The Second Jacksonian Age

INBOX: Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America pic.twitter.com/emufBcDM6A

— Henry Rodgers (@henryrodgersdc) March 5, 2021

I think we are heading toward a third populist age: the Jackson era, the Bryan era and now the Trump era or whatever comes next.

Project-Syndicate:

“PROVIDENCE – Many people have compared Donald Trump’s presidency to that of Andrew Jackson in the first half of the nineteenth century. Trump himself hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office. And though Trump is hardly the military hero that Jackson was, the periods in which their presidencies occurred have some striking similarities.

The Jacksonian era, like our own, was a time of extreme democratization and rampant anti-elitism. The Jacksonians insisted that anyone (by which they meant any white adult male) could serve in any political office. No longer would education, social status, and respectability matter. Such egalitarian claims alarmed the Harvard- and Yale-educated elites of the 1820s and 1830s, just as they do today.

Moreover, we, too, are living in an era when weakened traditional authorities are being challenged. Following the 2020 presidential election, one Democratic pollster concluded that Trump supporters “don’t trust the news media. They don’t trust elites. They don’t trust scientists. They don’t trust academics. They don’t trust experts.” In antebellum America, Jackson’s supporters were likewise suspicious and mistrustful of authority. …”

I would like to see a modern day minstrel show.

The difference would be that the comedians of the future would mock the pretentiousness of White professionals who maintained and enforced political correctness and how experts on television who were full of shit were taken seriously as authority figures when the Baby Boomers were alive.

Note: When the internet is finally ungagged, I look forward to seeing people like Don Lemon, Bubba Wallace and Jussie Smollett relentlessly mocked this way.