The Wall Street Journal Changes Its Tune, Sort Of

Via Real Clear Politics, a highly reliable organ of the conventional wisdom, I found a link to this piece at the WSJ by Tunku Varadarajan plugging Walter Russell Mead's weekly column there, Global View. Oddly, the Varadarajan piece isn't behind the WDJ paywall, but Global View is. In fact, Real Clear Politics often links to WSJ pieces that you must subscribe to read, an annoying practice that most aggregators don't follow.

What that says to me is that the WSJ is worried that Walter Russell Mead by himself isn't pulling enough paying readers in, and actually, considering his career arc, I think I can see why.

According to the piece, Mr Mead has come to the conclusion that Trump is a Jacksonian:

Jacksonians believe the most important priority of the U.S. government in both foreign and domestic policy is the security and well-being of the American people. A Jacksonian holds that the U.S. “should not seek out foreign quarrels, but when the U.S. or its allies are attacked or threatened or even insulted, they can become very energized, like a hive of bees. If the hive is attacked, they will sting with everything they’ve got.” That describes Mr. Trump, whose airstrikes on Iran Mr. Mead calls “a very Jacksonian action.”

Mead has been interpreting presidents as Jacksonian for almost 30 years, but as far as I can tell, all he means by the term "Jacksonian" is "good". On one hand, I will certainly agree that a review of Andrew Jackson's character and career shows similarities with Trump. His marital irregularities made him politically vulnerable. He was notorious for his quick temper. He had a record of failures in real estate. Like Trump with Canada and Greenland, Jackson advocated annexing Florida:

In December 1817, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun initiated the First Seminole War by ordering Jackson to lead a campaign "with full power to conduct the war as he may think best". Jackson believed the best way to do this was to seize Florida from Spain once and for all. Before departing, Jackson wrote to President James Monroe, "Let it be signified to me through any channel ... that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished."

So yes, I'll definitely agree that for these and many other reasons, Trump is a Jacksonian. The problem is that Mead made his reputation a generaton ago by announcing that Dubya was Jacksonian, too:

In 1999, American foreign policy academic Walter Russell Mead wrote an influential essay, The Jacksonian Tradition. In it, he identified a strand of US political thought associated with its conservative and anti-intellectual middle and working classes.

The article was highly prescient in anticipating the appeal of George W Bush as president. Now, as the US teeters on the brink of electing an unimaginably worse candidate [Trump 45], it’s worth reading again. Mead’s analysis turns out to be just as perceptive an insight into Donald Trump’s supporters and their political attitudes.

. . . The more idiotic his proposals – like the childish idea that a massive wall is the answer to illegal immigration – the more Jacksonians love him.

. . . Mead’s analysis of Jacksonian foreign policy gives a stark warning of the dangers of a Trump presidency, especially when Trump himself is so notoriously thin-skinned.

But while Andrew Jackson was a real person, "Jacksonianism" is a hypostatization, a fallacy I discussed here. It's a castle in the clouds that you can use to beat or praise whomever you choose without the need to excuse inconvenient contradictions. But let's look at why Dubya, despite Mead's view, was hardly Jacksonian.

Jackson was a product of the frontier and orphaned at 14. He seems to have secured legal training on the basis of his personal qualities alone, as he had no influential relatives. Dubya's family was aristocratic high society; he attended Phillips Exeter and was a legacy bonesman at Yale. According to the Wikipedia link,

[Dubya's] administration increased federal government spending from $1.789 trillion to $2.983 trillion (66 percent), while revenues increased from $2.025 trillion to $2.524 trillion (from 2000 to 2008). . . . Discretionary defense spending was increased by 107 percent, discretionary domestic spending by 62 percent, Medicare spending by 131 percent, social security by 51 percent, and income security spending by 130 percent. Cyclically adjusted, revenues rose by 35 percent and spending by 65 percent. The increase in spending was more than under any predecessor since Lyndon B. Johnson. The number of economic regulation governmental workers increased by 91,196.

. . . Nearly eight million immigrants came to the U.S. from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year period in the nation's history.[177] Almost half entered illegally.[178][unreliable source?] In 2006, Bush urged Congress to allow more than twelve million illegal immigrants to work in the United States with the creation of a "temporary guest-worker program".

In both the elections of 1824 (which he lost to John Quincy Adams when the election went to the House) and 1828 (when he defeated Adams), Jackson ran against Adams as an out-of-touch elitist, something Adams's performance in the White House reinforced. Like John Quincy Adams, who was a Harvard legacy, Dubya was a Yale legacy. Seen from this perspective, that Dubya would wear cowboy boots with black tie is as incongruous as Kamala Harris's upper-class wardrobe and accoutrements as she addressed the urban poor in street argot. Why would Mead and so many orhers who've cited him approvingly ever think of Dubya as a Jacksonian?

I wonder if the wardrobe choices of both Dubya and Harris, especially Dubya in hindsight, aren't a sign that the Americn electorate has gotten smarter over the past decades. At least it's gotten better at telling the difference between a phony Jacksonian and a real one. The Wall Strert Journal and Walter Russell Mead seem to be grudgingly edging over to get on the right side of history.