A Generation Ago, They Called Dubya "Jacksonian"

The Washington Post, September 17, 2002:

When President Bush travels today to Andrew Jackson's hometown of Nashville, he may wish to stop by the Hermitage and lay a wreath at the grave of the Hero of New Orleans. More and more, Bush has been acting like the seventh president.

Superficially, such a comparison is absurd. Jackson led a populist revolt against concentrated wealth in undoing the Bank of the United States; Bush is closely allied with corporate interests.

I wouldn't say "absurd" so much as "obtuse". The writer, Dana Milbank, goes on,

Jackson lost a disputed election in 1824 to the son of a former president; Bush, as son of a former president, won such a disputed election. Jackson was an uneducated war hero and father of the Democratic Party. Bush, of Andover, Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard, came to office in hopes of imitating McKinley, who defeated Jacksonian style populism in building the modern Republican Party a century ago.

Wait just a moment. Milbank misses an important point, Dubya's 2000 opponent:

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., as the second of two children born to Albert Gore Sr., a U.S. Representative who later served for 18 years as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee. . . . During the school year he lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in the Embassy Row section in Washington D.C. . . . Gore attended St. Albans School, an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for boys in Washington, D.C. from 1956 to 1965, a prestigious feeder school for the Ivy League. . . . He graduated 25th in a class of 51, applied to one college, Harvard University, and was accepted.

It's pretty clear that Al Jr was admitted to Harvard in a "basket" reserved for children of celebrities, prominent politicians, and other powerful figures. It didn't hurt that he came from St Albans, but of course, that's how he got into St Albans, too. Dubya, Yale Bonesman, was that because his dad was a Yale Bonesman before him, but then Bush pere's dad, Prescott Bush, was a Bonesman, too. Prescott's uncle and grandfather were Yalies as well.

In fact, Dubya's 2004 opponent, John Kerry, was also a member of Skull and Bones at Yale. In retrospect, what a strange interlude that was -- with few exceptions, beginning in 1988, a succession of privileged, elite-school alumni competed with each other for the presidency from both parties, all of them increasingly detached from the plebeian American experience.

We might say this culminated in Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, only nominally people of color, neither a descendant of US African slaves, whose childhoods were privileged, much of that time living outside the US. Harris in particular dressed as a full-fledged member of the US white upper class while affecting African-American street argot, and very few in the media had the temerity to speak about this. Milbank noted a similar juxtaposition in his 2002 essay:

Jackson was a frontiersman who spoke of the "idiots" in Washington. The cowboy-boot wearing Bush often ridicules Washington in speeches.

A legacy Yale Bonesman who wears cowboy boots whose grandfather was a Wall Street banker closely associated with the Democrat Harrimans. Not all that different from Kamala Harris, if you ask me. Milbank goes on to explore Dubya's "Jacksonian" instincts:

The Council on Foreign Relations' Walter Russell Mead, in a book last year titled "Special Providence," discerned four strains of American foreign policy: the Hamiltonian approach, which favors international commerce and institutions; the Jeffersonian approach, which frowns on costly international entanglements; the Jacksonian approach, an unapologetic flexing of military might; and the Wilsonian approach, an internationalism based on moral values.

The first President Bush had heavy Hamiltonian instincts. Bill Clinton mixed the Hamiltonian with the Wilsonian. Mead's book came out before it was possible to categorize the current president and his response to the Sept. 11 attacks. A recent conversation with Mead, though, allowed for some updating: Bush, he says, is increasingly pure Jacksonian.

The Jacksonian label "summarizes everything Europeans don't like about a strain of American foreign policy," Mead said. "It's a feeling that the preservation of our people, our national community, is the highest law."

Jacksonians have little use for international law. When Jackson was fighting Indians, he crossed into foreign territory, arrested and hanged British subjects. As president, he sent the Navy to Sumatra to burn a settlement that had insulted the American flag.

But if Mead thought Dubya was a pure Jacksonian, what is Trump? On Trump's first Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, Mead wrote,

For the first time in 70 years, the American people have elected a president who disparages the policies, ideas, and institutions at the heart of postwar U.S. foreign policy.

Wait. What about Dubya? But Mead goes on to re-explain his four basic foreign poicy strains:

When the Soviet Union fell, Hamiltonians responded by doubling down on the creation of a global liberal order, understood primarily in economic terms.

Wilsonians, meanwhile, also believed that the creation of a global liberal order was a vital U.S. interest, but they conceived of it in terms of values rather than economics. Seeing corrupt and authoritarian regimes abroad as a leading cause of conflict and violence, Wilsonians sought peace through the promotion of human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law.

. . . Jeffersonians, including today's so-called realists, argue that reducing the United States' global profile would reduce the costs and risks of foreign policy. They seek to define U.S. interests narrowly and advance them in the safest and most economical ways. . . . Both Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seemed to think that they could surf the rising tide of Jeffersonian thinking during the Republican presidential primary. But Donald Trump sensed something that his political rivals failed to grasp: that the truly surging force in American politics wasn't Jeffersonian minimalism. It was Jacksonian populist nationalism.

I'm not at all sure that Mead understood Trump especially well then, and still less now. What about Trump's Christmas messages on Truth Social?

Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump kicked off the lengthy posts by wishing a merry Christmas to all, “including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal.”

. . . Trump then mocked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he referred to as “governor," and suggested once again that the United States could annex Canada as its 51st state.

He wrote that "if Canada was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World."

Trump continued his post by addressing “the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will!”

Jacksonian? If you ask me, right now, Trump is more like Teddy Roosevelt mixed with Frank Zappa. But let's look at the originator of this "Jacksonian" theory, Walter Russell Mead himself:

He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs, the bimonthly foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

. . . Mead was educated at the Groton School, a private boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts. He then graduated from Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature.

In other words, he's a member of the traditional US upper class telling us how to think about the traditional US upper class, which at the moment is in turmoil. He wouldn't know a Jacksonian if it bit him on the butt, and I suspect his understanding of Trump at this point is minimal. Trump is beyond Jacksonian, something outside the box.