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.
This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United
States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.
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. 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.
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.
(Also see Black
Book of Communism)
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 (senior) took in the 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.
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 self-conscious 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 outlook 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 nineteenth-century 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 self-identification 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
Seeger 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.
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 non-Protestant 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 Anglo-Jacksonian 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 rights 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 military 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
battles 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."
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 self-evidently 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. 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 F. 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 status 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 V-USSR 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
Harley-Davidsons, 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, order-building 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 well-organized 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 hide unpopular policies, may succeed in the short run, but ultimately
they can lead to a collapse of popular confidence and the stiffening of
resistance to any and all policies deemed suspect. When misguided political
advisers persuaded the distinctively unmilitary Massachusetts Governor
Michael
Dukakis to put on a helmet and get in a tank for a television commercial,
they only advertised how far out of touch with Jacksonian America they
were. |