User talk:JWeb616

Jacksonian Democracy
It's hard to align it as left vs. right by modern standards. I don't think that Americans in the 1830s used the words "left" and "right" politically, except to refer to the French revolution. See also Herrenvolk democracy... AnonMoos (talk) 13:51, 17 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I'll admit that those terms weren't in common circulation at the time in America, but of course they are just shorthand for broader phenomena. It should also be noted that for a long time both major parties in any given party system had a mix or right and left-wing factions inside of them which further muddies the waters. And I understand that there's always going to be difficulty in defining a movement or regime as Left and Right by a pure abstract standard because people don't intrinsically operate that way and are too flawed to ever do so. To use the most extreme examples, every communist regime in existence tends to fall short on what a pure definition of the Left as we define it in the Liberal West now. Strong nationalistic fervor, far from cosmopolitan liberalism in their social norms and major human rights issues.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't call entities like the communist parties of China or Cuba left-wing.  Such problems can show up to different degrees in regimes on any part of the political spectrum whether it be in the pursuit of loftier goals or the movement decaying after some time. There were very real problems under their watch that continued to plague minorities in the periods specified and I can't emphasize enough that I don't mean to minimize them by any means.


 * Getting to what I'm sure is the meat of the matter for this specific disagreement, defining Jacksonian Democracy by slavery, which was not actually a clean-cut partisan divide during the Second Party System as both had a mix with several Southern Whigs including Alexander Stephens and George Fitzhugh being adamantly pro-slavery while many Democrats later left to join the Free Soil Party or later the Republicans when it took center-stage with most ultimately putting it on the back-burner, and Indian removal, which many of the Republicans in power after the Civil War weren't exactly great on either, is to my mind tantamount to boiling down the New Deal to redlining and Japanese internment. A lot of people don't seem to grasp just how much of a violent shift there was from the second to the Third Party System.  Anyway, I think the subject of a he New Deal Democrats is a useful point of comparison to run a bit more with.
 * The Jacksonian Democrats were the party of smalltime farmers, industrial laborers and the urban underclass with a sturdy base of support, including in Congress, in the South among the working class in particular which was very much the same case with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Coalition under him which had a precarious relationship with racial matters. And while we're at it, it's also worth mentioning that they were the ones who embraced the mass immigration of their time which incensed nativists who organized against them as the Know Nothings and were more defensive of the wall between church and state challenged by the wave of Evangelicals inspired by the Second Great Awakening who largely threw in with the Whigs.  Liberal Democratic leaders of the New Deal era like FDR and Truman traced their own political ancestry to Jackson as well as the also now oft contended Jefferson from before him while we're at it.
 * They understood themselves to be liberal and the inheritors to what they understood to be in keeping with the spirit of Jefferson and Jackson's liberal tradition which partly manifested in their paralleling coalitions. Both even ruffled the feathers of the hardline reactionary old guard Southern elite who were willing to rebel against them. In Jackson's case it was exhibited through the formation of the Nullifier Party and the emergence of the Cotton Whigs while in FDR's many conservative Southern Democrats were willing to throw in with the Republicans as part of the Conservative Coalition that opposed the New Deal.  And of course the point that I'm building up to here is that despite the places where they fell short, most people wouldn't say the New Dealers when taken on balance was to the Left in their particular time and place. That's not to mention the influence of the Jacksonian legacy on later seminal left-wing populists like William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long as noted on the Left-wing populism Wikipedia page.
 * The comparison of the concept to Herrenvolk Democracy is worth touching on but much like when you see people through a modern lens claim limited-government and laissez-faire promoting Classical Liberal groups as being right-wing, like the Jeffersonian Republicans or Gladstonian Liberals say, it's removing the matter from historical and cultural context by using associations forged in the time since. From where they started and where things were going. Not to mention that the situation for minorities like slaves and Native Americans was already really rough beforehand.  By the standards of the time and in absolute terms, inescapable to most of the people who had to actually live then to some degree which is why I think solely projecting modern notions onto the past in this discussion is flawed, Jacksonian Democracy did mark a move from a somewhat elitist system to a more populist one than America had seen prior.  Many of them even wanted to push things further than they did by doing stuff like abolishing the electoral college or making judges and senators elected positions.
