Broadly, Jacksonian democracy, in contrast to the Jeffersonian era, promoted the strength of the executive branch and the presidency at the expense of Congressional power, while also seeking to broaden the public’s participation in government. Jacksonians believed in enfranchising all white men, rather than just the propertied class, and supported the patronage system that enabled politicians to appoint their supporters into administrative offices, arguing it would reduce the power of elites and prevent aristocracies from emerging. They demanded elected (not appointed) judges and rewrote many state constitutions to reflect the new values. In national terms the Jacksonians favored geographical expansion, justifying it in terms of Manifest Destiny. There was usually a consensus among both Jacksonians and Whigs that battles over slavery should be avoided.
.. Manifest Destiny? What right-thinking American — in stark counterpoint to the left — doesn’t believe that the American experience is exceptional? That the nation hasn’t been ordained by God to be a beckon of freedom and hope in a dark world of tyrannies? Who, among the friends of liberty, doesn’t want to shout this from rooftops?
.. Like the Jacksonians (certainly like Jackson), liberty rebels spoil for the fight, and aren’t waiting around for the left to take the first shots anymore. Trump is showing how to knock the left and its establishment lackeys on their keisters.
Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate
“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.”
.. 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.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427536/donald-trump-appeal-jacksonian
Jacksonian: Donald Trump’s Politics of Fear
The Republicans who support Trump—who disproportionately lack college degrees—are largely what Walter Russell Mead calls “Jacksonians.” Jacksonians—whom Mead distinguishes from democracy-spreading “Wilsonians,” commerce-oriented “Hamiltonians,” and empire-fearing “Jeffersonians”—are hawkish isolationists.
.. They don’t believe that American security depends on democratizing far-off lands, something they suspect is impossible. And when there’s a crisis in some other part of the world, their first reaction is likely to be: Why can’t the countries over there handle it?
.. They’re the kind of people who, during Vietnam, told pollsters that America should either bomb North Vietnam back to the stone age or get the hell out.
.. Another Jacksonian favorite was Joseph McCarthy, who told Americans that battling the Soviet Union did not require costly foreign deployments or complex international alliances. America could keep itself safe simply by rooting out communists at home.
.. Trump has responded to Americans’ fear of foreign threats by arguing that the real menace lies within. Since the Paris attacks, while the “serious” GOP contenders have proposed establishing no-fly zones and arming Kurdish rebels in Syria, Trump has focused on registering Muslims and closing mosques in the U.S. while insisting that he “watched … thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrate 9/11.
.. And among Jacksonians, his message is resonating for the same reason McCarthy’s did: Because if the core problem is treason at home, not geopolitics abroad, then solving it is cheaper and simpler. Instead of solving the world’s pathologies, you simply expel them from your midst.