The Democrats used to hold Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinners. Not anymore.

Andrew Jackson's Beginnings:

His father died shortly before he was born. His widowed mother was left to raise three sons, one a newborn, alone. When the American Revolutionary War reached the Carolinas, the Jacksons paid a high price. Andrew’s older brother Hugh died of heatstroke in 1779, after a battle. In 1781, Andrew and his brother Robert who had joined the patriot cause, were captured by the British. Andrew was only thirteen.

During their captivity, the Jackson brothers were mistreated and contracted smallpox. Robert would not survive. He died shortly after Mrs. Jackson had arranged for their release. Andrew had been slashed by a British officer when he refused to polish the officer’s boots. Young Andrew would survive, but soon after he was well, his mother volunteered to aid sick soldiers in Charleston where she contracted cholera and died. Orphaned at age fourteen, Andrew Jackson unsurprisingly would hold a lifelong hostility towards Great Britain.

With rather a piecemeal form of education, as many at the time had, young Andrew Jackson apprenticed with a saddle-maker, taught in the local school a bit, and then worked in the law office of Spruce McCay where he learned enough law to be admitted into the North Carolina bar in 1787.

Not the typical picture of a patrician.

Young Mr. Jackson knew enough about the law to get work in the frontier towns. He soon moved west to what was soon to be the state of Tennessee. He boarded at the home of Rachel Stockly Donelson, where he met her daughter Rachel, who would become his wife and lifelong love.

Jackson would find himself in many fights defending Rachel’s honor. Rachel had been in a bad marriage, and although she thought she was divorced when she married Andrew in 1791, it turns out she wasn’t. Legal mayhem in the newly shifting jurisdictions were to blame. The Jacksons married again in 1794, but this legal technicality would dog them Rachel’s entire life.

Amazingly, when Andrew Jackson ran for the U.S. Presidency in 1828, this confusion about Rachel’s marital status at the time she married Andrew, was a major issue raised by Andrew Jackson’s opposition, while the fact that he had killed a man in a duel in 1806, was not!

Influences of past presidents on today's politics

What to you think about these characterizations?

This is the wrap-up of John Ringo's main points, but the thread continues after this.

What you are seeing now and have been for the last ten years or so is the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian wing going at it hammer and tongs live in living color. When antifa was going at it with Proud Boys that was Jeffersonian vs Jacksonian.

Trump is the first fully Jacksonian President and JD Vance is the poster child for Jacksonianism.

This is what has everyone in the establishment confused. They had no clue the Jacksonians even EXISTED. Most of the Jacksonians were checked out because no party really represented their interests.

The two revolutionary, reactionary, head banger elements of American politics are finally going at it hammer and tongs and the Jeffersonians are losing badly. (Currently.)

This is also MASSIVELY confusing on the international front because NOBODY ever lets the Jacksonians near international politics. They are strictly invisible.

Now, all of a sudden, the international community is seeing this snarling pit bull of Jacksonianism rising in the US and it has no clue how to react.

Anything absolutely new is terrifying. And Jacksonianism is pretty scary. When we get mad, we don't think in terms of 'negotiated settlements.'

The near future appears to continue to be the Jacksonians and Jeffersonians fighting it out with the Wilsonians and Madisonians increasingly sidelined.

What the long term holds will be interesting to see.

But the world had better get used to the Jacksonians.

We're out of the den and not interested in being put back in 'our place.'

You really should have left the kids alone.

Ringo makes reference to an earlier essay. Here are some excerpts from an academic version, 1999.

The Jacksonian Tradition. Walter Russell Mead.

Abstract: The author examines the history and nature of US foreign policy. Topics include goals of government, post-cold war politics, and protectionism

The School of Andrew Jackson

IT IS a tribute to the general historical amnesia about American politics between the War of 1812 and the Civil War that Andrew Jackson is not more widely counted among the greatest of American presidents. Victor in the Battle of New Orleans--perhaps the most decisive battle in the shaping of the modern world between Trafalgar and Stalingrad--Andrew Jackson laid the foundation of American politics for most of the nineteenth century, and his influence is still felt today. With the ever ready help of the brilliant Martin Van Buren, he took American politics from the era of silk stockings into the smoke-filled room. Every political party since his presidency has drawn on the symbolism, the institutions and the instruments of power that Jackson pioneered.

A principal explanation of why Jacksonian politics are so poorly understood is that Jacksonianism is less an intellectual or political movement than an expression of the social, cultural and religious values of a large portion of the American public. And it is doubly obscure because it happens to be rooted in one of the portions of the public least represented in the media and the professoriat. Jacksonian America is a folk community with a strong sense of common values and common destiny; though periodically led by intellectually brilliant men--like Andrew Jackson himself--it is neither an ideology nor a self-conscious movement with a clear historical direction or political table of organization. Nevertheless, Jacksonian America has produced--and looks set to continue to produce--one political leader and movement after another, and it is likely to continue to enjoy major influence over both foreign and domestic policy in the United States for the foreseeable future.

Which presidential tradition is this?

Music

The Battle of New Orleans

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, February 15, What has surprised you (and others) most about Trump 2?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.