Andrew Jackson Lives! America’s Foreign-Policy Populism. By Robert Golan-Vilella. The National Interest, December 5, 2013.
Golan-Vilella:
In his
well-known book Special Providence,
Walter Russell Mead laid out a typology that divided American foreign-policy
thinking into four broad schools: the big-government, pro-business
Hamiltonians; the Wilsonians, determined to spread U.S. values around the
world; the Jeffersonians, concerned primarily with preserving America’s
identity at home; and a group that he dubbed the Jacksonians. While the first
three are readily identifiable—and well represented within the Washington elite
(especially the the first two)—the Jacksonian school is at once the most
difficult to describe and the most interesting. Mead calls it a “large populist
school” that “believes that the most important goal of the U.S. government in
foreign and domestic policy should be the physical security and the economic
well-being of the American people.” Its adherents believe that America should
not seek out foreign wars. But should it become involved in them, then “there
is no substitute for victory,” in the words of Douglas MacArthur.
If you
want to get a sense of how Jacksonian America sees international affairs, as
good a place as any to start is the Pew Research Center’s latest version of its
“America’s Place in the World” survey, released earlier this week. The
quadrennial study polls both the general public and members of the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR). The full results of the 2013 survey show a strong
current of Jacksonian thinking in the public across a wide range of
foreign-policy issues.
The
main headline that some observers have grabbed on to in the Pew poll is that
the number of people who say both that the United States “does too much” in
helping to solve world problems and that it plays “a less important role” as a
world leader are at record highs. But it’s not quite that simple. The “less
important role” that the U.S. public envisions its government playing abroad
still involves doing quite a lot of things. 56 percent think “U.S. policies
[should] try to keep it so America is the only military superpower,” and on
average Americans want to preserve current levels of defense spending. Large
majorities said that “taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorist
attacks” (83 percent) and “preventing the spread of weapons of mass
destruction” (73 percent) should be “top priorities” among U.S. long-range
goals.
This is
a public, in short, that cares deeply about maintaining an overwhelmingly
powerful military and taking decisive action against what it sees as core
threats to American security—both central tenets of Jacksonian thinking. What
the public doesn’t see as top priorities are things like “helping improve
living standards in developing nations” (23 percent), “promoting democracy in
other countries” (18 percent), and “promoting and defending human rights in
other countries” (33 percent).
In the
Pew survey, the public breaks most decisively with CFR members on issues like
economics, trade and immigration. The public is far more likely (82 percent)
than CFR members (29 percent) to consider “protecting the jobs of American
workers” to be a top priority. The same is true when it comes to “reducing
illegal immigration” (48 percent versus 11 percent, respectively). These are
deep and enduring divides that are reflected in how consistent these numbers
have been over the past twenty years. This, too, tracks with Mead’s description
of the Jacksonian school. As he wrote in Special
Providence:
Jacksonian
opinion is instinctively protectionist, seeking trade privileges for American
goods abroad and hoping to withhold those privileges from foreign exports. . .
. They see the preservation of American jobs, even at the cost of some
unspecified degree of “economic efficiency,” as the natural and obvious task of
the federal government’s trade policy.
Likewise,
Mead says that Jacksonians “are also skeptical, on both cultural and economic
grounds, of the benefits of immigration,” seeing it as “endangering the
cohesion of the folk community and introducing new, low-wage competition for
jobs.”
This
doesn’t mean that the public is wholeheartedly opposed to immigration or trade.
Indeed, one section of the Pew study found a significant level of enthusiasm
for increased economic engagement with the rest of the world. What it does mean
is that their views on these issues are often based principally on their
concern for American jobs. One measure of this is that while the public
believes that “more foreign companies setting up operations in the U.S.” would
help rather than hurt the U.S. economy (by a 62 to 32 percent margin), they
decisively oppose “more U.S. companies setting up operations overseas,” with 73
percent saying they thought it would hurt the economy. This is in direct
contrast to the CFR members, 73 percent of whom think that more U.S. companies
setting up operations overseas would benefit the economy.
All
this suggests that the Jacksonian influence remains a powerful one in shaping
Americans’ views of the world. Yet at the same time, it also helps to
demonstrate the limitations of this influence. One might use the data above to
try to argue that because there are these key issues on which public and elite
opinion diverge, there would be potential political rewards for a party that better
aligned itself with the Jacksonian sensibility. But it’s hard to imagine that
either foreign policy in general or issues like trade in particular would rank
high enough on the list of issues that concern the electorate for this to make
much of a difference. More likely, candidates will continue to pander to
Jacksonian America on the campaign trail and then ignore those promises once
safely in office. As Daniel Drezner put it during the 2012 presidential
campaign, “You campaign as a mercantilist; you govern as a free trader.”
In the
end, one overriding fact is worth keeping in mind: Americans are perennially
unhappy with the direction of world affairs. Nine times over the past twenty
years, Pew has asked, “All in all, would you say that you are satisfied or
dissatisfied with the way things are going in the world these days?” Every
time, between 64 and 81 percent have said they were dissatisfied, with only 12
to 28 percent satisfied. This year was no exception, with only 16 percent
satisfied and 78 percent dissatisfied. The reason for this is anyone’s guess.
Maybe the U.S. public just has unrealistic expectations about the world. Or
maybe it’s because international news coverage is dominated by crises and
disasters, and not by long-term positive trends like declines in global poverty
and violence. But there’s at least one other potential explanation: the
persistent gap between the outlook of Jacksonian America and that of the
(usually Hamiltonian or Wilsonian) representatives that generally make up the
country’s foreign-policy establishment.
