Dang…I think I’m a Jacksonian!

Heard the one about the old Texas cowboy visiting the big city who strays into a lesbian bar? He sits down on a bar stool next to a tough-looking woman in biker leathers; tips his hat politely; and says, “Howdy, ma’am.” She looks at him hard and says, “Don’t ma’am me, cowpoke. I’m a lesbian. All I think about is young, beautiful women and their soft, lovely bodies, and all the things I can do to them. That’s all I think about, day in, day out, at night, all night and all day when I’m at work.” Thinking she’d shocked him, she challenged him with, “So whaddaya think about that?” The old fellow looks at her for a long thoughtful moment and responds, “Well, when I walked in here I thought for sure I was a cowboy, but dang if you ain’t got me wonderin’ if mebbe I ain’t a lesbian.”

Well, that’s the way I feel after wandering in to the-american-interest.com and reading Charles C.W. Cooke’s “Andrew Jackson, Revenant.” I was in there only a few paragraphs before I said to myself, “Dang, I think I’m a Jacksonian.” By the end of the piece, I knew I was.

For starters, Cooke says Jacksonians see the 2nd Amendment as the foundation of our freedom and security. That’s me for sure. Here’s more:

It is Jacksonians who most resent illegal immigration, don’t want to subsidize the urban poor, support aggressive policing and long prison sentences for violent offenders and who are the slowest to ‘evolve’ on issues like gay marriage and transgender rights.

Cooke notes that Jacksonians have been the slowest segment of American society to come around on racial advancements but says this regarding that:

Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress.

Cooke explains that Jacksonians have difficulty in organizing politically and exerting their influence:

Jacksonians are neither liberal nor conservative in the ways that political elites use those terms; they are radically egalitarian, radically pro-middle class, radically patriotic, radically pro-Social Security. They are not, under normal circumstances, joiners in politics; they are individualists who organize in response to threats, and their individualism goes to their stands on what outsiders sometimes think are the social issues that unite them.

With regard to Jacksonian morality and religious beliefs, Cooke says this:

Many Jacksonians, for example, are not evangelicals and not even Christian at all. While some are strongly anti-abortion, others believe that individual freedom makes abortion nobody’s business but their own. Some stand strongly behind the drug war; many indulge in recreational drugs and some Jacksonians grow or manufacture them, much like the moonshiners who have been evading ‘revenuers’ since the Washington administration.

While he lays out a number of difficulties facing any sort of immediate Jacksonian movement, Cooke says:

What we are seeing in American politics today is a Jacksonian surge. It is not yet a revolution on the scale of Old Hickory’s movement that transformed American politics for a generation. Such a revolution may not be possible in today’s America, and in any case the current wave of Jacksonian activism and consciousness is still in an early and somewhat incoherent phase.

And then he gets to the possibility of Jacksonian influences in the current presidential contest:

Donald Trump, for now, is serving as a kind of blank screen on which Jacksonians project their hopes. Proposing himself as a strong leader who ‘gets’ America but is above party, Trump appeals to Jacksonian ideas about leadership. … Indeed, one of the reasons that Trump hasn’t been hurt by attacks that highlight his lack of long term commitment to the boilerplate conservative agenda (either in the social or economic conservative variant) is that Jacksonian voters are less dogmatic and less conservative than some of their would-be political representatives care to acknowledge.

Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy, it now seems clear that Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack.

Several months ago I expressed my belief that Donald Trump’s appeal was Jacksonian, but this is the first time I’ve seen the premise spelled out so coherently. Thank you, Charles C.W. Cooke. What I’m wondering now is how many folks out there reading this are saying to themselves, much like that old cowboy in the lesbian bar, “Dang, I think I’m a Jacksonian!”

Crossposted at American Thinker

Category: Politics