TPM: Trump Knows Jack about Andrew Jackson. SAD!
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Trump imagines that Jackson, despite being a “very tough person” would have worked things out because he was “really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, ‘There’s no reason for this.'”
Well, not exactly.
Jackson tended to personalize political conflict. But the Nullification Crisis cut to the core of one of his central beliefs: the inviolability of the federal union. Today we hear ‘nationalism’ used as a byword for xenophobia, racism and militarism. Jackson had his mix of each. But Jackson thought the crisis, what Calhoun was doing could not have been more important. He actually wanted to march an army down to South Carolina and hang Calhoun. To the extent Jackson knew about the Civil War and was “really angry” about it, he was really angry at the Southern planter aristocrats who would later start the Civil War. He was ready to go to war in 1832-33 to vindicate the union and popular democracy – two concepts that to him were basically inseparable. In other words, if we take Trump’s comments on their own terms he’s completely wrong. Jackson thought the issue couldn’t be more important and he was ready to go to war and crush the nullifiers
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Trump’s claim in this interview that the Civil War didn’t need to happen and could have been worked out is rooted in Southern pro-slavery revisionism (and its descendent, contemporary neo-Confederacy) and more recently in the intellectuals who were and are the seedbed of what we now call the alt-right. Both Jackson and Calhoun were slaveholders. But slavery and Southern sectionalism were Calhoun’s guidestars. The crisis of the early 1830s was his effort to draw a line, a bastardized constitutional line to protect slavery and Southern power in what he accurately believed was an inevitable conflict. On this front, in addition to his narrow misunderstanding of Jackson’s feelings ‘about the Civil War’, Trump is far more in the Calhounite tradition than the Jacksonian one. Indeed, it’s from the descendants of Calhounism that Trump draws his greatest political punch.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-knows-jack-about-andrew-jackson-sad
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