The Jacksonian Tradition by Walter Russell Mead

IN THE LAST five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed
the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians--not counting the
casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [1]
This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the
United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined. [2]

On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped
1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese
bodies were found in the charred remains--a number greater than the
80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean
and Vietnam Wars combined.

Since the Second World War, the United States has continued to employ
devastating force against both civilian and military targets. Out of a
pre-war population of 9.49 million, an estimated 1 million North Korean
civilians are believed to have died as a result of U.S. actions during
the 1950-53 conflict. [3] During the same war, 33,870 American soldiers
died in combat, meaning that U.S. forces killed approximately thirty
North Korean civilians for every American soldier who died in action.
The United States dropped almost three times as much explosive tonnage
in the Vietnam War as was used in the Second World War, and something on
the order of 365,000 Vietnamese civilians are believed to have been
killed during the period of American involvement. [4]

Regardless of Clausewitz's admonition that "casualty reports . . . are
never accurate, seldom truthful, and in most cases deliberately
falsified", these numbers are too striking to ignore. They do not, of
course, suggest a moral parallel between the behavior of, say, German
and Japanese aggressors and American forces seeking to defeat those
aggressors in the shortest possible time. German and Japanese forces
used the indiscriminate murder of civilians as a routine police tool in
occupied territory, and wholesale massacres of civilians often
accompanied German and Japanese advances into new territory. The
behavior of the German Einsatzgruppen and of the Japanese army during
the Rape of Nanking has no significant parallel on the American side.

In the Cold War, too, the evils the Americans fought were far worse than
those they inflicted. Tens of millions more innocent civilians in
communist nations were murdered by their own governments in peacetime
than ever died as the result of American attempts to halt communism's
spread. War, even brutal war, was more merciful than communist rule.

Nevertheless, the American war record should make us think. An observer
who thinks of American foreign policy only in terms of the commercial
realism of the Hamiltonians, the crusading moralism of Wilsonian
transcendentalists, and the supple pacifism of the principled but
slippery Jeffersonians would be at a loss to account for American
ruthlessness at war.

THOSE WHO prefer to believe that the present global hegemony of the
United States emerged through a process of immaculate conception avert
their eyes from many distressing moments in the American ascension. Yet
students of American power cannot ignore one of the chief elements in
American success. The United States over its history has consistently
summoned the will and the means to compel its enemies to yield to its
demands.

Through the long sweep of American history, there have been many
occasions when public opinion, or at least an important part of it, got
ahead of politicians in demanding war. Many of the Indian wars were
caused less by Indian aggression than by movements of frontier
populations willing to provoke and fight wars with Indian tribes that
were nominally under Washington's protection--and contrary both to the
policy and the wishes of the national government. The War of 1812 came
about largely because of a popular movement in the South and Midwest.
Abraham Lincoln barely succeeded in preventing a war with Britain over
the Trent Affair during the Civil War; public opinion made it difficult
for him to find an acceptable, face-saving solution to the problem. More
recently, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were all
haunted by fears that a pullout from the Vietnam War would trigger a
popular backlash.

Once wars begin, a significant element of American public opinion
supports waging them at the highest possible level of intensity. The
devastating tactics of the wars against the Indians, General Sherman's
campaign of 1864-65, and the unprecedented aerial bombardments of World
War II were all broadly popular in the United States. During both the
Korean and Vietnam Wars, presidents came under intense pressure, not
only from military leaders but also from public opinion, to hit the
enemy with all available force in all available places. Throughout the
Cold War the path of least resistance in American politics was generally
the more hawkish stance. Politicians who advocated negotiated
compromises with the Soviet enemy were labeled appeasers and paid a
heavy political price. The Korean and Vietnam Wars lost public support
in part because of political decisions not to risk the consequences of
all-out war, not necessarily stopping short of the use of nuclear
weapons. The most costly decision George Bush took in th e Gulf War was
not to send ground forces into Iraq, but to stop short of the occupation
of Baghdad and the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein.

It is often remarked that the American people are more religious than
their allies in Western Europe. But it is equally true that they are
more military-minded. Currently, the American people support without
complaint what is easily the highest military budget in the world. In
1998 the United States spent as much on defense as its NATO allies,
South Korea, Japan, the Persian Gulf states, Russia and China combined.
[5] In response to widespread public concern about a decline in military
preparedness, the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress are
planning substantial increases in military spending in the years to
come.

Americans do not merely pay for these forces, they use them. Since the
end of the Vietnam War, taken by some as opening a new era of reluctance
in the exercise of American power, the United States has deployed combat
forces in, or used deadly force over, Cambodia, Iran, Grenada, Panama,
Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, Somalia, Haiti,
Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, the South China Sea, Liberia, Macedonia,
Albania and Yugoslavia. This is a record that no other country comes
close to matching.

It is also generally conceded that, with the exception of a handful of
elite units in such forces as the British Army, American troops have a
stronger "warrior culture" than do the armies of other wealthy
countries. Indeed, of all the NATO countries other than Turkey and
Greece, only Great Britain today has anything like the American "war
lobby" that becomes active in times of national crisis--a political
force that under certain circumstances demands war, supports the
decisive use of force, and urges political leaders to stop wasting time
with negotiations, sanctions and Security Council meetings in order to
attack the enemy with all possible strength. Why is it that U.S. public
opinion is often so quick--though sometimes so slow--to support armed
intervention abroad? "What are the provocations that energize public
opinion (at least some of it) for war-and how, if at all, is this "war
lobby" related to the other elements of that opinion? The key to this
warlike disposition, and to other important features of American foreign
policy, is to be found in what I shall call its Jacksonian tradition, in
honor of the sixth president of the United States.

The School of Andrew Jackson

IT IS a tribute to the general historical amnesia about American
politics between the War of 1812 and the Civil War that Andrew Jackson
is not more widely counted among the greatest of American presidents.
Victor in the Battle of New Orleans--perhaps the most decisive battle in
the shaping of the modern world between Trafalgar and Stalingrad-Andrew
Jackson laid the foundation of American politics for most of the
nineteenth century, and his influence is still felt today. With the ever
ready help of the brilliant Martin Van Buren, he took American politics
from the era of silk stockings into the smoke-filled room. Every
political party since his presidency has drawn on the symbolism, the
institutions and the instruments of power that Jackson pioneered. More
than that, he brought the American people into the political arena.
Restricted state franchises with high property qualifications meant that
in 1820 many American states had higher property qualifications for
voters than did boroughs for the British House of Commons. With
Jackson's presidency, universal male suffrage became the basis of
American politics and political values.

His political movement--or, more accurately, the community of political
feeling that he wielded into an instrument of power--remains in many
ways the most important in American politics. Solidly Democratic through
the Truman administration (a tradition commemorated in the annual
Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners that are still the high points on
Democratic Party calendars in many cities and states), Jacksonian
America shifted toward the Republican Party under Richard Nixon--the
most important political change in American life since the Second World
War. The future of Jacksonian political allegiance will be one of the
keys to the politics of the twenty-first century.

Suspicious of untrammeled federal power (Waco), skeptical about the
prospects for domestic and foreign do-gooding (welfare at home, foreign
aid abroad), opposed to federal taxes but obstinately fond of federal
programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and
Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies), Jacksonians constitute a large
political interest.

In some ways Jacksonians resemble the Jeffersonians, with whom their
political fortunes were linked for so many decades. Like Jeffersonians,
Jacksonians are profoundly suspicious of elites. They generally prefer a
loose federal structure with as much power as possible retained by
states and local governments. But the differences between the two
movements run very deep--so deep that during the Cold War they were on
dead opposite sides of most important foreign policy questions. To use
the language of the Vietnam era, a time when Jeffersonians and
Jacksonians were fighting in the streets over foreign policy, the former
were the most dovish current in mainstream political thought during the
Cold War, while the latter were the most consistently hawkish. One way
to grasp the difference between the two schools is to see that both
Jeffersonians and Jacksonians are civil libertarians, passionately
attached to the Constitution and especially to the Bill of Rights, and
deeply concerned to preserve the liberties of ordinary Americans. But
while the Jeffersonians are most profoundly devoted to the First
Amendment, protecting the freedom of speech and prohibiting a federal
establishment of religion, Jacksonians see the Second Amendment, the
right to bear arms, as the citadel of liberty.

