Jacksonian realism is based on the very sharp distinction in popular feeling between the inside of the folk community and the dark world without. Jacksonian patriotism is not a doctrine but an emotion, like love of one’s family. The nation is an extension of the family. Members of the American folk are bound together by history, culture and a common morality. At a very basic level, a feeling of kinship exists among Americans: we have one set of rules for dealing with each other and a very different set for the outside world.
Walter Russell Meade, The Jacksonian Tradition
When Obama and the Obamamaniacs objected to wrightgate, arugulagate, and bittergate, claiming that they were “distractions” and not “issues,” they demonstrated that they are unaware of Obama’s achilles’ heel. Obama’s fundamental problem is not political, but cultural. Hillary and her handlers know this; Obama and his disciples do not.
Forget Republican and Democrat. Obama’s cultural problem cuts across party lines. And unless he first wakes up and realizes the problem exists, then credibly fixes it, he has no chance in November.
In the last hundred years, no candidate has won the White House without the Jacksonian vote. Clinton operative Begala said as much, but negatively, when he said, “Obama can’t win with just the eggheads and African-Americans. That’s the Dukakis coalition. He carried 10 states.” Of course, the nutroots were in an uproar about the statement, but not even primarily because they perceived it as an anti-Obama comment. They objected for the same reasons Obama has the problem.
The Great Cultural Divide in the United States is between the Jacksonians and the Cosmopolitanists (perhaps the only major flaw in Meade’s excellent exposition of the rise of the Jacksonians in the United States is that he contrasts the Jacksonians — a cultural group — with Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, and Jeffersonians — political philosophies; I choose the term Cosmopolitanist to describe the largely urban and academic anti-Jacksonian cultural group, represented by the chattering classes). For a hundred years, the Cosmopolitanists have despised the jacksonians and have predicted their demise, yet the Jacksonians have become the dominant American culture. As Meade correctly states:
Urban, immigrant America may have softened some of the rough edges of Jacksonian America, but the descendants of the great wave of European immigration sound more like Andrew Jackson from decade to decade. Rugged frontier individualism has proven to be contagious; each successive generation has been more Jacksonian than its predecessor. The social and economic solidarity rooted in European peasant communities has been overmastered by the individualism of the frontier. The descendants of European working-class Marxists now quote Adam Smith; Joe Six-pack thinks of the welfare state as an expensive burden, not part of the natural moral order. Intellectuals have made this transition as thoroughly as anyone else. The children and grandchildren of trade unionists and Trotskyites now talk about the importance of liberal society and free markets; in the intellectual pilgrimage of Irving Kristol, what is usually a multigenerational process has been compressed into a single, brilliant career.
The new Jacksonianism is no longer rural and exclusively nativist. Frontier Jacksonianism may have taken the homesteading farmer and the log cabin as its emblems, but today’s Crabgrass Jacksonianism sees the homeowner on his modest suburban lawn as the hero of the American story. The Crabgrass Jacksonian may wear green on St. Patrick’s Day; he or she might go to a Catholic Church and never listen to country music (though, increasingly, he or she probably does); but the Crabgrass Jacksonian doesn’t just believe, she knows that she is as good an American as anybody else, that she is entitled to her rights from Church and State, that she pulls her own weight and expects others to do the same. That homeowner will be heard from: Ronald Reagan owed much of his popularity and success to his ability to connect with Jacksonian values. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in different ways have managed to tap into the power of the populist energy that Old Hickory rode into the White House. In both domestic and foreign policy, the twenty-first century will be profoundly influenced by the values and concerns of Jacksonian America.
Obama and his worshippers are essential, even prototypical Cosmopolitanists. Like all Cosmopolitanists, they insulate themselves by living and associating only with other Cosmopolitanists; this is essentially what Bernard Goldberg calls the liberal bubble. Cosmopolitanists not only despise Jacksonians; they fear them. This fear is the real root of the Cosmopolitanist love for gun control, although that’s another topic for another article.
Obama’s cultural problem is that he is a Cosmopolitanist. He not only has a cultural disconnection with the American character; he fears and despises it. We saw this with bittergate and arugulagate. We saw this with the “Why I don’t wear an American flag lapel pin” statement, and the pathetic attempts later to spin it away. Obama is out of touch, and it appears that he doesn’t even realize it.
Cosmopolitans don’t even have a basic understanding of Jacksonian America. This is why when they run Cosmopolitanists and lose, as Cosmopolitanists always do, they always speak of “learning to speak to” Americans, or “learn to talk about values with” Americans. If they had even the most superficial understanding of Jacksonians, they would realize how fruitless such ploys are.
Jacksonians divide the world into those within the community and those without, where the community is both geographical and cultural (Meade goes into this in great detail; if you haven’t read it, I suggest you do). Jacksonians also have a sixth sense, if you will, that allows them to tell whether someone is from the community or not. Cosmopolitanists are absolutely outside the community, and to use a cliché, a Jacksonian can smell a Cosmopolitanist a mile away, no matter how he phrases what he says.
As Michael Barone points out, we are seeing the Jacksonian/Cosmopolitanist split in the Democratic primary race.
In reviewing the maps of the Democratic primary results, in Dave Leip’s electoral atlas, I was struck by the narrow geographic base of Barack Obama’s candidacy. In state after state, he has carried only a few counties—though, to be sure, in many cases counties with large populations. There are exceptions, particularly in the southern states with large numbers of black voters in both urban and rural counties. But overall, the geographic analysis has pointed up to me a divide between Democratic constituencies—a divide as stark as that between blacks and Latinos or the old and the young—which has not shown up in the exit polls. It’s a division that helps to explain the quite different performances of Obama and Hillary Clinton in general election pairings against John McCain.
