If Jefferson and Jackson saw political life as a dark struggle of "haves" and "have-nots", Lincoln and the Whigs saw the Democrats–Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Douglasite alike–as an irrational and power-hungry elite, as the real "haves" trying to play the "have-nots" off against the bourgeois "have-somes" in order to lock American politics into a static system where they would always possess a monopoly on authority. Every issue Lincoln spoke for as a legislator–the railroads, land grants, tariffs–and every rhetorical gesture, from his abusive early political journalism to the refinement of the Gettysburg Address, was undergirded by his unwavering allegiance to the Whig ideology . . . to the formation of an optimistic and socially mobile bourgeoisie who would guarantee an equal opportunity that "the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of men," "that every man can take care of himself," to give all a chance," to "improve one's condition." (Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, p. 458.)
This quote is taken from a section in Guelzo's book where he argues that the real, adamantly ideological Whig Lincoln has been lost in the American historical mists as everyone, except the most recalcitrant neoconfederate defenders of Dixie, seeks to claim him as their own. But Guelzo is at pains to argue that while Lincoln admired the Jefferson of the Declaration, he detested the static, agrarian, power-aggregating imagination of America that Jefferson and later Jackson represented. Lincoln, good Whig that he was, stood for growth and improvements, and embraced capitalism, particularly small-business capitalism, as the engine that drove that growth. He saw the Democrats as representing the interests of quasi-feudal oligarchs who manipulated the poor yeoman and subsistence farmers, the 'have-nots', into resenting the burgeoning middle class, the 'have-somes'. The more things didn't change, the more it favored the entrenched power of the Jacksonian olligarchs.
Guelzo goes on:
What Lincoln wanted was not so much a triumph of capitalism as the victory of free wage labor as the labor system of capitalism. "Lincoln's main argument against the expansion of slavery rested on the free labor ideal," writes Michael Sandel [p,181], and he "led the North to war in the name of free labor and the small, independent producer."
From the other side of post-industrialism and global free trade, all of this has a touchingly naive ring to it. The painful irony Sandel finds in Lincoln's achievement is the "lack of fit" between the ideal of free wage labor and the realities of the post war economy, when the United States entered fully into the development of mass industrial state. With two decades of Lincoln's death, the industrial wage labor had become "system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South." Lincoln has often been forgiven this short-sightedness on the grounds that he had no real experience of the sort of mass industrial proletariat, politically free but economically powerless, which would make genuine social mobility remote. Still, Lincoln was not entirely blind to the possibility that mobility could become wedded to the pursuit of selfishness and exploitation.
Lincoln had misgivings that the Whig ideal of individualistic self-reliance and social mobility had a dark side, but he didn't live long enough to see it so horrifically realized during the Robber Baron era. Had he lived, there's good reason to believe that he would have aligned with the progressives in the Republican Party who gradually morphed into Democrats as it became clear that the Republican Party had no interest in the plight of the new wage slaves in the industrial north. I think his relationship to that dimension of Whiggery, the the part prone to selfishness and exploitation, would probably have been very similar to that of the trust-busting Republican Whig, Teddy Roosevelt.
Whatever. Here's the point I want to make and which I will explore in future posts: Jefferson and Jackson were Rouseauans and Hamilton and Lincoln were Lockeans. But if Rouseauans in Europe lean left, Rouseauans in America lean right. The American Revolution was Lockean, and the French Revolution was left-Rouseauan. If Rouseauans in France morphed into the san-culottes mob who brought the world the Terror in the 1790s, the right Rouseauans in America brought us the Jacksonian oligarchs and the stream in American politics that was pro-slavery and white supremacist in the 19th century and the proto fascists who flocked to Huey Long in the '30s, George Wallace in the '60s, and now the militia groups and Tea Partiers in the '90s and '00s. It's ultimately not about party affiliation; it's about a mentality. And the right-Rouseauan mentality is as fundamental part of the American political architecture as the Lockean Whig mentality is.
So if the left in Europe is primarily Rouseauan in its mentality, the left in the U.S. is Lockean. The progressive impulse in American politics has always been driven more by an educated business, artisan, and professonal middle class and less by a consciousness-raised but poorly educated proletariat, as is more the case in Europe and in the Third World. The left in America is by temperament Whiggishly rational, moderate, and process and rules centered. Those on the right in America are mainly Jacksonians who are by temperament passions-driven and autocratic. The Whigs promoted individualism, mobility, compromise; the Jacksonians promoted a fear-and-resentment driven pseudo-egalitarianism of the mob that was easily manipulated by the Jacksonian oligarchs, particularly in the South.
The Whiggish left thinks that political conflict is a test of opposing minds. The Jacksonian right thinks that political conflict is a test of opposing wills. That's why in the U.S. the left generally loses to the right. They complacently assume that because they've won the argument on the facts that that's enough. The right understands that facts don't matter; only the will to dominate does. They understand that most Americans don't care about who's technically correct; they only care about who's stronger and who wins. The right, therefore, is not interested in fair-minded compromise, but it is quite willing to exploit the Whiggish Left's valuation of reason, fair-mindedness, and its inclination to compromise. This was true in the 1840s and '50s, and it's true today.
It's becoming clearer, to me at least, that the alliance between the Whiggish left and the Jacksonian right in the Democratic Party effected by the crisis of the 1930s was temporary and perhaps aberrational. It was destroyed in the 1970s, and with the ascent of Reaganism, the nation reverted to the 19th century Whiggish Left vs. Jacksonian Right norm. The alliance within the Democratic Party from the '30s through the '70s lasted so long as the underlying tensions were suppressed by the united war effort in the '40s, and the ensuing prosperity of the '50s and '60s. The Democrats in the '70s, insofar as the party became dominated by anti-war activists and proponents of identity and sexual politics, pushed the Jacksonians out of the party, and the Republicans corporate oligarchs were glad to welcome them. And that's where we are now–living with the same fundamental factional dynamics that ripped the country apart in the runup to the Civil War.
This is the fundamental architecture of politics in America. On the one hand the Jacksonians–oligarchs
supported by educated aspirational oligarchs and poorly educated and fear-and-resentment filled have-nots.
On the other hand, there are the left-leaning, culturally liberal Whigs, comprising the better-educated, cosmopolitan urban and suburban information class allied with those considered 'Other' by the Jacksonians, primarily Blacks and Hispanics. The system is in so many ways set up to favor the Jacksonians because they are well funded, they are clear and united in their objectives, they control the media, and they have so far been able to harness the passion of the Jacksonian mob.
While the coalition that comprises the the Democrats is larger than the Republican coalition, their superiority in number is easily nullified. The Democrats are dominated by culturally left Whiggish Yuppies whose only real passion is the advancement of their careers. Apart from a few politically correct platitudes, as a group they stand for nothing, and they are pathologically risk averse and unwilling to go to the mat for the things they do stand for. The have-not Hispanics and Blacks are unfunded, disorganized, and unmotivated–especially compared to the have-not Jacksonians–at least for now. This coalition of culturally left Whigs and poor blacks and Hispanics chronically loses in their struggle with the Jacksonians, and they will continue to lose unless something changes in the fundamental passional dynamics. And it looks like that dynamism has to come from Blacks and Hispanics, because it ain't coming from the Whigs. They simply haven't the will.
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