Jeffersonians join the American Civil Liberties Union; Jacksonians join
the National Rifle Association. In so doing, both are convinced that
they are standing at the barricades of freedom. For foreigners and for
some Americans, the Jacksonian tradition is the least impressive in
American politics. It is the most deplored abroad, the most denounced at
home. Jacksonian chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are
the despair of high-minded people everywhere, as they hold up adhesion
to the Kyoto Protocol, starve the UN and the IMF, cut foreign aid, and
ban the use of U.S. funds for population control programs abroad. When
spokesmen for other schools of thought speak about the "problems" of
American foreign policy, the persistence and power of the Jacksonian
school are high on their list. While some of this fashionable despair
may be overdone, and is perhaps a reflection of different class
interests and values, it is true that Jacksonians often figure as the
most obstructionist of the schools, as the least likely to support
Wilsonian initiatives for a better world, to understand Jeffersonian
calls for patient diplomacy in difficult situations, or to accept
Hamiltonian trade strategies. Yet without Jacksonians, the United States
would be a much weaker power.

A principal explanation of why Jacksonian politics are so poorly
understood is that Jacksonianism is less an intellectual or political
movement than an expression of the social, cultural and religious values
of a large portion of the American public. And it is doubly obscure
because it happens to be rooted in one of the portions of the public
least represented in the media and the professoriat. Jacksonian America
is a folk community with a strong sense of common values and common
destiny; though periodically led by intellectually brilliant men--like
Andrew Jackson himself--it is neither an ideology nor a selfconscious
movement with a clear historical direction or political table of
organization. Nevertheless, Jacksonian America has produced--and looks
set to continue to produce--one political leader and movement after
another, and it is likely to continue to enjoy major influence over both
foreign and domestic policy in the United States for the foreseeable
future.

The Evolution of a Community

IT IS NOT fashionable today to think of the American nation as a folk
community bound together by deep cultural and ethnic ties. Believers in
a multicultural America attack this idea from one direction, but
conservatives too have a tendency to talk about the United States as a
nation based on ideology rather than ethnicity. Former British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, among others, has said that the United
States is unlike other nations because it is based on an idea rather
than on a community of national experience. The continuing and growing
vitality of the Jacksonian tradition is, for better or worse, living
proof that she is at least partly wrong.

If Jeffersonianism is the book-ideology of the United States, Jacksonian
populism is its folk-ideology. Historically, American populism has been
based less on the ideas of the Enlightenment than on the community
values and sense of identity among the British colonizers who first
settled this country. In particular, as David Hackett Fischer has shown,
Jacksonian populism can be originally identified with a subgroup among
these settlers, the so-called "Scots-Irish", who settled the back
country regions of the Carolinas and Virginia, and who went on to settle
much of the Old West--West Virginia, Kentucky, parts of Indiana and
Illinois--and the southern and south central states of Tennessee,
Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Jacksonian populism today has
moved beyond its original ethnic and geographical limits. Like country
music, another product of Jacksonian culture, Jacksonian politics and
folk feeling has become a basic element in American consciousness that
can be found from one end of the country to the other.

The Scots-Irish were a hardy and warlike people, with a culture and out
look formed by centuries of bitter warfare before they came to the
United States. Fischer shows how, trapped on the frontiers between
England and Scotland, or planted as Protestant colonies in the hostile
soil of Ireland, this culture was shaped through centuries of constant,
bloody war. The Revolutionary struggle and generations of savage
frontier conflict in the United States reproduced these conditions in
the New World; the Civil War--fought with particular ferocity in the
border states--renewed the cultural heritage of war.

The role of what we are calling Jacksonian America in nineteenthcentury
America is clear, but many twentieth-century observers made what once
seemed the reasonable assumption that Jacksonian values and politics
were dying out. These observers were both surprised and discomfited when
Ronald Reagan's political success showed that Jacksonian America had
done more than survive; it was, and is, thriving.

What has happened is that Jacksonian culture, values and
selfidentification have spread beyond their original ethnic limits. In
the 1920s and 1930s the highland, border tradition in American life was
widely thought to be dying out, ethnically, culturally and politically.
Part of this was the economic and demographic collapse of the
traditional home of Jacksonian America: the family farm. At the same
time, mass immigration from southern and Eastern Europe tilted the
ethnic balance of the American population ever farther from its colonial
mix. New England Yankees were a vanishing species, limited to the hills
of New Hampshire and Vermont, while the cities and plains of
Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island filled with Irishmen,
Italians, Portuguese and Greeks. The great cities of the United States
were increasingly filled with Catholics, members of the Orthodox
churches and Jews--all professing in one way or another communitarian
social values very much at odds with the individualism of traditional
Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic culture.

As Hiram W. Evans, the surprisingly articulate Imperial Wizard of the Ku
Klux Klan, wrote in 1926, the old stock American of his time had become
a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him. Moreover, he
is a most unwelcome stranger, one much spit upon, and one to whom even
the right to have his own opinions and to work for his own interests is
now denied with jeers and revilings. "We must Americanize the
Americans,' a distinguished immigrant said recently. Protestantism
itself was losing its edge. The modernist critique of traditional
Biblical readings found acceptance in one mainline denomination after
another; Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran seminaries
accepted critical, post-Darwinian readings of Scripture; self-described
"fundamentalists" fought a slow, but apparently losing, rearguard action
against the modernist forces. The new mainline Protestantism was a
tolerant, even a namby-pamby, religion.

The old nativist spirit, anti-immigrant, anti-modern art and apparently
anti-twentieth century, still had some bite--Ku Klux crosses flamed
across the Midwest as well as the South during the 1920s--but it all
looked like the death throes of an outdated idea. There weren't many
mourners: much of H.L. Mencken's career was based on exposing the
limitations and mocking the death of what we are calling Jacksonian
America.

Most progressive, right thinking intellectuals in mid-century America
believed that the future of American populism lay in a social democratic
movement based on urban immigrants. Social activists like Woody Guthrie
and Pete Seegerk consciously sought to use cultural forms like folk
songs to ease the transition from the old individualistic folk world to
the collective new one that they believed was the wave of the future;
they celebrated unions and other strange, European ideas in down home
country twangs so that, in the bitter words of Hiram Evans, "There is a
steady flood of alien ideas being spread over the country, always
carefully disguised as American."

WHAT CAME next surprised almost everyone. The tables turned, and Evans'
Americans "americanized" the immigrants rather than the other way
around. In what is still a largely unheralded triumph of the melting
pot, Northern immigrants gradually assimilated the values of Jacksonian
individualism. Each generation of new Americans was less "social" and
more individualistic than the preceding one. American Catholics, once
among the world's most orthodox, remained Catholic in religious
allegiance but were increasingly individualistic in terms of psychology
and behavior ("I respect the Pope, but I have to follow my own
conscience"). Ties to the countries of emigration steadily weakened, and
the tendency to marry outside the group strengthened. Outwardly, most
immigrant groups completed an apparent assimilation to American material
culture within a couple of generations of their arrival. A second type
of assimilation--an inward assimilation to and adaptation of the core
cultural and psychological structure of the native population--took
longer, but as third, fourth and fifth-generation immigrant families
were exposed to the economic and social realities of American life, they
were increasingly "americanized" on the inside as well as without.

This immense and complex process was accelerated by social changes that
took place after 1945. Physically, the old neighborhoods broke up, and
the Northern industrial working class, along with the refugees from the
dying American family farm, moved into the suburbs to form a new
populist mix. As increasing numbers of the descendants of immigrants
moved into the Jacksonian Sunbelt, the pace of assimilation grew. The
suburban homeowner with his or her federally subsidized mortgage
replaced the homesteading farmer (on free federal land) as the central
pillar of American populism. Richard Nixon, with his two-pronged appeal
to white Southerners and the "Joe Six-pack" voters of the North, was the
first national politician to recognize the power of this newly energized
current in American life.