[ . . . ]
But looking at these electoral data suggests to me that there’s another tribal divide going on here, one that separates voters more profoundly than even race (well, maybe not more profoundly than race in Mississippi but in other states). That’s the divide between academics and Jacksonians. In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians.
Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war. Economically, defense spending competes for the public-sector dollars that academics and public employees think are rightfully their own. More important, I think, warriors are competitors for the honor that academics and public employees think rightfully belongs to them. Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.” And he (or she) means it. If you want to hear an eloquent version, listen to
Sen. Zell Miller’s speech endorsing George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican National Convention. The academic who hears the Rev. Jeremiah Wright declaiming, “God damn America,” is not unnerved. He hears this sort of thing on campus all the time. The Jacksonian who watches the tape sees an enemy of everything he holds dear.
Note also that Obama has won primarily caucus states, and Hillary, primary states: Where the elite decide, they vote Obama. Where the people decide, they vote Hillary. Hillary and McCain both appeal to Jacksonians, and this is why Hillary would be a far more formidable Democrat opponent for McCain.
Because of the Democrats’ byzantine method(s) for translating votes into delegates, Obama is running slightly ahead of Hillary (I think — everybody’s counts differ from everybody else’s, but everybody seems to agree on this), even though Hillary has won most of the primary states, and most of the counties. I will put my head on the chopping block here and assume that Obama will be the nominee.
Obama and the Cosmopolitanists, to judge from what they way, hold a mistaken idea that running against John McCain will be more or less the same as running against Hillary. It will not. Obama will have a much more difficult race when his audience is the entire United States, and not just Democrats.
Barone:
Of course, the real Jacksonian in this race is John McCain. He is descended from Scots-Irish fighters who settled in Carroll County, Miss. Former Sen. Trent Lott, who once worked as a fundraiser for the University of Mississippi and therefore knew the folkways of elite types in his state very well, once told me that he had relatives who had known McCain’s relatives in Mississippi. “They were fighters,” he said, as best I can remember his words. “They would never stop fighting you. Those people would never stop fighting.” Obama gives the impression, through his demeanor and through his statements on Iraq, that he would never start fighting. That appeals enormously to voters in the academia and public-employee enclaves of America, who want to deny honor to our warriors and arrogate it to themselves (think of those bumper stickers that call for spending Pentagon dollars on teachers). Clinton and, more convincingly, McCain give the impression that they will never stop fighting until they have achieved victory (Clinton in Denver, McCain in Iraq).
Although Hillary and McCain may both appeal to Jacksonians, they are not the same. Hillary is an outsider, although she is an outsider who shares some Jacksonian values and understands Jacksonians. McCain is a Jacksonian. If Obama is to win the election, he must convince Jacksonians not to vote for one of their own, and vote for a Cosmopolitanist instead.
West Virginia is surely the most thoroughly Jacksonian state in the Union, and Hillary beat Obama 67-26 (CNN). West Virginia is the best barometer for how Jacksonians will vote, and Obama would do well to pay close attention. Hillary is the Jacksonian shadow of McCain, and a 41-point loss in West Virginia is not good news for Obama. Even the usually stuck on stupid LA Times realizes this. Will Franklin has an interesting article about this, from a slightly different perspective, and Bob Krumm also touches on it, and even the liberal Juan Williams acknowledges it.
The oblivion to Jacksonians and Jacksonian values is already hurting Obama. Cosmopolitans react to empty charges of racism with guilt; it is ineffective on Jacksonians, and often provokes anger. See The Other McCain or Dan Riehl for two examples. And claiming that “American” is a code word for some kind of redneck racism, as Harold Meyerson does here, will only anger and alienate Jacksonians from Obama.
In fact, that is Obama’s problem. He does not share the values of Jacksonian America. None of the methods that so effectively manipulate Cosmopolitanists works on Jacksonians. He is starkly Cosmopolitanist — and that has nothing to do with his race, but his culture and values. Focusing solely on “issues” — and I use sneer quotes because culture and values are not only an issue, but a fundament, perhaps the fundamental issue — will do nothing to endear Obama, and outsider, and therefore, distrusted, to jacksonians. In the past, Democrats have always tried to con Jacksonians by trying to make the Cosmopolitanist look like a Jacksonian (John Kerry in his duck hunting photoshoot, for example). But that’s always a failure, because a Cosmopolitanist can never pass as a Jacksonian. As Meade says:
Attempts to mask Hamiltonian or Wilsonian policies in Jacksonian rhetoric, or to otherwise misrepresent or hide unpopular policies, may succeed in the short run, but ultimately they can lead to a collapse of popular confidence and the stiffening of resistance to any and all policies deemed suspect. When misguided political advisers persuaded the distinctively unmilitary Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis to put on a helmet and get in a tank for a television commercial, they only advertised how far out of touch with Jacksonian America they were.
Just as they do when they discuss “how to talk to” Americans.
Obama’s problem is that he doesn’t know anything about the essential American or the essential American’s values, other than the sneering redneck stereotypes Cosmopolitans gleefully cast about (see bittergate). And I see no easy solution. The cultural divide is far to wide and deep, and Jacksonians are far more savvy than Cosmopolitanists realize. But if Obama is to win the White House, he can only do it by crossing the divide.
Crossposted at Blogs4McCain
