You know, when we usually hear the word democracy,
there's this, I don't know, this glowing, almost
sacred aura around it. Oh, definitely. Like a
pristine Greek temple. Right. You picture the
marble columns, everybody politely taking turns
to speak at the forum, just, you know, respectfully
debating the issues of the day. It's a very comforting
ideal. It feels clean and ordered and entirely
rational. But historically speaking, that pristine
temple is rarely how power actually changes hands.
Yeah, I mean you look at how modern politics
actually functions and suddenly that temple is
completely overrun. It's loud. It's messy. People
are screaming at each other. The marble is covered
in graffiti and like Someone is selling t -shirts
in the lobby. Exactly. It is the absolute definition
of a political street fight. And frankly, it's
been that way for a very long time. And if you,
as an endlessly curious learner, really want
to understand exactly how we got from that polite
aristocratic ideal to the absolute street fight
of modern politics, well, we have the perfect
deep dive for you today. We really do. We are
exploring a massive, comprehensive Wikipedia
article detailing Jacksonian democracy. Our mission
today is to explore this 19th century political
earthquake, really dissecting how it permanently
rewired American politics, how it birthed the
modern democratic party, and how it relied on
some profound Honestly, very dark contradictions
to hold its massive coalition together. So, OK,
let's unpack this. Yeah. To really grasp the
magnitude of this shift, we have to set the stage
in the 1820s. For decades prior, American politics
was defined by what historians call the first
party system. Right. Which is essentially the
Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans.
Exactly. But by the 1820s, that old order had
completely fractured. I mean, the Federalist
Party collapsed. The Democratic Republicans splintered
into all these different different factions,
and the political establishment was just in total
chaos. It was a vacuum. Total vacuum. And out
of that emerged Andrew Jackson. He was an estatesman
from some polished Virginia dynasty. He was a
deeply polarizing, fiercely aggressive military
figure. And he realized that to seize power,
he needed to shift the focus entirely away from
the aristocratic property -owning elites. Right.
He had to focus squarely on what he called the
common man. Exactly. And that concept of the
common. I mean, that is where the entire game
changes because it completely redefines who actually
gets to participate in the political system.
Yeah, because before this era, voting wasn't
a universal right. You couldn't just walk up
to a ballot box. You had to prove you own a certain
amount of land or, you know, pay a specific amount
taxes. A gated community. It really was. But
throughout the 1820s, those laws began to shift
radically. State after state dropped those property
requirements, moving rapidly toward a universal
white male suffrage. The garoping the laws is
just, I mean, giving people the right to vote
is completely useless if they just stay home
on election day. Right. And that legal shift
is just the tip of the iceberg. The mechanics
of how this happened changed the country forever.
Because they couldn't just send an email blast
or run a television ad to get these guys to care.
No, not at all. A brilliant political operative
named Martin Van Buren realized something crucial
about this newly enfranchised group of men. It's
simply wasn't enough to drop the property laws
and say, OK. You have the legal right to vote
now. You would have dragged them out of their
houses. Basically, yeah. You had to engineer
a system to pull them to the polls. They built
the first true mass politics machine. Van Buren
and the Jacksonians created this highly organized
network of local and state committees. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And they established fiercely partisan
newspapers that, I mean, they didn't even pretend
to be objective. Their sole purpose was to cheerlead
for Jackson and just ruthlessly attack his enemies.
And then on election day, they threw massive
public barbecues, right? Oh, huge barbecues.
They organized parades with marching bands and
they practically drowned the electorate in free
whiskey. Which is absolutely wired to picture.
Like there's this famous painting by George Caleb
Bingham called The County Election that perfectly
captures this messy reality. I love that painting.
It's so good. It's not a quiet, dignified affair
at all. The painting shows voting happening out
in the open over several days. You've got people
who are clearly drunk being lit. propped up to
vote. Grizzled veterans, newly naturalized citizens,
all just crammed together in a chaotic public
square. The political machine was physically
dragging people to the ballot box. It was a true
spectacle and the thing is it worked fundamentally.
