Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate. By Rich Lowry. National Review Online, November 24, 2015. Also at Real Clear Politics.
Lowry:
After the Paris attack, conventional wisdom held that Republican voters would finally turn away from political outsiders and reward candidates representing sobriety and experience. No one stopped to consider that, actually, voters might be drawn to the guy who memorably said of ISIS that he would “bomb the [expletive] out of them.”
After the Paris attack, conventional wisdom held that Republican voters would finally turn away from political outsiders and reward candidates representing sobriety and experience. No one stopped to consider that, actually, voters might be drawn to the guy who memorably said of ISIS that he would “bomb the [expletive] out of them.”
Not
only has Donald Trump not been hurt by Paris, he has bumped up in the aftermath
(Ben Carson, on the other hand, has indeed dropped). The cliché about Trump is
that he’s defying the laws of political gravity. If Trump is cutting against
the contemporary political grain — certainly, no one else could get away with
being as routinely careless and insulting in his statements — he is also
tapping into one of America’s deepest cultural and political wellsprings.
In
large part, Donald Trump is a Jacksonian, the tradition originally associated
with the Scotch-Irish heritage in America and best represented historically by
the tough old bird himself, Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory might be mystified that
a celebrity New York billionaire is holding up his banner (but, then again,
Jackson himself was a rich planter). Trump is nonetheless a powerful voice for
Jacksonian attitudes.
Historian
Walter Russell Mead once wrote a memorable essay on the Jacksonianism that, so
many years later, serves as a very rough guide to the anti-PC and fiercely
nationalistic populism of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Trump
has trampled on almost every political piety, and gotten away with it, even
when he has been factually wrong or had to backtrack. “The Jacksonian hero
dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites,” Mead
writes. “The hero may make mistakes, but he will command the unswerving loyalty
of Jacksonian America so long as his heart is perceived to be in the right
place.”
Trump
condemns the political system, and everyone who has thrived in it. For
Jacksonians, Mead writes: “Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress
and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists. Career
politicians are inherently untrustworthy.”
Trump
is obsessed with how other countries are taking advantage of us. He is tapping
into the Jacksonian fear of, in Mead’s words, politicians “either by ineptitude
or wickedness serving hostile foreign interests.”
Trump
is hell on criminals and unwelcoming to illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees,
reflecting what Mead characterizes as the Jacksonian’s “absolute and even
brutal distinction drawn between the members of the community and outsiders.”
Trump
never sweats the details. Jacksonians, according to Mead, believe “that while
problems are complicated, solutions are simple.” In fact, the side in a public
debate that “is endlessly telling you that the popular view isn’t sufficiently
‘sophisticated’ or ‘nuanced’ — that is the side that doesn’t want you to know
what it is doing, and it is not to be trusted.”
Trump
doesn’t believe in limited government. “Jacksonians believe that the government
should do everything in its power to promote the well-being — political, moral,
economic — of the folk community,” Mead writes. “Any means are permissible in
the service of this end, as long as they do not violate the moral feelings or
infringe on the freedoms that Jacksonians believe are essential in their daily
lives.”
Trump
isn’t ideologically consistent. The Jacksonian philosophy, Mead notes, “is an
instinct rather than an ideology — a culturally shaped set of beliefs and
emotions rather than a set of ideas.”
Finally,
national honor is a paramount value for Jacksonians, a concern that can be
heard in Trump’s signature promise to make America great again. He will
out-bully and out-fox our adversaries and, as for ISIS, he will bomb and
water-board it into submission.
It is
tempting to see Donald Trump as something wholly new, the reality star who
represents the merger of entertainment and popular culture. He is also
something centuries old, the populist railing against a corrupt and ineffectual
elite that will, through his chastisement, get the comeuppance it deserves.
