“If you're voting for Donald Trump, you may get something very good or very bad,” Webb said. “If you're voting for Hillary Clinton, you're going to be getting the same thing.”
I read Walter Russell Mead's essay, Andrew Jackson, Revenant, and Webb came to my mind, although Donald Trump's political success inspired the article.
Trump aside, it is one heck of an essay, and Mead diagnoses the situation among Jacksonians quite well. The entire essay is thought-provoking, but here are a few ideas that stuck out at me...
Who are the Jacksonians?
For President Barack Obama and his political allies in particular, Jacksonian America is the father of all evils. Jacksonians are who the then Senator had in mind when, in the campaign of 2008, he spoke of the ‘bitter clingers’ holding on to their guns and their Bibles.
It is Jacksonians who, as I wrote in Special Providence back in 2001, see the Second Amendment as the foundation of and security for American freedom. It is Jacksonians who most resent illegal immigration, don’t want to subsidize the urban poor, support aggressive policing and long prison sentences for violent offenders and who are the slowest to ‘evolve’ on issues like gay marriage and transgender rights.
Historically, Jacksonian America has been the enemy of many of what President Obama, rightly, sees as some of America’s most important advances.
Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress.Progressives hate Jacksonians
Virtually everything about progressive politics today is about liquidating the Jacksonian influence in American life. From immigration policy, touted as ending the era when American whites were the population of the United States, to gun policy and to regulatory policy, President Obama and his coalition aim to crush what Jacksonians love, empower what they fear, and exalt what they hate.Trump is to Jacksonians as Obama was to Progressives...
"Donald Trump, for now, is serving as a kind of blank screen on which Jacksonians project their hopes."Trump's appeal to Jacksonians?
"Jacksonian voters are less dogmatic and less conservative than some of their would-be political representatives care to acknowledge."Please follow the link, read the essay, and tell me what you think.
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