Because of this machinery, voter turnout skyrocketed
to about 80 % of the adult white male population
by 1840. Wait, 80 %? 80%. That is a staggering
number. The whole philosophy was that the democratic
ideal had to be embraced, even if it meant that
loud, chaotic, and frankly sometimes highly uninformed
votes were deciding the fate of the country.
Right. It feels incredibly modern to me. It's
like the dawn of viral social media campaigns.
Suddenly, the traditional gatekeepers, you know,
those elite property owners in Virginia, Massachusetts,
they are entirely bypassed. Exactly bypassed.
Your political survival no longer depends on
impressing the aristocracy in a parlor room.
It depends on going viral in the streets. But
I have to ask, doesn't this hyper focus on mobilizing
the masses inevitably lead to intense tribalism?
Oh, for sure. Like, if you're constantly trying
to whip up a crowd with parades and partisan
newspapers, don't you have to create a fierce
us versus them dynamic just to keep them angry
and engaged? Well, this raises an important question,
and the historical record shows that the answers
are resounding yes. You cannot maintain that
level of constant frenzied mobilization without
a villain. Right. You need an enemy. Exactly.
And that exact dynamic birthed the second party
system. Jackson was so polarizing and his coalition
was so incredibly well organized that his political
enemies basically had no choice but to adapt
or die. So they formed their own machine. Right.
Figures like Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams,
who frankly despised each other and didn't agree
on much. They were forced to unite and form an
entirely new organization, the Whig Party, just
to counter Jackson's massive electioneering machine.
So the tribalism wasn't a byproduct of the new
system. It was the engine running. It was the
fuel. Yeah. OK, so Jackson builds this massive
loyal base. He defeats the establishment and
he wins the presidency. But once he's actually
sitting in the Oval Office, how does he keep
that massive coalition loyal? I mean, he can't
just keep throwing parades and handing out whiskey
for four straight years. No, no he can't. How
does this new tribal politics fundamentally change
the way the government itself actually operates?
By transforming the government into a system
driven almost entirely by personality and patronage.
You see, Jackson's worldview was intensely almost
uncomfortably personal. How so? Well, if you
look at his letters and his policies, he really
divided the world into two strict camps, friends
who deserve to be rewarded and enemies who needed
to be completely extinguished. There's a very
little gray area with Jackson. Here's where it
gets really interesting, because. They institutionalized
this personal loyalty through something called
the spoils system. Yes, the spoils system. The
Jacksonians essentially claimed that rotating
political appointees in and out of office was
a core democratic duty. Their argument was that
keeping the same civil servants in place for
decades just created a corrupt entrenched class
of bureaucrats who were totally out of touch
with the common man. That was certainly the elegant
public justification anyway. They argued that
any average citizen of normal intelligence could
figure out how to do a government job. So, you
know, rotating them out frequently kept the government
close to the people. But that wasn't how it actually
played out, was it? Not at all. The operational
reality was entirely different. The spoils system
prioritized strict unwavering party loyalty over
actual competence. So they just handed out jobs
to their friends. Exactly. It led to rampant
corruption because people were being handed crucial
government jobs. Things like managing customs
collections, running regional postal routes,
overseeing federal funds, simply because they
had knocked on doors for Jackson during the campaign.
It sounds exactly like a hostile corporate takeover.
The new CEO comes in, fires the entire season's
staff, just because they worked for the old boss
and hands the department head jobs to his drinking
buddies. That is a perfect analogy. I mean, they
claimed this was to prevent corruption, but wasn't
it really just replacing old aristocratic corruption
with a brand new, highly organized form of partisan
corruption? It absolutely was. And what's crucial
to understand is that Jackson didn't really have
a deeply philosophical framework for this. He
was a man of visceral action. The spoils system
was a weapon. It was used to ensure absolute
obedience across the board, which really marked
a massive shift in how the executive branch wielded
power. The presidency was no longer just a bureaucratic
administrative role. It was the command center
of a highly disciplined, partisan army. And if
you stepped out of line, that army would destroy
you. Utterly destroy you. There is a spectacular
anecdote from the source material that perfectly
illustrates how brutal this loyalty test was.
And it involves none other than Davy Crockett.