 * The brass tacks of it is that there wasn't another major nation, certainly not any on the scale of the United States, that had as democratic of a political culture as the it did at the time. There really wasn't another one around getting the issue of race right to compare it to. But I guess this gets into a big difference.  You talked about using modern standards while I myself prioritize organic development over what appears to be abstract categorization when it comes to discerning political evolution.  I'm not saying it's wrong for you to do so, but it does possibly illustrate the different places from which we are coming at it and creates the impasse we probably have on this topic which might be impossible to overcome.  Though who knows, maybe I'm wrong.  Though I might understand not slotting Jacksonian Democracy into either the Left or Right wing categories, I've seen a lot of people lately try to assert the latter and I just don't think that's more accurate.  My apologies about how long this response turned out to be.  I hope you don't take that as me trying to be aggressive or obnoxious, I just think there are a lot of layers to this conversation worth addressing.  Feel free to respond to whatever you want or add whatever you wish if you so choose.  And if there's anything you'd like me to clear up, because looking back on this it might be a bit messy, I wouldn't mind doing so.  In any case, take care for now. JWeb616 (talk) 05:41, 18 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I don't want to debate all this at any length, but "liberal" is another word that's probably anachronistic to the 1830's United States, in the way that you're using it. According to the Wikipedia Liberalism article, "positive liberalism" was developed by T. H. Green, who was born in 1836.
 * Also, I don't see how an analogy with FDR is useful. FDR basically regarded race as a distraction from his economic agenda, and did what he needed to do to get his policies implemented, trying to keep the Southern committee chairmen in Congress as well as A. Philip Randolph at least minimally appeased.  And however wrong Japanese internment was, it was the result of catastrophic world events impinging on the United States, and not something that the Roosevelt administration would have done spontaneously.  If only Japanese citizens had been detained (and not American citizens of Japanese ethnicity also), then it would have been within accepted norms on the treatment of enemy aliens in wartime (a number of German citizens and Italian citizens were also detained).
 * By contrast, discrimination was part of Andrew Jackson's personal governing philosophy.  He was for a large degree of democracy among adult white males, and for moving Indians out of the way to benefit white people.  The post-Civil-War U.S. record on the treatment of Indians is a sad history of sleazy expedience (mainly), causing Indians who largely lived by hunting and gathering to give way to farmers and miners who made much more intensive use of the land.   In contrast, Andrew Jackson caused fairly-densely settled and so-called "civilized" Indian farmers to give way to White farmers. AnonMoos (talk) 03:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
 * So, there were three reasons I went into an in-depth comparison between the eras of Jacksonian Democracy and the New Deal. The first and I’ll fully admit lesser point in comparing the negative events that transpired during their epochs like Indian removal or redlining was not so much about the particular figureheads themselves, but the legacies of their movements and how you can find significant stains on either which you can boil them down to when trying to asses their greater impact.  That’s why I phrased it in that section as Jacksonian Democracy and the New Deal rather than Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt.  I do think there’s some more to dig into around those men themselves, with regard to both the good and the bad, but that last comment stayed long passed its welcome evidently and that isn’t really the main focus.  What we are actually discussing is the content of the page about the broader concept inspired by the man taken in its totality as opposed to just the man himself.  Sure his name is alluded to in it, but that’s like saying we reduce, I don’t know, Marxism to just what Karl Marx himself said and did while not taking into account the variations in and later developments by its adherents as well.
 * What I think we can both agree on would be that these political projects were much bigger than those single men and naturally were carried out by a wide variety of people with their own perspectives on a variety of things including slavery in the case of the Jacksonian Democrats. There were a number of Republicans and particularly the Free Soilers who played a part in forming the Republican Party that were Jacksonian Democrats like Lincoln’s first VP Hannibal Hamlin and his first Secretary of War Simon Cameron who both aligned with the Radical Republicans. That was also exemplified in strong early support for the Republican Party in the states where it was founded Wisconsin and Michigan which were solidly Democratic in the Jacksonian Era with similar examples in other ones like New Hampshire and Maine that later went for the Republicans after the collapse of the Second Party System.  Clearly Jacksonian Democracy meant something a lot bigger than racism to people in those areas who agreed with the core principles he advanced throughout his career.  As touched on earlier, both parties were mixed on such issues during the era and thus tended to get put on the back-burner for the most part.