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.

The Jacksonian Code

TO UNDERSTAND how Crabgrass Jacksonianism is shaping and will continue
to shape American foreign policy, we must begin with another
unfashionable concept: Honor. Although few Americans today use this
anachronistic word, honor remains a core value for tens of millions of
middle-class Americans, women as well as men. The unacknowledged code of
honor that shapes so much of American behavior and aspiration today is a
recognizable descendent of the frontier codes of honor of early
Jacksonian America. The appeal of this code is one of the reasons that
Jacksonian values have spread to so many people outside the original
ethnic and social nexus in which Jacksonian America was formed.

The first principle of this code is self-reliance. Real Americans, many
Americans feel, are people who make their own way in the world. They may
get a helping hand from friends and family, but they hold their places
in the world through honest work. They don't slide by on welfare, and
they don't rely on inherited wealth or connections. Those who won't work
and are therefore poor, or those who don't need to work due to family
money, are viewed with suspicion. Those who meet the economic and moral
tests belong to the broad Middle Class, the folk community of working
people that Jacksonians believe to be the heart, soul and spine of the
American nation. Earning and keeping a place in this community on the
basis of honest work is the first principle of Jacksonian honor, and it
remains a serious insult even to imply that a member of the American
middle class is not pulling his or her weight in the world.

Jacksonian honor must be acknowledged by the outside world. One is
entitled to, and demands, the appropriate respect: recognition of rights
and just claims, acknowledgment of one's personal dignity. Many
Americans will still fight, sometimes with weapons, when they feel they
have not been treated with the proper respect. But even among the less
violent, Americans stand on their dignity and rights. Respect is also
due age. Those who know Jacksonian America only through its very inexact
representations in the media think of the United States as a
youth-obsessed, age-neglecting society. In fact, Jacksonian America
honors age. Andrew Jackson was sixty-one when he was elected president
for the first time; Ronald Reagan was seventy. Most movie stars lose
their appeal with age; those whose appeal stems from their ability to
portray and embody Jacksonian values--like John Wayne-only become more
revered.

The second principle of the code is equality. Among those members of the
folk community who do pull their weight, there is an absolute equality
of dignity and right. No one has a right to tell the self-reliant
Jacksonian what to say, do or think. Any infringement on equality will
be met with defiance and resistance. Male or female, the Jacksonian is,
and insists on remaining, independent of church, state, social
hierarchy, political parties and labor unions. Jacksonians may choose to
accept the authority of a leader or movement or faith, but will never
yield to an imposed authority. The young are independent of the old:
"free, white and twenty-one" is an old Jacksonian expression; the color
line has softened, but otherwise the sentiment is as true as it ever
was.

Mrs. Fanny Trollope (mother of novelist Anthony Trollope) had the
misfortune to leave her native Britain to spend two years in the United
States. Next to her revulsion at the twin American habits of chewing
tobacco in public places and missing spittoons with the finished
product, she most despised the passion for equality she found everywhere
she looked. "The theory of equality", Mrs. Trollope observed, may be
very daintily discussed by English gentlemen in a London dining-room,
when the servant, having placed a fresh bottle of cool wine on the
table, respectfully shuts the door, and leaves them to their walnuts and
their wisdom; but it will be found less palatable when it presents
itself in the shape of a hard, greasy paw, and is claimed in accents
that breathe less of freedom than of onions and whiskey. Strong, indeed,
must be the love of equality in an English breast if it can survive a
tour through the Union. [6]

The third principle is individualism. The Jacksonian does not just have
the right to self-fulfillment--he or she has a duty to seek it. In
Jacksonian America, everyone must find his or her way: each individual
must choose a faith, or no faith, and code of conduct based on
conscience and reason. The Jacksonian feels perfectly free to strike off
in an entirely new religious direction. "I sincerely believe", wrote
poor Mrs. Trollope, "that if a fire-worshiper, or an Indian Brahmin,
were to come to the United States, prepared to preach and pray in
English, he would not be long without a 'very respectable
congregation."' She didn't know the half of it.

Despite this individualism, the Jacksonian code also mandates acceptance
of certain social mores and principles. Loyalty to family, raising
children "right", sexual decency (heterosexual monogamy-which can be
serial) and honesty within the community are virtues that commend
themselves to the Jacksonian spirit. Children of both sexes can be wild,
but both women and men must be strong. Corporal punishment is customary
and common; Jacksonians find objections to this time-honored and (they
feel) effective method of discipline outlandish and absurd. Although
women should be more discreet, both sexes can sow wild oats before
marriage. After it, to enjoy the esteem of their community a couple must
be seen to put their children's welfare ahead of personal gratification.

The fourth pillar in the Jacksonian honor code struck Mrs. Trollope and
others as more dishonorable than honorable, yet it persists
nevertheless. Let us call it financial esprit. While the Jacksonian
believes in hard work, he or she also believes that credit is a right
and that money, especially borrowed money, is less a sacred trust than a
means for self-discovery and expression. Although previous generations
lacked the faculties for consumer credit that Americans enjoy at the end
of the twentieth century, many Americans have always assumed that they
have a right to spend money on their appearance, on purchases that
affirm their status. The strict Jacksonian code of honor does not enjoin
what others see as financial probity.

What it demands, rather, is a daring and entrepreneurial spirit. Credit
is seen less as an obligation than as an opportunity. Jacksonians have
always supported loose monetary policy and looser bankruptcy laws.
Finally, courage is the crowning and indispensable part of the code.
Jacksonians must be ready to defend their honor in great things and
small. Americans ought to stick up for what they believe. In the
nineteenth century Jacksonian Americans fought duels long after
aristocrats in Europe had given them up, and Americans today remain far
more likely than Europeans to settle personal quarrels with extreme and
even deadly violence.

Jacksonian America's love affair with weapons is, of course, the despair
of the rest of the country. Jacksonian culture values firearms, and the
freedom to own and use them. The right to bear arms is a mark of civic
and social equality, and knowing how to care for firearms is an
important part of life. Jacksonians are armed for defense: of the home
and person against robbers; against usurpations of the federal
government; and of the United States against its enemies. In one war
after another, Jacksonians have flocked to the colors. Independent and
difficult to discipline, they have nevertheless demonstrated magnificent
fighting qualities in every corner of the world. Jacksonian America
views military service as a sacred duty. When Hamiltonians, Wilsonians
and Jeffersonians dodged the draft in Vietnam or purchased exemptions
and substitutes in earlier wars, Jacksonians soldiered on, if sometimes
bitterly and resentfully. An honorable person is ready to kill or to die
for family and flag.

JACKSONIAN society draws an important distinction between those who
belong to the folk community and those who do not. Within that
community, among those bound by the code and capable of discharging
their responsibilities under it, Jacksonians are united in a social
compact. Outside that compact is chaos and darkness. The criminal who
commits what, in the Jacksonian code, constitute unforgivable sins
(cold-blooded murder, rape, the murder or sexual abuse of a child,
murder or attempted murder of a peace officer) can justly be killed by
the victims' families, colleagues or by society at large--with or
without the formalities of law. In many parts of the United States,
juries will not convict police on almost any charge, nor will they
condemn revenge killers in particularly outrageous cases. The right of
the citizen to defend family and property with deadly force is a sacred
one as well, a legacy from colonial and frontier times.

The absolute and even brutal distinction drawn between the members of
the community and outsiders has had massive implications in American
life. Throughout most of American history the Jacksonian community was
one from which many Americans were automatically and absolutely
excluded: Indians, Mexicans, Asians, African Americans, obvious sexual
deviants and recent immigrants of nonProtestant heritage have all felt
the sting. Historically, the law has been helpless to protect such
people against economic oppression, social discrimination and mob
violence, including widespread lynchings. Legislators would not enact
laws, and if they did, sheriffs would not arrest, prosecutors would not
try juries would not convict.

