Who Controls the State?
Since Roman times, political thinkers have understood that there are two basic factions in any political world: those who have and those who have less. We can define politics as the effort to balance power between the wealthy and privileged on one side and the poor and working people on the other. But if these are the primary factions that define politics through history, they are not the only ones. In the United States today, competing and overlapping factions include those around questions of gender freedom, racial equality, educational distinction, foreign policy liberalism or isolationism, and more. The imagined genius of the American constitutional system was to understand that freedom is dependent not on banning or eliminating factions (for faction is to freedom as air is to fire, in James Madison’s famous analogy), but in multiplying and empowering institutional support for so many competing factions so as to blunt the power and influence of any one faction to take power. The core insight of American constitutional republicanism is that politics must live with and even cultivate multiple polarizations and disagreements rather than simply a single polarization or disagreement.
In her account of American constitutional republicanism in On Revolution, Hannah Arendt argued that the greatest American contribution to the foundation of freedom was its consistent abolition of sovereignty. To preserve and to found meaningful freedom, power must be dispersed, multiplied, and divided. This quintessentially American understanding of politics as the multiplication and division of powers—non simply amongst the three branches of the national government, but also amongst the states and counties and even local nongovernmental organizations—is, Arendt argues, the institutional embodiment of the American constitution of freedom.
As Arendt understands American politics, the great enemy of freedom are those movements which would centralize power and thus risk overturning the essential plurality of forces that are the font of freedom. When we think of the urge to centralize the national government today, we often think of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, both of whom vastly augmented the power of the national government over the federalist system. But if there is one president who did more to further centralization of power in the United States in a way that is relevant for today, it is Andrew Jackson.
As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued in his justly famous book The Age of Jackson, the real innovation of Jackson’s presidency was his mobilization of a coalition of the working classes with intellectual elites to attack the power of corporate and financial interests. The intellectuals behind Jackson sought to emancipate the working classes a decade before Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. Schlesinger’s innovation was to see Jackson’s presidency as the elevation of class as the most important faction in American politics. The age of Jackson, Schlesinger wrote, was the “the second phase, Jeffersonianism having been the first, of the perennial struggle between the business community and the rest of society for control of the state.”
Writing in 1989, fifty years after The Age of Jackson was published, Schlesinger reconsiders his argument and asks: What was the source of intensive conflict during the Jacsonian years really about. His answer is: it was a battle to answer the question: “Who is to control the state?” Rather than business and corporate interests, Jackson stands for the American idea that the people and not elites should control the state. It was, and still is today, a movement that sees the state as largely captured by monied and corporate and expert interests and seeks, at once, to demolish but also to capture the power of elite and state institutions. What Schlesinger understood is that the attack on the state was actually an attempt to wrest control of the state from one group in society and give it to another.
The reason to re-read Schlesinger (both his original book and the 1989 reappraisal which has just been made freely available at the New York Review of Books website), is because our politics today is clearly consumed with the same core conflict between elites and the working classes. As Walter Russell Mead argues, we are witnessing a Jacksonian Turn in American politics. Mead writes:
Amidst this Jacksonian turn, however, there is a fundamental lack of clarity amongst the players in this controversy about what the stakes really are. If Donald Trump presents himself as a Jacksonian who would crush an elitist-led state in the name of the working man, his actual policies favor corporate elites at the expense of the poor and middle classes. And if the Democrats fashion themselves as trust-busters and defenders of the poor and working classes, their elitist defense of the managerial class system prevents them from actually taking on the system in any meaningful way. Trumpians are furious at intellectual and cultural elites. The left wing of the Democratic Party are furious at corporate and pro-Israel elites. On both sides there are rising forces who would take control of the state from elites. There is a battle today over who will control the state. Yet, while both major parties are mobilizing Jacksonian rhetoric, neither are fully committed to the consequences of Jacksonian politics. There is a sense that elites have controlled the state for too long, but there is a disagreement about which elites are the problem and how fully to expunge the elites from their ruling role.
