Once
upon a time there was a US presidential candidate
who scared the wits out of his opponents by being a
champion of the common man, vowing in his
campaign to get rid of the corrupt elites in Washington. A
famous hero, he at first won the
election by the slimmest of margins, and yet was cheated (according
to some) out of the prize by a decision in Congress staged
by his enemies.
No,
this fairy tale is not about the man
you may have been thinking of.
It
wasn't Al Gore either, he
lost his presidency in the US Supreme
Court. The man I am referring to went on to win the
US presidency twice more - and no, it wasn't FDR either (he
won four times). After the Inauguration of the hero of this story,
the White House held an open-house reception, to which a huge crowd
arrived, celebrating Andrew Jackson's
victory. The drunken crowd overflowed
the building and brought general chaos, to the point where furniture
was broken and porcelain smashed, and the newly elected President had
to escape by a side exit. That was the election of 1828. The victor,
the 7th
US President, was also the founder of the Democratic party.
Hence,
despite the disparate party labels, Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump
could in some respects be said to be parallel cases, especially in
their appeal to people who have felt «betrayed by the system», in
the rough crowds both have had supporting them, and in the
uncompromising way they both have related to minorities. Jackson
pursued the policy of moving entire nations of Native Americans
beyond the Mississippi; Trump has promised to ship 11 million illegal
immigrants out of the country.
As
for party labels, Trump's link to the Republican party is pretty
tenuous and not very convincing to many Republicans of longer
standing. Is he, then, a closet «populist»? The question is rather
tricky, partly due to Trump's inconsistent statements over time,
partly because populism is not a consensual term, which also has its
special, more concrete meaning in the US, linked to the Populist
Party of a century or so ago. The
Economist
considered the question in an article this summer and concluded
Trump's politics was not populism, but rather «[a]n
unpleasant but often politically successful mix of populism, nativism
and xenophobia, delivered with a dollop of cynicism.” (The
Economist,
July 4th, 2016) (Nativism, in the
sense of giving preference to those born in the country as against
foreigners.)
All
told, it may be an insult to Andrew Jackson, who at his election was
already an experienced politician, a lawyer and a general – a
proven military hero - to compare him to a TV personality and
real-estate mogul like Donald Trump, an unproven politician who has repeatedly demonstrated
himself to be simply a self-obsessed braggard.