This tells us something very important: throughout most of American
history and to a large extent even today, equal rights emerge from and
depend on this popular culture of equality and honor rather than flow
out of abstract principles or written documents. The many social and
legal disabilities still suffered in practice by unpopular minorities
demonstrate that the courts and the statute books still enjoy only a
limited ability to protect equal rights in the teeth of popular feeling
and culture.

Even so, Jacksonian values play a major role in African-American
culture. If anything, that role has increased with the expanded presence
of African Americans in all military ranks. The often blighted social
landscape of the inner city has in some cases re-created the atmosphere
and practices of American frontier life. In many ways the gang culture
of some inner cities resembles the social atmosphere of the Jacksonian
South, as well as the hard drinking, womanizing, violent male culture of
the Mississippi in the days of Davy Crockett and Mark Twain. Bragging
about one's physical and sexual prowess, the willingness to avenge
disrespect with deadly force, a touchy insistence that one is as good as
anybody else: once over his shock at the urban landscape and the racial
issue, Billy the Kid would find himself surprisingly at home in such an
environment.

The degree to which African-American society resembles Jacksonian
culture remains one of the crucial and largely overlooked elements in
American life. Despite historical experiences that would have completely
alienated many ethnic minorities around the world, American black
popular culture remains profoundly--and, in times of danger,
fiercely--patriotic. From the Revolution onward, African Americans have
sought more to participate in America's wars than to abstain from them,
and the strength of personal and military honor codes in
African-American culture today remains a critical factor in assuring the
continued strength of American military forces into the twenty-first
century.

The underlying cultural unity between African Americans and
AngloJacksonian America shaped the course and ensured the success of the
modern civil rights movement. Martin Luther King and his followers
exhibited exemplary personal courage, their rhetoric was deeply rooted
in Protestant Christianity, and the rights they asked for were precisely
those that Jacksonian America values most for itself. Further, they
scrupulously avoided the violent tactics that would have triggered an
unstoppable Jacksonian response.

Although cultures change slowly and many individuals lag behind, the
bulk of American Jacksonian opinion has increasingly moved to recognize
the right of code-honoring members of minority groups to receive the
tights and protections due to members of the folk community. This new
and, one hopes, growing feeling of respect and tolerance emphatically
does not extend to those, minorities or not, who are not seen as
code-honoring Americans. Those who violate or reject the
code--criminals, irresponsible parents, drug addicts--have not benefited
from the softening of the Jacksonian color line.

The Politics of the Culture

JACKSONIAN foreign policy is related to Jacksonian values and goals in
domestic policy. For Jacksonians, the prime goal of the American people
is not the commercial and industrial policy sought by Hamiltonians, nor
the administrative excellence in support of moral values that Wilsonians
seek, nor Jeffersonian liberty. Jacksonians believe that the government
should do everything in its power to promote the well-being--political,
moral, economic--of the folk community. Any means are permissible in the
service of this end, as long as they do not violate the moral feelings
or infringe on the freedoms that Jacksonians believe are essential in
their daily lives. Jacksonians are instinctively democratic and
populist. Hamiltonians mistrust democracy; Wilsonians don't approve of
the political rough and tumble. And while Jeffersonians support
democracy in principle, they remain concerned that tyrannical majorities
can overrule minority rights. Jacksonians believe that the political and
moral instincts of the American people are sound and can be trusted, and
that the simpler and more direct the process of government is, the
better will be the results. In general, while the other schools welcome
the representative character of our democracy, Jacksonians tend to see
representative rather than direct institutions as necessary evils, and
to believe that governments breed corruption and inefficiency the way
picnics breed ants. Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress
and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists.
Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life
buzzing around the outhouse, it's probably a fly. Jacksonians see
corruption as human nature and, within certain ill-defined boundaries of
reason and moderation, an inevitable by-product of government.

It is perversion rather than corruption that most troubles Jacksonians:
the possibility that the powers of government will be turned from the
natural and proper object of supporting the well-being of the majority
toward oppressing the majority in the service of an economic or cultural
elite--or, worse still, in the interests of powerful foreigners. Instead
of trying, however ineptly, to serve the people, have the politicians
turned the government against the people? Are they serving large
commercial interests with malicious designs on the common good? Are they
either by ineptitude or wickedness serving hostile foreign
interests--giving all our industrial markets to the Japanese, or
allowing communists to steal our secrets and hand them to the Chinese?
Are they fecklessly frittering away huge sums of money on worthless
foreign aid programs that transfer billions to corrupt foreign
dictators?

Jacksonians tolerate a certain amount of government perversion, but when
it becomes unbearable, they look to a popular hero to restore government
to its proper functions. It was in this capacity that Andrew Jackson was
elected to the presidency, and the role has since been reprised by any
number of politicians on both the local and the national stages. Recent
decades have seen Ronald Reagan master the role, and George Wallace,
Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura and Pat Buchanan auditioning for it. The
Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the
entrenched elites. "I welcome their hatred", said the aristocratic
Franklin Roosevelt, in his role of tribune of the people. The hero may
make mistakes, but he will command the unswerving loyalty of Jacksonian
America so long as his heart is perceived to be in the right place.

When it comes to Big Government, Jeffersonians worry more about the
military than about anything else. But for Jacksonians, spending money
on the military is one of the best things government can do. Yes, the
Pentagon is inefficient and contractors are stealing the government
blind. But by definition the work that the Defense Department
does--defending the nation--is a service to the Jacksonian middle class.
Yes, the Pentagon should spend its money more carefully, but let us not
throw the baby out with the bath water. Stories about welfare abusers in
limousines and foreign aid swindles generate more anger among
Jacksonians than do stories of $600 hammers at the Pentagon.

The profoundly populist world-view of Jacksonian Americans contributes
to one of the most important elements in their politics: the belief that
while problems are complicated, solutions are simple. False idols are
many; the True God is One. Jacksonians believe that Gordian Knots are
there to be cut. In public controversies, the side that is always giving
you reasons why something can't be done, and is endlessly telling you
that the popular view isn't sufficiently "sophisticated" or
"nuanced"--that is the side that doesn't want you to know what it is
doing, and it is not to be trusted. If politicians have honest
intentions, they will tell you straight up what they plan to do. If it's
a good idea, you will like it as soon as they explain the whole package.
For most of the other schools, "complex" is a positive term when applied
either to policies or to situations; for Jacksonians it is a negative.
Ronald Reagan brilliantly exploited this. As in the case of Andrew
Jackson himself; Reagan's own intuitive approach to the world led him to
beliefs and policies that appealed to Jacksonian opinion right from the
start.

Instinct, Not Ideology

THOSE WHO LIKE to cast American foreign policy as an unhealthy mix of
ignorance, isolationism and trigger-happy cowboy diplomacy are often
thinking about the Jacksonian populist tradition. That tradition is
stronger among the mass of ordinary people than it is among the elite.
It is more strongly entrenched in the heartland than on either of the
two coasts. It has been historically associated with white Protestant
males of the lower and middle classes--today the least fashionable
element in the American political mix.

Although there are many learned and thoughtful Jacksonians, including
those who have made distinguished careers in public service, it is
certainly true that the Jacksonian philosophy is embraced by many people
who know very little about the wider world. With them it is an instinct
rather than an ideology--a culturally shaped set of beliefs and emotions
rather than a set of ideas. But ideas and policy proposals that resonate
with Jacksonian core values and instincts enjoy wide support and can
usually find influential supporters in the policy process. So
influential is Jacksonian opinion in the formation of American foreign
policy that anyone lacking a feel for it will find much of American
foreign policy baffling and opaque. Foreigners in particular have
alternately overestimated and underestimated American determination
because they failed to grasp the structure of Jacksonian opinion and
influence. Yet Jacksonian views on foreign affairs are relatively
straightforward, and once they are understood, American foreign policy
becomes much less mysterious.