Forgotten fully in this Jacksonian turn is Arendt’s understanding of republicanism in which the American idea of freedom requires that no one faction control the state. For Arendt, republican freedom meant a fundamental refusal of democratic supremacy, and a defense of institutional decentralization over the dictate of fulfilling the democratic will of a unified people. The danger in Jacksonianism is not its attack on elites, but its belief that the state is a prize for one faction to win and to control.
It is this idea that the state should be a centralized state that can carry out the democratic will of the people without institutional opposition that is the true and dangerous legacy of Jacksonian politics. Amidst our Jacksonian turn, it is helpful to read Schlesinger on Jackson on the question of who is to control the state. You can read the 1989 essay here. Shlesinger writes:
Even more important, Jackson took two decisive steps to affirm the supremacy of the national government—one against a rebellious state, South Carolina, the other against the most powerful private corporation in the country. I mean, of course, Jackson’s proclamation condemning South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the Tariff Act of 1832 and the Bank veto. Had South Carolina got away with nullification, had Biddle shown that the Bank of the United States was more powerful than the government of the United States, the implications for the future of the republic would have been considerable. “The Bank of the United States,” Jackson told his cabinet in words that might also have applied to the state of South Carolina, “is in itself a Government which has gradually increased its strength from the day of its establishment. The question between it and the people has become one of power.” Jackson, in mastering these two profound challenges to federal authority, established that authority more firmly than ever.
That is why Henry Clay, in calling on the Senate to censure Jackson for the removal of federal funds from the US Bank, made his passionate cry in 1833, “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending toward a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man.” Even a Jacksonian like Brownson exclaimed with alarm at Jackson’s “tendency to Centralization and his evident leaning to Bureaucraticy“; Jackson had made more rapid strides toward “Centralization and to the Bureaucratic system than even the most sensitive nullifier has yet suspected.” Another young Jacksonian, that intelligent rogue Ben Butler of Massachusetts, wrote in his memoirs that, while he had been “dazzled with the brilliancy of Jackson’s administration…I early had sense enough to see that it conflicted, in a very considerable degree, with the teachings of Jefferson.”
In the years since The Age of Jackson such scholars as J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon Wood have given new clarity to the competing visions of “republicanism” and “liberalism” in the first generation of independence. Republicanism called on citizens to subordinate their individual interests to public virtue and the common good. Liberalism argued that citizens in pursuing their individual interests promoted the common good. Historians disagree about the proportions in which republicanism and liberalism were mingled in the revolutionary mind and about the time when liberalism drove republicanism out. In any event, as Jackson once told James K. Polk, “My political creed…was formed in the old republican school.”
The old republican creed, as Robert V. Remini persuasively shows in his fine recent biography of Jackson, nourished Jackson’s commitment to public virtue and sanctioned government action to secure the common good. Roger B. Taney, who served Jackson as attorney general and as secretary of the treasury and whom Jackson thereafter made chief justice, summed up the point when the Supreme Court vindicated the right of the state of Massachusetts to construct a free bridge over the Charles River at the expense of a privately owned toll bridge. “The object and end of all government,” Taney wrote for the Court, “is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the community…and it can never be assumed, that the government intended to diminish its power of accomplishing the end for which it was created.”
Under the banner of antistatism, the Jacksonians carried on an aggressive program of government intervention and regulation. Intervention was required to dismantle existing structures of privilege, starting of course with the Bank of the United States. “A good deal of positive government,” wrote John L. O’Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review, “may be yet wanted to undo the manifold mischiefs of past misgovernment.”
Regulation was required to prevent banks and corporations from erecting a new structure of privilege. “It is the duty of every government,” Jackson said, “so to regulate its currency as to protect this numerous [laboring] class as far as practicable from the impositions of avarice and fraud” and to prevent the use of “the paper money system…as an engine to undermine your free institutions.”
In practice, the answer to the question of the proper role of the state depended for the Jacksonians on the answer to the question who controlled the state; and this is what the fight in the age of Jackson was all about.