Andrew Jackson as historical image

This segment of The Majority Report takes off on a painting that Trump has put on the Oval Office wall, Donald Trump Literally Hung This Bizarre Painting In His White House 10/17/2018:

I liked the segment on the chessy Andy Thomas painting. But it did inspire me to write them an email on interpreting early/antebellum American history. I actually have a similar painting by Andy Thomas featuring Democratic Presidents. I first saw it at a gallery in New Orleans by Jackson Square. Hey, there's kitsch and there's inspired kitsch. That one features Andrew Jackson hosting the Presidents' get-together. Shooting pool in that case.

The Majority Report clips also talks some about Andrew Jackson, which led me to write this.

I fugure it will be at least 20 years before the interpretive cycle seings back around to something like my viewpoint that in America circa 1832, reactionary, anti-democratic, pro-slavery politics was embodied in John C. Calhoun, godfather of American reaction and the guiding spirit behind today's TrumPutinist Republican Party. The most prominent embodiment of expanding democracy and restraining the seditious slaveholders and fighting for ordinary citizens back then was Andrew Jackson.

So I'll offer a few points to at least complicate the prevailing picture, which is based on what I would describe as a weird Whig view of Amreican history in which the monarchist Alexander Hamiliton, who thought democracy could only function through massive corruption, and the plutocrat John Quincy Adams are the big heroes of early/antebellum American history.

That view still allows Abraham Lincoln to be a relevant, pro-democracy icon. And I wouldn't quarrel with anything in the short conversation on him during that program. Which brings me to the fact that Lincoln the Great Liberator cited two previous Presidents as his models: Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Jackson led the successful fight against the Bank of the United States, which was an institution doing what its early advocate Hamilton wanted it to do, i.e., function as the defender of concentrated economic power and as a corrupter of Congress.

The term "populism" hadn't been invented yet. But Jackson styled his campaigns as the People vs. the Bank, which stood in for the Elite in a way that fits right into the Mouffle/Laclau definition of populism. I'll settle for "proto-populist," and it was very much on the left by any remotely applicable meaning in the 1830s. Jackson's other big fight was in the Nullification Controversy, when he successfully quashed Calhoun's scheme to nullify federal laws, which the major players at the time certainly understood as a trial run for secession in defense of slavery.

Jackson's Indian policy sucked. So has every other President's, some to greater or lesser degrees, but that's no excuse. As bad as Jackson's was, I don't know of any reason to consider that the infamous Indian removal in the 1830s had a genocidal intent.. Some of the Indian tribes deported to Oklahoma were around during the Civil War to fight against the Union Army, because some of them were slaveowners. (History is complicated.)

Plus these fun facts:

• Jackson's address to Congress on the Nullification Controversy was the first time a President identified American patriotism with support for democracy and the Constitution. That's pretty much the concept that today Jürgen Habermas adovocates as "constitutional patriotism." Although I hear that the term was coined by another philosopher, Dolf Sternberger. But Old Hickory was advocating it back in the day.
• The Cabinet Secretary who spearheaded Jackson's fight against the Bank of the US was an economic radical named Roger Taney, who had done pro bono work as a young lawyer defending escaped slaves from being forcibly returned to their owners. His later career was less helpful for the cause of democracy. Although I guess we could say his Dred Scott decision did "heighten the contradictions."
• Jackson helped the pioneering American feminist Fanny Wright to set up a Utopian community actively dedicated to the abolition of slavery at Nashoba, Tennessee. It may have had less to do with shared goals than with the fact that she was the girlfriend of the Marquis de Lafayette, but still.
• Jackson as a 17-year-old lied about his age so that he could enlist in the Continental Army to fight in the Revolutionary War. So he can legitimately be considered a Founder.
• Also in the anti-British-imperialism category, winning the battle of New Orleans in 1815 prevented Britain from being able to control the Mississippi River and use it to split and weaken the US in the following years. For that battle, Jackson assembled a force that included blacks, Indians, and Jean Lafitte and his pirates.

I try to distinguish between leaders and movements that advanced democracy (Jackson) - even when the politial community was recognized as including only propertied white men - and those that opposed it or tried to push it back (Calhoun; also the entire Republican Party of 2018). But the further back in time you go, the more effort it is conceive of the context.

And 200 years from now it's extremely likely that people will look back at us in 2018, even the flaming lefties, and think we were all depraved and irresponsible. But I'm hoping the pendulum on the left/center-left will swing away from the Hamiltonian Whig view of history. Heck, the Democratic Party may someday decide they should defend their own historical symbolism, including Jefferson and Jackson, instead of tossing them to the Republicans like Trump distributing paper towels in Puerto Rico.