To begin with, although the other schools often congratulate themselves
on their superior sophistication and appreciation for complexity,
Jacksonianism provides the basis in American life for what many scholars
and practitioners would consider the most sophisticated of all
approaches to foreign affairs: realism. In this it stands with
Jeffersonianism, while being deeply suspicious of the "global meliorist"
elements found, in different forms, in both Wilsonian and Hamiltonian
foreign policy ideas. Often, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians will stand
together in opposition to humanitarian interventions, or interventions
made in support of Wilsonian or Hamiltonian world order initiatives.
However, while Jeffersonians espouse a minimalist realism under which
the United States seeks to define its interests as narrowly as possible
and to defend those interests with an absolute minimum of force,
Jacksonians approach foreign policy in a very different spirit-one in
which honor, concern for reputation, and faith in milit ary institutions
play a much greater role.

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. Unlike Wilsonians, who hope
ultimately to convert the Hobbesian world of international relations
into a Lockean political community, Jacksonians believe that it is
natural and inevitable that national politics and national life will
work on different principles from international affairs. For
Jacksonians, the world community Wilsonians want to build is not merely
a moral impossibility but a monstrosity. An American foreign policy
that, for example, takes tax money from middle-class Americans to give
to a corrupt and incompetent dictatorship overseas is nonsense; it hurts
Americans and does little for Borrioboola-Gha. Countries, like families,
should take care of their own; if everybody did that we would all be
better off. Charity, meanwhile, should be left to private initiatives
and private funds; Jacksonian America is not ungenerous but it lacks all
confidence in the government's ability to administer charity, either at
home or abroad.

Given the moral gap between the folk community and the rest of the
world--and given that other countries are believed to have patriotic and
communal feelings of their own, feelings that similarly harden once the
boundary of the folk community is reached--Jacksonians believe that
international life is and will remain both anarchic and violent. The
United States must be vigilant and strongly armed. Our diplomacy must be
cunning, forceful and no more scrupulous than anybody else's. At times,
we must fight pre-emptive wars. There is absolutely nothing wrong with
subverting foreign governments or assassinating foreign leaders whose
bad intentions are clear. Thus, Jacksonians are more likely to tax
political leaders with a failure to employ vigorous measures than to
worry about the niceties of international law. Indeed, of all the major
currents in American society, Jacksonians have the least regard for
international law and international institutions. They prefer the rule
of custom to the written law, and that is as true in the international
sphere as it is in personal relations at home. Jacksonians believe that
there is an honor code in international life--as there was in clan
warfare in the borderlands of England--and those who live by the code
will be treated under it. But those who violate the code--who commit
terrorist acts in peacetime, for example--forfeit its protection and
deserve no consideration.

Many students of American foreign policy, both here and abroad, dismiss
Jacksonians as ignorant isolationists and vulgar patriots, but, again,
the reality is more complex, and their approach to the world and to war
is more closely grounded in classical realism than many recognize.
Jacksonians do not believe that the United States must have an
unambiguously moral reason for fighting. In fact, they tend to separate
the issues of morality and war more clearly than many members of the
foreign policy establishment.

The Gulf War was a popular war in Jacksonian circles because the defense
of the nation's oil supply struck a chord with Jacksonian opinion. That
opinion--which has not forgotten the oil shortages and price hikes of
the 1970s--clearly considers stability of the oil supply a vital
national interest and is prepared to fight to defend it. The atrocity
propaganda about alleged Iraqi barbarisms in Kuwait did not inspire
Jacksonians to war, and neither did legalistic arguments about U.S.
obligations under the UN Charter to defend a member state from
aggression. Those are useful arguments to screw Wilsonian courage to the
sticking place, but they mean little for Jacksonians. Had there been no
UN Charter and had Kuwait been even more corrupt and repressive that it
is, Jacksonian opinion would still have supported the Gulf War. It would
have supported a full-scale war with Iran over the 1980 hostage crisis,
and it will take an equally hawkish stance toward any future threat to
perceived U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf region. In the absence of a
clearly defined threat to the national interest, Jacksonian opinion is
much less aggressive. It has not, for example, been enthusiastic about
the U.S. intervention in the case of Bosnia. There the evidence of
unspeakable atrocities was much greater than in Kuwait, and the legal
case for intervention was as strong. Yet Jacksonian opinion saw no
threat to the interests, as it understood them, of the United States,
and Wilsonians were the only segment of the population that was actively
eager for war.

In World War I it took the Zimmermann Telegram and the repeated sinking
of American ships to convince Jacksonian opinion that war was necessary.
In World War II, neither the Rape of Nanking nor the atrocities of Nazi
rule in Europe drew the United States into the war. The attack on Pearl
Harbor did.

To engage Jacksonians in support of the Cold War it was necessary to
convince them that Moscow was engaged in a far-reaching and systematic
campaign for world domination, and that this campaign would succeed
unless the United States engaged in a long-term defensive effort with
the help of allies around the world. That involved a certain
overstatement of both Soviet intentions and capabilities, but that is
beside the present point. Once Jacksonian opinion was convinced that the
Soviet threat was real and that the Cold War was necessary, it stayed
convinced. Populist American opinion accepted the burdens it imposed and
worried only that the government would fail to prosecute the Cold War
with the necessary vigor. No one should mistake the importance of this
strong and constant support. Despite the frequent complaints by
commentators and policymakers that the American people are
"isolationist" and "uninterested in foreign affairs", they have made and
will make enormous financial and personal sacrifices if convinced that
these are in the nation's vital interests.

This mass popular patriotism, and the martial spirit behind it, gives
the United States immense advantages in international affairs. After two
world wars, no European nation has shown the same willingness to pay the
price in blood and treasure for a global presence. Most of the
"developed" nations find it difficult to maintain large, high-quality
fighting forces. Not all of the martial patriotism in the United States
comes out of the world of Jacksonian populism, but without that
tradition, the United States would be hard pressed to maintain the kind
of international military presence it now has.

Pessimism

WHILE in many respects Jacksonian Americans have an optimistic outlook,
there is a large and important sense in which they are pessimistic.
Whatever the theological views of individual Jacksonians may be,
Jacksonian culture believes in Original Sin and does not accept the
Enlightenment's belief in the perfectibility of human nature. As a
corollary, Jacksonians are pre-millennialist: they do not believe that
utopia is just around the corner. In fact, they tend to believe the
reverse--the anti-Christ will get here before Jesus does, and human
history will end in catastrophe and flames, followed by the Day of
Judgment.

This is no idle theological concept. Belief in the approach of the "End
Times" and the "Great Tribulation"--concepts rooted in certain
interpretations of Jewish and Christian prophetic texts--has been a
powerful force in American life from colonial times. Jacksonians believe
that neither Wilsonians nor Hamiltonians nor anybody else will ever
succeed in building a peaceful world order, and that the only world
order we are likely to get will be a bad one. No matter how much money
we ship overseas, and no matter how cleverly the development bureaucrats
spend it, it will not create peace on earth. Plans for universal
disarmament and world courts of justice founder on the same rock of
historical skepticism. Jacksonians just tend not to believe that any of
these things will do much good.

In fact, they think they may do harm. Linked to the skepticism about
man-made imitations of the Kingdom of God is a deep apprehension about
the rise of an evil world order. In theological terms, this is a
reference to the fear of the anti-Christ, who, many commentators affirm,
is predicted in Scripture to come with the appearance of an angel of
light--a charismatic political figure who offers what looks like a plan
for world peace and order, but which is actually a Satanic snare
intended to deceive.

For most of its history, Jacksonian America believed that the Roman
Catholic Church was the chief emissary of Satan on earth, a belief that
had accompanied the first Americans on their journey from Britain. Fear
of Catholicism gradually subsided, but during the Cold War the Kremlin
replaced the Vatican as the center for American popular fears about the
forces of evil in the world. The international communist conspiracy
captured the old stock American popular imagination because it fit
cultural templates established in the days of the Long Parliament and
the English Civil War. Descendants of immigrants from Eastern Europe had
their own cultural dispositions toward conspiracy thinking, plus, in
many cases, a deep hatred and fear of Russia.

