March 16, 2017

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Donald Trump Sees Himself in Andrew Jackson : The president deserves the Jackson legacy, but not for the reasons he'd like. (Jamelle Bouie, 3/16/17, Slate)

Trump, who hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office, sees himself in the seventh president of the United States. [...]

That's one view of Jackson. There is another. That perspective sees Jackson in a different tradition. Not of democracy, but of white supremacy. This Jackson was a planter who built his wealth and influence with the stolen labor of more than 200 enslaved Africans. He forced Native Americans off their land in a campaign of removal that claimed thousands of lives in service of white expansion and white hegemony.

Jacksonian democracy, in other words, was a racial democracy built on a foundation of ethnic cleansing, committed to race hierarchy and enslavement. And while Jackson rejected the nullification theories of his vice president, John C. Calhoun, he all but embraced the South Carolinian's view that slavery--and racial caste more broadly--was "the best guarantee to equality among the whites." Along with that racial ideology, he brought ceaseless condemnation of elite corruption and a profoundly anti-government philosophy that contributed to the panic of 1837, a crushing depression that lasted more than a half-decade.

Posted by at March 16, 2017 7:05 AM

  

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