Oh, this is a great story. So Crockett was a
representative from Tennessee. And he actually
dared to vote against Jackson's Indian removal
policies. And to make matters worse, he refused
to endorse Jackson's inebriated nephew for a
cozy government job. Which was a fatal political
mistake in Jackson's Washington. Right. So in
revenge, Jackson personally targets Crockett
in the next election. He uses his entire political
machine to back a peg -legged opponent named
Adam Huntsman. A peg -legged opponent, yeah.
Jackson successfully engineers Crockett's defeat,
and a furious Crockett famously declares, It's
such a hilarious quote, but the underlying mechanism
is genuinely ruthless. I mean, Jackson literally
hunted down members of his own party who showed
even an ounce of independence. He purged his
own ranks. He did? And once he had solidified
his political army, he turned that weaponized
executive power toward the broader economy. Right.
The warfare moves from politicians to the financial
institutions of the old elite because we see
this massive expansion of the president's veto
power during this time. Huge expansion. Before
Jackson, presidents mostly used the veto only
if they thought a bill was explicitly unconstitutional.
But Jackson used it simply because he didn't
like a policy, or more accurately, because he
didn't like the person proposing it. The perfect
example of that is the Maysville Road veto in
1830. So Congress passed a bill to provide federal
funding for a road that was located entirely
within the state of Kentucky. Jackson vetoes
it. He argues for a strict, limited view of the
federal government, claiming that because the
road was a local project, the federal government
had no business paying for it. But there was
a catch, right? A huge catch. The glaring sub...
was that Kentucky happened to be the home state
of his most bitter rival, Henry Clay. Yeah, so
it was a petty targeted strike, but it established
this really powerful precedent of keeping the
federal government out of local economic development.
And that philosophy of economic warfare culminates
in the defining conflict of his presidency, which
is the bank war. Jackson fiercely opposed the
second bank of the United States. He believed
it was a corrupt device designed to cheat the
common people. He famously told his vice president,
the bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill
it. He really had a flair for the dramatic. He
really did. But wait, for those of us who aren't
19th century economists, what exactly was the
second bank and why did Jackson hate it so much?
It's vital to understand the mechanics here.
The second bank of the United States wasn't a
normal bank. It was a private corporation that
held all the federal government's deposits. But
it was run by unelected elites, most notably
its president, Nicholas Biddle. Now, because
it held so much federal money, the bank had the
power to regulate local, state -level banks,
basically restricting them from printing too
much paper money. Which seems like a good thing.
Well, Jackson viewed this as an unconstitutional
monopoly. He saw a small cabal of wealthy, unelected
aristocrats in Philadelphia controlling the entire
nation's credit and currency, essentially enriching
themselves at the expense of farmers and laborers.
So Jackson decides to destroy it. And he actually
does. He vetoes the recharter of the bank. But
he doesn't stop there, does he? No, he goes all
the way. He pulls all the federal funds out of
the national bank and redistributes them to local
state -level banks that were loyal to his party.
Which people mockingly called his pet banks.
Exactly, his pet banks. But taking a wrecking
ball to the nation's financial referee. Has to
have consequences. Massive consequences. When
Jackson put that money into those loosely regulated
pet banks, those local banks just went on a massive
lending spree. They printed mountains of paper
money, fueling this huge speculative bubble,
especially in Western land. Oh, I can see where
this is going. Yeah, Jackson quickly realized
the paper money was becoming worthless, so he
panicked. He issued an executive order called
the Specie Circular, which demanded that all
federal land had to be bought with hard money,
meaning actual gold and silver. Which completely
pulls the rug out from under the economy. Instantly.