The fear of a ruthless, formidable enemy abroad who enjoys a powerful
fifth column in the United States--including high-ranking officials who
serve it either for greed or out of misguided ideological zeal--is older
than the Republic. During the Cold War, this "paranoid tradition" in
American life stayed mostly focused on the Kremlin-though organizations
like the John Birch Society saw ominous links between the Kremlin and
the American Establishment. The paranoid streak was, if anything,
helpful in sustaining popular support for Cold War strategy. After the
Cold War, it is proving more difficult to integrate into effective
American policy. To some degree, the chief object of popular concern in
post-Cold War America is the Hamiltonian dream of a fully integrated
global economy, combined with the Wilsonian dream of global political
order that ends the nightmare of warring nation-states. George Bush's
call for a "New World Order" had a distinctly Orwellian connotation to
the Jacksonian ear. Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, in his
book The New World Order (1991), traces the call for that Order to a
Satanic conspiracy consciously implemented by the pillars of the
American Establishment.

The fear that the Establishment, linked to its counterpart in Britain
and, through Britain, to all the corrupt movements and elites of the Old
World, is relentlessly plotting to destroy American liberty is an old
but still potent one. The Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Bilderbergers, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Rothschilds,
the Rockefellers: these names and others echo through a large and
shadowy world of conspiracy theories and class resentment. Should
seriously bad economic times come, there is always the potential that,
with effective leadership, the paranoid element in the Jacksonian world
could ride popular anger and panic into power.

Honor

ANOTHER aspect of Jacksonian foreign policy is the aforementioned deep
sense of national honor and a corresponding need to live up to--in
actuality and in the eyes of others--the demands of an honor code. The
political importance of this code should not be underestimated;
Americans are capable of going to war over issues of national honor. The
War of 1812 is an example of Jacksonian sentiment forcing a war out of
resentment over continual national humiliations at the hand of Britain.
(Those who suffered directly from British interference with American
shipping, the merchants, were totally against the war.) At the end of
the twentieth century; it is national honor, more than any vital
strategic interest, that would require the United States to fulfill its
promises to protect Taiwan from invasion.

The perception of national honor as a vital interest has always been a
wedge issue driving Jacksonians and Jeffersonians apart. The
Jeffersonian peace policy in the Napoleonic Wars became impossible as
the War Hawks grew stronger. The same pattern recurred in the Carter
administration, during which gathering Jacksonian fury and impatience at
Carter's Jeffersonian approaches to the Soviet Union, Panama, Iran and
Nicaragua ignited a reaction that forced the President to reverse his
basic policy orientation and ended by driving him from office. What
Jeffersonian diplomacy welcomes as measures to head off war often look
to Jacksonians like pusillanimous weakness.

Once the United States extends a security guarantee or makes a promise,
we are required to honor that promise come what may. Jacksonian opinion,
which in the nature of things had little faith that South Vietnam could
build democracy or that there was anything concrete there of interest to
the average American, was steadfast in support of the war--though not of
the strategy--because we had given our word to defend South Vietnam.
During this year's war in Kosovo, Jacksonian opinion was resolutely
against it to begin with. However, once U.S. honor was engaged,
Jacksonians began to urge a stronger warfighting strategy including the
use of ground troops. It is a bad thing to fight an unnecessary war, but
it is inexcusable and dishonorable to lose one once it has begun.

Reputation is as important in international life as it is to the
individual honor of Jacksonians. Honor in the Jacksonian imagination is
not simply what one feels oneself to be on the inside; it is also a
question of the respect and dignity one commands in the world at large.
Jacksonian opinion is sympathetic to the idea that our
reputation-whether for fair dealing or cheating, toughness or
weakness--will shape the way that others treat us. Therefore, at stake
in a given crisis is not simply whether we satisfy our own ideas of what
is due our honor. Our behavior and the resolution that we obtain must
enhance our reputation--our prestige--in the world at large.

Warfighting

JACKSONIAN America has clear ideas about how wars should be fought, how
enemies should be treated, and what should happen when the wars are
over. It recognizes two kinds of enemies and two kinds of fighting:
honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in
the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case all
rules are off.

An honorable enemy is one who declares war before beginning combat;
fights according to recognized rules of war, honoring such traditions as
the flag of truce; treats civilians in occupied territory with due
consideration; and--a crucial point--refrains from the mistreatment of
prisoners of war. Those who surrender should be treated with generosity.
Adversaries who honor the code will benefit from its protections, while
those who want a dirty fight will get one.

This pattern was very clearly illustrated in the Civil War. The Army of
the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia faced one another
throughout the war, and fought some of the bloodiest baffles of the
nineteenth century, including long bouts of trench warfare. Yet Robert
E. Lee and his men were permitted an honorable surrender and returned
unmolested to their homes with their horses and personal side arms. One
Confederate, however, was executed after the war: Captain Henry Wirz,
who was convicted of mistreating Union prisoners of war at Camp Sumter,
Georgia.

Although American Indians often won respect for their extraordinary
personal courage, Jacksonian opinion generally considered Indians to be
dishonorable opponents. American-Indian warrior codes (also honor based)
permitted surprise attacks on civilians and the torture of prisoners of
war. This was all part of a complex system of limited warfare among the
tribal nations, but Jacksonian frontier dwellers were not students of
multicultural diversity. In their view, Indian war tactics were the sign
of a dishonorable, unscrupulous and cowardly form of war. Anger at such
tactics led Jacksonians to abandon the restraints imposed by their own
war codes, and the ugly skirmishes along the frontier spiraled into a
series of genocidal conflicts in which each side felt the other was
violating every standard of humane conduct.

The Japanese, another people with a highly developed war code based on
personal honor, had the misfortune to create the same kind of impression
on American Jacksonians. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the gross
mistreatment of American POWs (the Bataan Death March), and Japanese
fighting tactics all served to enrage American Jacksonians and led them
to see the Pacific enemy as ruthless, dishonorable and inhuman. All
contributed to the vitriolic intensity of combat in the Pacific theater.
By the summer of 1945, American popular opinion was fully prepared to
countenance invasion of the Japanese home islands, even if they were
defended with the tenacity (and indifference to civilian lives) that
marked the fighting on Okinawa.

Given this background, the Americans who decided to use the atomic bomb
may have been correct that the use of the weapon saved lives, and not
only of American soldiers. In any case, Jacksonians had no compunction
about using the bomb. General Curtis LeMay (subsequently the 1968
running mate of Jacksonian populist third-party candidate George
Wallace) succinctly summed up this attitude toward fighting a
dishonorable opponent: "I'll tell you what war is about", said Lemay in
an interview, "You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough
they stop fighting." [7]

By contrast, although the Germans committed bestial crimes against
civilians and POWs (especially Soviet POWs), their behavior toward the
armed forces of the United States was more in accordance with American
ideas about military honor. Indeed, General Erwin Rommel is considered
something of a military hero among American Jacksonians: an honorable
enemy. Still, if the Germans avoided exposure to the utmost fury of an
aroused American people at war, they were nevertheless subjected to the
full, ferocious scope of the violence that a fully aroused American
public opinion will sustain--and even insist upon.

For the first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with
all available force. The use of limited force is deeply repugnant.
Jacksonians see war as a switch that is either "on" or "off." They do
not like the idea of violence on a dimmer switch. Either the stakes are
important enough to fight for--in which case you should fight with
everything you have--or they are not, in which case you should mind your
own business and stay home. To engage in a limited war is one of the
costliest political decisions an American president can make-neither
Truman nor Johnson survived it.

