Democracy's Dangers & Discontents by Bruce S. Thornton

Author:Bruce S. Thornton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: democracy, United States, free market economics, Athenian democracy, modern democracy, Constitution, freedom, totalitarianism, foreign policy, domestic policy, nation-building, Arab Spring, limited government, government
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2014-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Antidemocrats at Bay

After the Jackson era, US political sentiment had moved decidedly toward democracy and the rehabilitation of the masses. In 1835, William Henry Seward, a member of the Whig party (the new political party that developed in Jackson’s second term), acknowledged this political reality. Gloomily predicting the victory in the next year’s presidential election of Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s secretary of state, Seward wrote, “It is utterly impossible, I am convinced, to defeat Van Buren. The people are for him. Not so much for him as for the principle they suppose he represents. That principle is Democracy.… It is with them, the poor against the rich; and it is not to be disguised, that, since the last election, the array of parties has very strongly taken that character.”111 Indeed, “By 1837,” Remini writes, the “word democracy had largely supplanted the term republicanism in national discourse.”112

Though the federal government was still defined by the antidemocratic structures of the Constitution, in the court of public sentiment the people had won. At first antidemocrat Federalists continued to protest what they considered the triumph of the tumultuous masses. Jackson’s legendary first inaugural festivities, in which the White House was thrown open to ordinary people, seemingly confirmed to critics all their prejudices about the unruly masses. To Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, “the reign of KING MOB seemed triumphant.”113 Outgoing president John Quincy Adams left town instead of attending the celebration. Anne Newport Royall, considered by some to be the first female professional journalist, noted in the White House soiled sofas and carpets, and Jackson supporters who made “disgraceful scenes in the parlors, in which even women got bloody noses.” Only a bowl of punch was able “to lure the new ‘democracy’ out of the house.” As Walter McDougall writes, “Wondrous it was, and to the genteel a nightmare. Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson had imagined the American experiment coming to all sorts of bad ends. They never imagined the Federal City overrun by frontiersmen who care nothing for history and loved only cheap land and credit, whiskey, tobacco, guns, fast women, fast horses, and Jesus.”114

By the time the Civil War started in 1861, the antidemocrats had long been at bay, and those seeking public office, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “hide their heads, and if they wish to rise are forced to borrow their colors.”115 The rival party to Jacksonian democracy, the Whigs, “devised a contrasting democratic message that struck a deep nerve in the electorate that the Democrats [as Republicans came to be called under Jackson] did not even realize was there,” Wilentz writes. Whig political success was due to exploiting Jacksonian democracy’s “own democratic political terms that old-guard conservatives had abhorred. By decade’s end, Whigs and Democrats alike could agree in principle with Jacksonian paeans to the people and majority rule.”116

With the triumph of democracy and the political eclipse of antidemocratic ideology, it was left to Alexis de Tocqueville, American democracy’s most astute analyst and influential publicist, to acknowledge democracy’s weaknesses and dangers in his influential Democracy in America.

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