It triggered a catastrophic financial crash known
as the Panic of 1837. Banks collapsed, unemployment
soared, and the very common men Jackson claimed
to protect were financially ruined. Which leads
me to a major pushback against this entire Jacksonian
economic philosophy Because they pushed a strictly
laissez -faire approach like taking a totally
hands -off attitude toward the economy No government
interference in wages. No interference in profits,
right? But if Jackson is supposed to be the great
champion of the working class, why abandon them
to a totally unregulated free market? I mean,
it's like tearing down the only referee in a
boxing match just because you think the referee
is arrogant and then leaving the lightweight
fighters to just fend for themselves against
the heavyweights. How does that help the common
man? That's a very fair point. But if we connect
this to the bigger picture, it makes sense within
their specific, hyper suspicious worldview. The
Jacksonians firmly believe that any central economic
planning, whether it was a national bank or federally
funded infrastructure, would inevitably be captured
by the rich and used to create monopolies. So
they just didn't trust the government to do it
fairly. Right. To them, government intervention
always favored the elite. So they believed that
by dismantling the bank and aggressively paying
off the national debt, they were actually freeing
the individual artisan and the yeoman farmer
from elite control. To a Jacksonian, the risk
of an unregulated chaotic market was infinitely
preferable to the certainty of an economy controlled
by aristocratic bankers like Nicholas Betel.
So what does this all mean for the concept of
Jacksonian democracy? Because as we go through
the source material, there is a devastating catch
to this vision of liberty. A very dark catch.
Yeah. This economic laissez -faire attitude and
this massive expansion of voting rights, it required
a strictly enforced boundary. I mean, to unite
such a wildly diverse group of people. poor northern
city laborers on one side and incredibly wealthy
southern plantation owners on the other, the
movement desperately needed another. And this
is where we have to confront the darkest, most
foundational aspects of Jacksonian politics.
That massive expansion of democracy we talked
about earlier, dropping the property requirements,
it was exclusively for white men. In fact, the
historical research points out a chilling parallel
here. During the exact same period that voting
rights were vastly expanding for white men, The
voting rights for free black men were being systematically
revoked. It's incredibly bleak. States like New
York and Pennsylvania, which previously allowed
some free black men to vote, they literally rewrote
their constitutions to strip those rights away
just as they were handing them out to poor white
men. And it wasn't a coincidence, you know, it
was the actual mechanism of their political coalition.
Historians argue that the core value holding
the entire Jacksonian movement together wasn't
economic policy. It was white supremacy and racial
essentialism. I mean, think about the sheer mechanics
of it. What does a struggling immigrant Irish
laborer in a New York slum actually have in common
economically with a wealthy slave -owning cotton
planter in Mississippi. Absolutely nothing. I
mean, their economic interests are entirely opposed.
Exactly. But they were united by a political
ideology that established whiteness as the ultimate
unifying factor. Jackson essentially offered
a psychological wage. He told the poor white
laborer, you may not have money, but in this
democracy, your race makes you the absolute equal
of the richest planter. And this wasn't just
campaign rhetoric, right? I mean, it translated
into brutal systemic federal policy. Oh, absolutely.
The most defining aggressive policy of Jackson's
entire era was Indian removal. It was the ethnic
cleansing of unceded indigenous lands, most famously
resulting in the Trail of Tears, specifically
to make way for the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom
and the institution of slavery. The data from
the era shows that a politician's vote on Indian
affairs was the single most consistent predictor
of their partisan affiliation. It was the defining
wedge issue. And Jackson's personal approach
to indigenous people was marked by profound,
almost dizzying psychological contradictions.
It really was. Which brings us to arguably the
most bizarre and hypocritical historical footnote
in this entire deep dive. The story of Lincoya
Jackson. Yeah, the story always stops me in my
tracks. It's wild. Andrew Jackson actually adopted
an orphaned indigenous boy and not just any boy.
a child orphaned from a village that Jackson's
own troops had destroyed during the Creek War.
Just unbelievable. Jackson brought this boy back
to his plantation, the Hermitage, and raised
him. Yet Jackson and his political allies actively
used this boy's biography as a campaign prop.
During the 1824 and 1828 elections, when critics
attacked Jackson's Indian removal policies as
inhumane, his machine literally pointed to Lincoya's
presence in his household as proof of Jackson's
benevolence. What's fascinating here is how it
highlights Jackson's ability to separate personal
paternalism from systemic subjugation. I mean,
he could feel genuine paternal sympathy for a
single individual orphan that his own military
campaign had created, while simultaneously orchestrating
the forced removal and death of tens of thousands
of people from entire nations. I look at all
of this and I find myself really pushing back
on the very word democracy in Jacksonian democracy.