The second key concept in Jacksonian thought about war is that the
strategic and tactical objective of American forces is to impose our
will on the enemy with as few American casualties as possible. The
Jacksonian code of military honor does not turn war into sport. It is a
deadly and earnest business. This is not the chivalry of a medieval
joust, or of the orderly battlefields of eighteenth-century Europe. One
does not take risks with soldiers' lives to give a "fair fight." Some
sectors of opinion in the United States and abroad were both shocked and
appalled during the Gulf and Kosovo wars over the way in which American
forces attacked the enemy from the air without engaging in much ground
combat. The "turkey shoot" quality of the closing moments of the war
against Iraq created a particularly painful impression. Jacksonians
dismiss such thoughts out of hand. It is the obvious duty of American
leaders to crush the forces arrayed against us as quickly, thoroughly
and professionally as possible.

Jacksonian opinion takes a broad view of the permissible targets in war.
Again reflecting a very old cultural heritage, Jacksonians believe that
the enemy's will to fight is a legitimate target of war, even if this
involves American forces in attacks on civilian lives, establishments
and property. The colonial wars, the Revolution and the Indian wars all
give ample evidence of this view, and General William Tecumseh Sherman's
March to the Sea showed the degree to which the targeting of civilian
morale through systematic violence and destruction could, to widespread
popular applause, become an acknowledged warfighting strategy, even when
fighting one's own rebellious kindred.

Probably as a result of frontier warfare, Jacksonian opinion came to
believe that it was breaking the spirit of the enemy nation, rather than
the fighting power of the enemy's armies, that was the chief object of
warfare. It was not enough to defeat a tribe in battle; one had to
"pacify" the tribe, to convince it utterly that resistance was and
always would be futile and destructive. For this to happen, the war had
to go to the enemy's home. The villages had to be burned, food supplies
destroyed, civilians had to be killed. From the tiniest child to the
most revered of the elderly sages, everyone in the enemy nation had to
understand that further armed resistance to the will of the American
people--whatever that might be--was simply not an option.

With the development of air power and, later, of nuclear weapons, this
long-standing cultural acceptance of civilian targeting assumed new
importance. Wilsonians and Jeffersonians protested even at the time
against the deliberate terror bombing of civilian targets in the Second
World War. Since 1945 there has been much agonized review of the
American decision to use atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
None of this hand wringing has made the slightest impression on the
Jacksonian view that the bombings were selfevidently justified and
right. During both the Vietnam and Korean conflicts, there were serious
proposals in Jacksonian quarters to use nuclear weapons--why else have
them? The only reason Jacksonian opinion has ever accepted not to use
nuclear weapons is the prospect of retaliation.

Jacksonians also have strong ideas about how wars should end. "There is
no substitute for victory", as General MacArthur said, and the only sure
sign of victory is the "unconditional surrender" of enemy forces. Just
as Jacksonian opinion resents limits on American weapons and tactics, it
also resents stopping short of victory. Unconditional surrender is not
always a literal and absolute demand. The Confederate surrenders in 1865
included generous provisions for the losing armies. The Japanese were
assured after the Potsdam Declaration that, while the United States
insisted on unconditional surrender and acceptance of the terms, they
could keep the "emperor system" after the war. However, there is only so
much give in the idea: all resistance must cease; U.S. forces must make
an unopposed entry into and occupation of the surrendering country; the
political objectives of the war must be conceded in toto.

When in the later stages of World War II the Joint Chiefs of Staff
discussed the prospect of an invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of the
major Japanese home islands, Admiral William Leahy projected 268,000
Americans would be killed or wounded out of an invasion force of
766,000.[8] The invasion of the chief island of Honshu, tentatively
planned for the spring of 1946, would have been significantly worse.
While projected casualty figures like these led a number of American
officials to argue for modification of the unconditional surrender
formula, Secretary of State James M. Byrnes told Truman that he would be
"crucified" if he retreated from this formula--one that received a
standing ovation when Truman repeated it to Congress in his first
address as president. Truman agreed--wisely. His efforts to wage limited
war in Korea cost him re-election in 1952. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson's
inability to fight unlimited war for unconditional surrender in Vietnam
cost him the presidency in 1968; Jimmy Carter's inability to resolve the
Iranian hostage crisis with a clear-cut victory destroyed any hope he
had of winning the 1980 election; and George Bush's refusal to insist on
an unconditional surrender in Iraq may have contributed to his defeat in
the 1992 presidential election. For American presidents, MacArthur is
right: there is no substitute for victory.

In Victory, Magnanimity

ONCE THE enemy has made an unconditional surrender, the honor code
demands that he be treated magnanimously. Grant fed Lee's men from his
army supplies, while Sherman's initial agreement with General Johnston
was so generous that it was overruled in Washington. American occupation
troops in both Germany and Japan very quickly lost their rancor against
the defeated foes. Not always disinterestedly, GIs in Europe were
passing out chocolate bars, cigarettes and nylon stockings before the
guns fell silent. The bitter racial antagonism that colored the Pacific
War rapidly faded after it. Neither in Japan nor in Germany did American
occupiers behave like the Soviet occupation forces in eastern Germany,
where looting, rape and murder were still widespread months after the
surrender.

In both Germany and Japan, the United States had originally envisioned a
harsh occupation strategy with masses of war crimes trials and strict
economic controls--somewhat akin to the original Radical Republican
program in the post Civil War South. But in all three cases, the
victorious Americans quickly lost the appetite for vengeance against all
but the most egregious offenders against the code. Whatever was said in
the heat of battle, even the most Radical Reconstructionists envisioned
the South's ultimate return to its old political stats and rights. In
the same way, soon after the shooting stopped in World War II, American
public opinion simply assumed that the ultimate goal was for Germany and
Japan to resume their places in the community of nations.

Not everybody qualifies for such lenient treatment under the code. In
particular, repeat offenders will suffer increasingly severe penalties.
Although many Americans were revolted by the harsh and greedy peace
forced on Mexico (Grant felt that the Civil War was in part God's
punishment for American crimes against Mexico), Santa Anna's long record
of perfidy and cruelty built popular support both for the Mexican War
and the peace. The pattern of frontier warfare, in which factions in a
particular tribe might renew hostilities in violation of an agreement,
helped solidify the Jacksonian belief that there was no point in making
or keeping treaties with "savages."

In the international conflicts of the twentieth century, it is
noteworthy that there have been no major populist backlashes calling for
harsher treatment of defeated enemies. But when foreign enemies lack the
good taste to surrender, Jacksonian opinion carries grudges that last
for decades. Some of the roots of anti-China feeling in the United
States today date back to mistreatment of American prisoners during the
Korean War. U.S. food and energy aid to North Korea, indeed any
engagement at all with that defiant regime, remains profoundly unpopular
for the same reason. The mullahs of Iran, the assassins of Libya and
Fidel Castro have never been forgiven by Jacksonian opinion for their
crimes against and defiance of the United States. Neither will they be,
until they acknowledge their sins.

In the case of the Cold War, the failure of the Soviet Union to make a
formal surrender, or for the conflict to end in any way that could be
marked as VUSSR Day, has greatly complicated American policy toward
post-Cold War Russia. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War absolutely and
unconditionally, and Russia has suffered economic and social devastation
comparable to that sustained by any losing power in the great wars of
the century. But because it never surrendered, Jacksonian opinion never
quite shifted into magnanimity mode. Wilsonians, Hamiltonians and
Jeffersonians all favored reconstruction support and aid; but without
Jacksonian concurrence the American effort was sharply limited. Advice
was doled out with a free and generous hand, but aid was extended more
grudgingly.

This is far from a complete account of Jacksonian values and beliefs as
they affect the United States. In economic as well as defense policy,
for example, Jacksonian ideas are both influential and unique. Convinced
that the prime purpose of government is to defend the living standards
of the middle class, Jacksonian opinion is instinctively protectionist,
seeking trade privileges for U.S. goods abroad and hoping to withhold
those privileges from foreign exports. Jacksonians were once farmers;
today they tend to be service and industrial workers. They see the
preservation of American jobs, even at the cost of some unspecified
degree of "economic efficiency", as the natural and obvious task of the
federal government's trade policy. Jacksonians can be convinced that a
particular trade agreement operates to the benefit of American workers,
but they need to be convinced over and over again. They are also
skeptical, on both cultural and economic grounds, of the benefits of
immigration, which is seen as endangering the cohesion of the folk
community and introducing new, low-wage competition for jobs. Neither
result strikes Jacksonian opinion as a suitable outcome for a desirable
government policy.