 * And this gets into maybe the reason I’m as adamant about this as I am. Jacksonian Democracy fundamentally changed American political life and wound up instigating a whole party system.  Even more than most other political movements in American history I find it hard to leave it in a vacuum as it obviously fits into the larger American narrative somewhere.  Warts and all, it marked a turn in some direction for the country.  Let me put it this way.  Few people would disagree, say, that the Jeffersonian Republicans represented what we’d call the Left during the political landscape of the Founding.  Even if the name wasn’t in circulation in that time either, they plainly embodied what we’ve come to recognize as Classical Liberalism in terms of policy, pushed to extend the political franchise to the common man and took the side of Revolutionary France over Great Britain.  Fewer would deny that the New Dealers represented the mainstream American Left in their day given the ways in which they substantially transformed the government and provoked the rise of what became known as the modern conservative movement.  Well, until fairly recently, it was the modern conservative movement in any case.  But obviously, there’s some space in-between.
 * That starts to get at the second reason I compared Jacksonian Democracy and the New Deal which does dovetail into the third. The shepherds of the New Deal like FDR and Truman themselves, held by most as icons of Modern Liberalism, in no uncertain terms identified their own political tradition with the underlying ethos of the Jacksonians.  And that I argued that they did fulfill the same basic political role and that it was indeed manifested in their mirroring coalitions.  As said before, both largely comprised of smalltime farmers, industrial laborers and the urban underclass.  They were popular nationwide and that included heavy support in the South from which they had overlapping critics who tended to be much of the plantation, black belt and low country types.  They favored the self-described conservative Whigs or the Nullifiers during the Age of Jackson while their successors threw in with Republicans as the Conservative Coalition that opposed the New Deal.  And both by their own accounts were essentially following in the footsteps of the Jeffersonians.  Something evident from their working class bases, enemies from the financial establishment, anti-elitist rhetoric those lent themselves to and the “remarkable ferment” of their eras as George McGovern put it.
 * Looking at the big question around the political position through an evolutionary lens in addition to an essentialist one, Jacksonian Democracy strikes me as a transitionary fossil that slides more neatly into the arc of the predominant American Left, Liberalism or whatever other label we might choose to give it than it does the Right. While undoubtedly leaving a wider mark on politics we all take for granted, they serve as a more direct link in the chain between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the New Dealers than they are connected to their rivals among the Federalists and the Conservative Coalition.  That also applies to the influence it had on figures such as William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long who are generally considered landmark figures of left-wing populism.  The latter of which is in the America section of Wikipedia’s own Left-wing populism page.  If nothing else, the site should be consistent on the matter unless perhaps there is some extensive discussion that ultimately agrees the change is justified and done across the board.  Of course, none of this is to say that there weren’t several twists and turns along the way or any modern shifts to address.  But I do think there is a discernible through line.
 * I’m sorry about the delayed response if you do care. And maybe I have to apologize for how long this one has turned out to be.  But this should do a somewhat better or less messy job of explaining my take. It helped that there was a more specific device to frame this around.  I get that you place extra emphasis on modern standards to the categorizations and that this probably won’t change your mind.  But this should do a somewhat better job of explaining my take on the topic.  Again, feel free to reply if you want to and in whatever fashion you wish.  If there’s anything I ought to clear up, I will do so.  As said before, I don’t mean for this to be some kind of heated exchange and apologize if I've come off that way.  I think this stuff can be stimulating but hopefully it’s at least been interesting.  And for lack of another close, take care. JWeb616 (talk) 18:27, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * The reason I removed Jacksonian Democracy from the category of "Left-wing populism in the United States" is because it does not fit the category of "Left wing", although it certainly meets the criteria of "Populism in the United States", and I would be in favor of moving it to that category. Although Jacksonian Democracy promoted the common man and expanded suffrage, one can say the same about the entire American political tradition grounded in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, as distinguished from the the old hierarchical system of Europe headed by a monarch and with lands, privileges, and power concentrated in the hands of aristocratic elites (and with a powerful established Church and clergy).
 * However, Jacksonian Democracy was also characterized by support for laissez faire economic policy, Manifest Destiny, states' rights, Indian removal, and focus on individual liberties and enfranchisement for white men.
 * The book "Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism", by Joshua A. Lynn goes into great detail to show how Jacksonian values (grassroots democracy, liberal individualism, and anti-statism) became transformed by Jacksonian Democrats into "staples of conservatism", as the book's synopsis puts it.
 * It should be added that only at the end of the 19th century did the Democratic Party start to evolve into the identifiably "progressive" party that it is today, such that during the during the 20th century, conservative "Jacksonian" Democrats would often be contrasted with progressive "liberal" Democrats.
 * In summary, can Jacksonian Democracy be defined as populist? Absolutely. But to call it "left wing" is confusing and misleading. I therefore suggest moving it to the "Populism in the United States" category.
 * Jacob D (talk) 16:37, 20 September 2022 (UTC)Jacob D