It feels incredibly deceptive. How do you mean?
It's like an exclusive country club that proudly
brags to the national press about lowering its
membership fees so that any regular guy can join
while at the exact same time it's building a
giant fortified wall with armed guards to keep
everyone else out. That is a highly accurate
way to visualize it. This was Jax's great terrible
innovation. He actively superintended massive
systemic inequality, the aggressive expansion
of slavery, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous
peoples, precisely so that white men of all economic
classes could feel like absolute equals in the
public square. It was a democracy built entirely
fundamentally on the requirement of exclusion.
So how does a coalition built on such massive
internal contradictions finally break apart?
And what does it leave behind when it does? Well,
the coalition finally fractures in the 1850s.
A political alliance built purely on racial essentialism
simply couldn't survive the escalating violent
tensions over the Western expansion of slavery,
specifically surrounding the Pansas -Nebraska
Act in 1854. The party just tore itself apart.
So they split into different factions again.
Right. Many anti -slavery Jacksonians in the
North finally defected to form the Free Soil
Party and eventually the modern Republican Party,
while Southern Jacksonians overwhelmingly embraced
the path towards secession. But even though the
specific coalition shattered, the machinery they
built didn't. The legacy of that incredibly strong
executive branch, the use of the veto pen as
a routine political weapon rather than just a
constitutional safeguard, and the entire architecture
of mass popular politics. That remained a permanent
fixture in American governance. Unquestionably.
And it's a style of politics that continues to
resonate heavily today. Now, it's worth noting
here, and we are strictly looking at the historical
and academic comparisons drawn by political scientists
in our source material, not taking any political
stance ourselves. Right. Absolutely. Just reporting
what the Wikipedia article notes. Exactly. But
many scholars frequently point to Donald Trump
as a modern embodiment of this exact Jacksonian
style. Right. The parallels they draw are definitely
there. The source points to the massive upset
victory against an established political dynasty,
the relentless populist rhetoric pitting the
common man against entrenched elites, a highly
opportunistic foreign policy, and, of course,
Trump's own personal affinity for Jackson, like
famously hanging Jackson's portrait in the Oval
Office. Yeah, the connections are very direct.
It really makes you wonder how an ideology tied
so closely to one man's cult of personality manages
to outlive him by centuries. It's like a band
breaking up, but their specific, distinct sound
becomes an entire genre of music that people
are still playing 200 years later. That's a great
way to put it because Jacksonianism was never
really a coherent set of rigid policy platforms.
If it had been, it would have died in the 19th
century. Right. It was and is a style of politics.
The relentless emphasis on the will of the majority,
the deep abiding suspicion of established experts
and elites, and the reliance on a powerful, culturally
dominant executive. That became the foundational
blueprint for modern American political strategy
utilized by politicians across the spectrum.
which ties us all back to you listening right
now. Because whether you are watching a modern
political debate or seeing politicians on the
news railing against the coastal elites or watching
a campaign use incredibly sophisticated data
to turn out a hyper -specific base of voters
while vilifying the opposition, you are looking
at the direct descendants of Martin Van Buren's
and Andrew Jackson's political machine. It's
all connected. It is a stark historical reminder
that expanding democracy has historically been
a double -edged sword. All too often, expanding
rights and access for one specific group has
been paid for by directly removing them from
another. It requires us as engaged citizens to
always look past the soaring rhetoric of protecting
the common man and critically ask the harder
question, who is deliberately being left out
of that definition. Exactly. Which leaves us
with a final thought for you to mull over as
we wrap up this deep dive. The Jacksonians successfully
used race as an essentialist unifier. They used
a single rigid identity marker to bind together
groups of voters who actually had completely
opposed contradictory economic interests. Yeah,
poor laborers and rich planters. Right. So Look
at the complex political coalitions of today
across the globe. What are the invisible, unacknowledged
boundaries or essentialist ideas being used right
now to convince wildly different groups of people
that they share the exact same interests? The
political temple is still loud, it's still messy,
and the columns are still covered in graffiti.
The question you always have to ask is, who is
standing at the door deciding who gets led inside?