The Indispensable Element

JACKSONIAN influence in American history has been--and remains-enormous.
The United States cannot wage a major international war without
Jacksonian support; once engaged, politicians cannot safely end the war
except on Jacksonian terms. From the perspective of members of other
schools and many foreign observers, when Jacksonian sentiment favors a
given course of action, the United States will move too far too fast and
too unilaterally in pursuit of its goals. When Jacksonian sentiment is
strongly opposed, the United States will be seen to move too slowly or
not at all. For anyone wishing to anticipate the course of American
policy, an understanding of the structure of Jacksonian beliefs and
values is essential.

It would be an understatement to say that the Jacksonian approach to
foreign policy is controversial. It is an approach that has certainly
contributed its share to the headaches of American policymakers
throughout history. It has also played a role in creating a constituency
abroad for the idea that the United States is addicted to a crude cowboy
diplomacy--an idea that, by reducing international faith in the judgment
and predictability of the United States, represents a real liability for
American foreign policy.

Despite its undoubted limitations and liabilities, however, Jacksonian
policy and politics are indispensable elements of American strength.
Although Wilsonians, Jeffersonians and the more delicately constructed
Hamiltonians do not like to admit it, every American school needs
Jacksonians to get what it wants. If the American people had exhibited
the fighting qualities of, say, the French in World War II, neither
Hamiltonians, nor Jeffersonians nor Wilsonians would have had the
opportunity to have much to do with shaping the postwar international
order.

Moreover, as folk cultures go, Jacksonian America is actually open and
liberal. Non-Jacksonians at home and abroad are fond of sneering at what
must be acknowledged to be the deeply regrettable Jacksonian record of
racism, or its commitment to forms of Christian belief that strike many
as both unorthodox and bigoted. Certainly, Jacksonian America has not
been in the forefront of the fight for minority rights, nor is it
necessarily the place to go searching for avant garde artistic styles or
cutting-edge philosophical reflections on the death of God.

But folk cultural change is measured in decades and generations, not
electoral cycles, and on this clock, Jacksonian America is moving very
rapidly. The military institutions have moved from strict segregation to
a concerted attack on racism in fifty years. In civilian life, the
belief that color is no bar to membership in the Jacksonian community of
honor is rapidly replacing earlier beliefs. Just as Southerners whose
grandfathers burned crosses against the Catholic Church now work very
well with Catholics on all kinds of social, cultural and even religious
endeavors, so we are seeing a steady erosion of the racial barriers.
Even on issues of modernist art, Jacksonian America is moving. The
Vietnam Memorial in Washington, once widely denounced by Jacksonians for
its failure to include figurative sculptures, has now become one of the
most visited and revered sites in the capital. On Memorial Day,
thousands of leather-clad representatives of the Jacksonian culture
visit it on their HarleyDavidsons, many of them accompanied by their
wives riding pillion.

Jacksonian America performs an additional service: it makes a major, if
unheralded, contribution to America's vaunted "soft power." It is not
simply the Jeffersonian commitment to liberty and equality, the
Wilsonian record of benevolence, anti-colonialism and support for
democracy, or even the commercial success resulting from Hamiltonian
policies that attracts people to the United States. Perhaps beyond all
these it is the spectacle of a country that is good for average people
to live in: where ordinary people can and do express themselves
culturally, economically and spiritually without any inhibition. The
consumer lifestyle of the United States--and the consequences of federal
policy to enrich the middle class and make it a class of homeowners and
automobile drivers--wins the country many admirers abroad. For the first
time in human history, millions of ordinary people have enough money in
their pockets and time on their hands to support a popular culture that
has more resources than the high culture of the aristocracy and elite.
This culture is what hundreds of millions of foreigners love most about
the United States, and its dissemination makes scores of millions of
foreigners feel somehow connected to or even part of the United States.
The cultural, social and religious vibrancy and unorthodoxy of
Jacksonian America--not excluding such pastimes as professional
wrestling--are among the country's most important foreign policy assets.

It may also be worth noting that the images of American propensities to
violence, and of the capabilities of American military forces and
intelligence operatives, are so widely distributed in the media that
they may actually heighten international respect for American strength
and discourage attempts to test it.

THIS BASICALLY positive assessment would be incomplete without a
description of the two most serious problems that the Jacksonian school
perennially poses for American policymakers. Both of them spring from
the wide ideological and cultural differences that divide the Jacksonian
outlook from the other schools.

The first problem is the gap between Hamiltonian and Wilsonian promises
and Jacksonian performance. The globally oriented, orderbuilding schools
of thought see American power as a resource to be expended in pursuit of
their far-reaching goals. Many of the commitments they wish to make, the
institutions they wish to build, and the social and economic policies
they wish to promote do not enjoy Jacksonian support; in some cases,
they elicit violent Jacksonian disagreement. This puts Hamiltonians and
Wilsonians over and over again in an awkward position. At best they are
trying to push treaties, laws and appropriations through a sulky and
reluctant Congress. At worst they find themselves committed to military
confrontations without Jacksonian support. More often than not, the
military activities they wish to pursue are multilateral, limited
warfare or peacekeeping operations. These are often unpopular both
inside the military and in the country at large. Caught between their
commitments (and the wellorganized Hamiltonian or Wilsonian lobbies and
pressure groups whose political clout is often at least partially
responsible for these commitments) and the manifest unpopularity of the
actions required to fulfill them, American policymakers dither, tack
from side to side, and generally make an unimpressive show. This is one
of the structural problems of American foreign policy, and it is
exacerbated by the divided structure of the American government and
Senate customs and rules that give a determined opposition many
opportunities to block action of which it disapproves.

The second problem has a similar origin, but a different structure.
Jacksonian opinion is slow to focus on a particular foreign policy
issue, and slower still to make a commitment to pursue an end vigorously
and for the long term. Once that commitment has been made, it is even
harder to build Jacksonian sentiment for a change. This is particularly
true when change involves overcoming one of the ingrained preferences in
Jacksonian culture; it is, for example, much harder to shift a settled
hawkish consensus in a dovish direction than vice versa. The hardest
task of all is to maintain support for a policy that eschews
oversimplification in favor of complexity. Having gotten Jacksonian
opinion into a war in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf, it was very hard to
get it out again without achieving total victory. Once China or Vietnam
has been established as an enemy nation, it is very difficult to build
support for normalizing relations or, worse still, extending foreign
aid.

These problems, which are responsible for many of the recurring system
crashes and unhappy stalemates in American foreign policy, can never be
fully solved. They reflect profound differences in outlook and interest
in American society and it is the job of our institutions to adjudicate
these disputes and force compromise rather than to eliminate them.

Efforts by policymakers to finesse these disputes often exacerbate the
basic problem, which is the cultural, political and class distance
between Jacksonian America and the representatives of the other schools.
Attempts to mask Hamiltonian or Wilsonian policies in Jacksonian
rhetoric, or to otherwise misrepresent or bide 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.

(1.) David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in
Depression and War 1929-45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), p. 847.
(2.) That figure is 441,513. Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed
Conflicts: A Statistical Reference, Volume II (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Co., Inc., 1992).
(3.) Ibid., p. 886.
(4.) Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, l996), p. 103.
(5.) William S. Cohen, Report on Allied Contributions to the Common
Defense: A Report to the United States Congress by the Secretary of
Defense (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March 1999).
(6.) Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans: Volume I
(London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832).
(7.) Richard Rhodes, "The General and World War II", The New
Yorker, June 19, 1995, pp. 47ff.
(8.) Douglas J. MacEachin, The Final Months of the War With Japan:
Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb
Decision (Langley, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998).

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