Jackson's than to Richard Nixon's."

"American History Is Returning Full Circle"

"Downplaying or ignoring Jackson's conservatism, while conjuring a liberal ideology on his behalf, served a partisan interest for 20th-century Democrats. But there are also honest reasons that may have led historians like Schlesinger astray. From the standpoint of the 20th century, the United States had evolved into a two-party system in which the more liberal of the two parties had its strongest base in the Deep South. As this felt to many to be the inevitable direction of American politics, it seemed natural to peer back at the 19th century and see those coalitions in protean form. Despite its conservative views on race and suspicion of Washington, the white South probably appeared like a plausible base for the development of a liberal party.
"From the standpoint of the 21st century, things look very different."


Jonathan Chait in New York argues that Andrew Jackson "is, clearly, the father of the modern Republican Party."

The Way We're Droppin' Hamiltons

"What to make of all this? Well, people are complicated, and don't always line up along the conventional left-right axis. Hamilton has an especially unstable background, especially compared to Virginia planters who dominated the founding generation: Born in the British West Indies and orphaned, Hamilton had an early history so sketchy, we're not even sure of his birth year.
"But part of it is that we've gotten Hamilton wrong over the decades, perhaps thanks to high school history classes that framed Hamilton as the father of American conservatism and Jefferson as the founder of U.S. liberalism, with Andrew Jackson as his inheritor."


Scott Timberg in Salon looks at reactions to the announced elimination of Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill.


Ron Chernow at Politico pleads to keep Hamilton on the bill.


Binyamin Appelbaum and Josh Barro at The New York Times discuss the issue.


And David Greenberg at Politico defends Andrew Jackson.

"The Last Time Britain Fought America"

"The British sustained 2,042 casualties; the Americans 71. To make things worse, the battle was unnecessary. The Treaty of Ghent, ending the 1812 War, was signed on Christmas Eve. News of the treaty didn't reach Washington until February 17."


Harry Mount at The Spectator marks the bicentennial of the Battle of New Orleans.

"Nothing Short of Ethnic Cleansing"

"More than 46,000 Native Americans experienced this horror brought about by Jackson’s brand of populism. While Jackson did not personally supervise the extermination of tribes, according to Watson, he 'encouraged the atmosphere of callousness and indifference to Indian welfare that culminated in those deaths.'

"Jackson 'always insisted he was not an Indian hater, he just felt the presence of Indians on land that ought to be white people’s was a barrier to the development of the white country,' Watson said."

Ari Rabin-Havt in The American Prospect argues that the Democratic Party should stop honoring Andrew Jackson.

Massive Resistance

"Mihm said today’s fight has a parallel in the nullification movement of the 1830s when John C. Calhoun, who had resigned the vice presidency to run for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, devised a strategy to oppose a tariff that he said hit the South unfairly. If the state legislature passed a law that refuted the federal one, the state could ignore it based on what he called a 'concurrent majority.'
"President Andrew Jackson eventually interceded and thwarted the nullification movement. Had it gone forward, Mihm said, it may have led to the breakup of the Union before the Civil War.
"Now, he said, those who want to stop Obamacare 'are trying to find another way to nullify that poses a much graver threat, but not to the law,' Mihm said, referring to a possible failure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.
"'Our debt is something we all, every one of us, are on the hook for,' he said. 'And the idea that you can take that and make that a bargaining chip is very similar to the idea of the nullifiers.'"

Michael Tackett at Bloomberg compares today's Republican Party to Southern conservatives of the past.

"The Other Half Is Equality"

"We usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality. But in our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are unrelated. The fortunes of middle-class Americans have declined while prospects for many women and minorities have risen. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have improved together—this is what appeared to be happening in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Since then, many women and minorities have done better than in any previous generations, but many others in both groups have seen their lives and communities squeezed by the economic contractions of the past generation. Like almost everything else, the new inclusiveness divides the country into winners and losers. It’s been good for those with the education, talent, and luck to benefit from it; for others—in urban cores like Youngstown, Ohio; rural backwaters like Rockingham County, North Carolina; and the exurban slums outside Tampa—inclusiveness remains mostly theoretical. It gives an idea of equality, which makes the reality of inequality even more painful."

George Packer at The New Yorker looks at "What America Has Gained, What America Has Lost."

At The American Conservative, Samuel Goldman responds.

Joe Klein at Time reads Packer's new book.

Smoke Out Hickory

"But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course."

Steve Yoder in Salon argues in favor of dumping Andrew Jackson from the name of Democratic Party fundraising events.

Land of Divergence

In The New York Times, David Leonhardt reviews Michael Lind's Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, and Benjamin M. Friedman reviews Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.

Thru the Perilous Fight

"Historians of the period and of the war may resent Hofstadter’s summary dismissal, but it offers some clues as to why neither is the subject of much popular interest. The very things that put Hofstadter off—the bumbling diplomacy, the bitter infighting, the ineptly executed war effort—force us to confront a vision of the United States that doesn’t generally fit our understanding of its origins. The war plays out as a disappointing second act to the Revolution, with the nation suddenly at the whim of Europeans and Indians and riven by internal dissent, and the heroes and heirs of 1776 acting without the pluck and ingenuity that we expect of them. How are we to commemorate that?"

In Slate, James M. Lundberg observes the War of 1812's bicentennial.

"Maybe I'd Be a Failed Rock Musician or a Boring Old Guy Who Tells Stories about the Good Old Days"

"The move from seemingly hard-left labor historian to defender of traditional political history—notably in the New Republic essay about Lincoln scholarship—has caused some head-scratching in the academic world. (Wilentz has also written a sweeping work of contemporary history, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008; and a short biography of Andrew Jackson.)
"But Foner says Wilentz's career simply 'reflects an evolution that is going on in the American historical profession generally.'"

Christopher Shea in The Chronicle Review profiles Sean Wilentz.

How Much Money Will It Bring In?

"The contradictions Tocqueville found in Cincinnati fed into his larger conclusions. America, he found, was a nation of paradoxes. It proclaimed that all men were created equal, yet was suffused by racial prejudice. It placed unparalleled faith in the individual yet was conformist and controlled by the majority. It was materialistic yet deeply religious, commercial but puritanical."

David S. Reynolds in The New York Times reviews Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville Discovery of America.

"The New Nullifiers"

"After four years of Civil War, in a 'new birth of freedom' that resurrected the Union, Calhoun’s states’ rights doctrines were utterly disgraced—but they did not disappear forever. Nearly a century later they were exhumed to justify the so-called 'massive resistance' of the segregationist South against civil rights and, in particular, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The current rage for nullification is nothing less than another restatement, in a different context, of musty neo-Confederate dogma."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic attacks "the current wave of enthusiasm for 'states’ rights,' 'interposition,' and 'nullification.'"

What Hath God Wrought

"Thus, President James Monroe observed that a growing network of canals and turnpikes and the development of the steamboat were helping stitch a disparate country together, even as other Americans, like DeWitt Clinton, foresaw a calamitous 'dismemberment of the Union,' East to West, unless it were bound to­gether by a common thread like the Erie Canal. Thus, average Americans worshiped Andrew Jackson as 'Everyman writ large,' even as the new Whig party saw him as an unbridled despot. Thus, countless utopian movements blossomed across the country—'We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,' Ralph Waldo Emerson breathlessly wrote—along with movements to help the poor, heal the sick and assist the deaf, even as Native Americans were brutally marched to their deaths along the Trail of Tears and plans were being made to ship free blacks off to Africa, or elsewhere."

Jay Winik in The New York Times reviews David S. Reynolds's Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.