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The
Principles and Program of National-Jacksonism, by Joseph R. Stromberg
"Hver títhendi eru at segja frá um ragnarøkr? Thess hefi ek eigi fyrr heyrt getit." ~ Gangleri to Óthin, n.d. Rök and Wroll In the Gylfaginning, Gylfi, a Swedish king who dabbles in magic, travels to the Æsirs’ hall. Disguised as Gangleri ("Wayworn"), he gains entry and interrogates the High One (Óthin) about things-to-come. In the modern Teutonic idiom, he asks, "What’s the deal with Ragnarök? I never got to hear about that before." Óthin then spins a tiresome tale of coming frost and snow, three winters with no summer, cows dying, a pub with no beer, social decay, wrack, and ruin, thereby justifying the Norse reputation for dwelling on doom and downfall. Professor Hugh Nibley once wrote that the antique Greek and Arabic writers are interesting because they always expect surprises; whereas the Norse writers are fatalists, a bunch of gloomy Gustavs, so to speak. A Dimmer Godling for the Masses Gangleri could have saved some fretting, if he’d been in touch with Walter Russell Mead. Reading last-named’s essay "Braced for Jacksonian Ruthlessness" in the next most important flagship of late American liberalism, The Washington Post, Wayworn would see that the man and the hour have met, even if the man – Jackson – has been dead long-awhile-oh and the nature of the hour is rather dim and murky. Preparing us for whatever the US establishment may unleash on the world, Mead bedecks the juggernaut with the legacy of Andrew Jackson. Here a few quotations are in order, if only as evidence to be submitted to some future War Crimes Tribunal (Stockholm, 2004). Alluding to America’s first religious war, Mead quotes from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," a song which, I must confess, some of us never sing. Mead rightly states that whoever committed the monstrous crimes of last Tuesday has deeply provoked the American people. He adds that Americans, "when their blood is up," make "the fiercest warriors on earth." Perhaps so, but no policy follows from justified wrath by itself. Mead observes that "American bombs are estimated to have killed 900,000 Japanese civilians in the last five months of World War II." While "twice the total of all combat deaths sustained by all U.S. forces in all our foreign wars since 1776," such mass slaughter of noncombatants is, apparently, merely in the nature of things and requires no further comment. (I sure hope Mead isn’t angling for appointment as US Ambassador to Japan.) And here Andrew Jackson is adduced as justification and precedent. Jackson constantly violated any law – international or domestic – which stood in the way of doing whatever needed doing. He had a bit of a leader complex, it seems. This got me to thinking about Andrew Jackson. The results are in: Jackson is very hard to like. His contributions to a democratic and populist integral nationalism made his movement, potentially, a long-run danger to federalism and freedom alike. Hot-tempered and homicidal, Jackson thought the main point of duelling was to kill your opponent and not so much the code of rules that went along with the custom. Perhaps the only thing about which the neo-mercantilist Whig Party was ever right was their critique of Jackson’s authoritarian conception of the Presidency. It is not altogether odd that certain National Socialist writers of the 1930s saw in Jackson a kindred spirit. In the end, all you get with Jackson is commodity-based money and destruction of the central bank. While these are good things, they are not by themselves reason enough to get enthused about Jackson. Somehow I think this is not the side of Jackson most admired by any current adherents of National-Jacksonism. There is also Jackson’s treatment of Indians, but this is a short essay.... For some reason, a lot of Southerners have taken an unrealistically favorable view of the fellow. They should look a little deeper. By far the worst thing Jackson did, in my view, was to cobble together a superficially plausible nationalist theory of the union which Lincoln could then wield as his casus belli in 1861. In the nullification crisis, Jackson raved about hanging John C. Calhoun and reducing South Carolina by military force. In a way it is too bad he didn’t get to try. Then, at least, with Andrew Jackson – slaveholder, slave trader, slavery expansionist – in charge, no one would be lecturing us that the war was "about" slavery rather than the nature of the union. Also, we could have had Sherman’s March thirty one years early ("successful" or not), without Sherman, and thus also a head start on developing the characteristically American theory of total war. 21st-Century Olympians Total war, mass slaughter of enemy civilians by the townful, and Jackson’s fierce visage smiling down on it all. It makes one wonder why the Scandinavians, Germans, Celts, English, etc., ever bothered taking up Christianity, or why they should have dabbled in any of the higher religions. Better to consult Óthin, Zeus, or Indra, I should think. One wonders how much a pagan notion of just warfare differs from what Mead has on offer. Somehow, Mead extracts a set of eternal American attitudes from Jackson’s National Jacobinism. On the other hand, from the Olympian heights of the Council on Foreign Relations – nudge, nudge, say no more – Mead creates a few metric slivers of distance between himself and the apparently soon-to-be-rampant-again Jacksonian ruthlessness. It’s not for him directly to endorse this stuff. Oh no. You’d think with all those interlocking directorates and overlapping bureaucracies – building better burghers as they go – the elites would have the ability to restrain the ruthless, if they cared to. You’d think the leaders could lead, if they cared to. Alas, they seem to be mere shadows of their waspish predecessors. And what’s an upper class to do? Only this: pursue a policy almost foredoomed to be excessive and unfocused and be ready then to blame the emotion-driven masses for the "excesses," if any of the slightly more civilized nations complain. This is perfect, even Wilsonian. So here we are, at the beginning of the Third Millennium, learning once again that there is class warfare in the greatest nation ever. It is too bad that no one seems to know how it works. Yes, the masses let off steam and propose on talk radio to "obliterate" this or that hostile people. The chaps who coldly reason out the exterminationist logic and commit it to print are of the elite. Come on along, come on and hear, MacNamara’s Ragtime Band.... But for now we may leave reflections on the twilight of the godlings and other idols to the Establishment’s ever grimmer dithering in their increasingly dimmer gatherings. September 21, 2001 Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for Antiwar.com. Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com |