Abolitionism: Part One: a study in political action

The beginning of organised, militant abolitionism in the United States is usually dated to 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison began publication of The Liberator. At the time, abolitionists were reviled as threats to America’s freedom and security, whose agitation would apparently encourage slave revolts, divide the nation along sectional lines, and lead to the ‘amalgamation of the races’. Abolitionists were lynched and singled out for criticism by President Andrew Jackson, their meetings were interrupted, and their buildings torched. Somehow, their cause went from nowhere in 1831 to ultimate success in 1865 (with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment), and how it did so provides an excellent illustration in how political change is effected.

Despite the abolitionists’ small numbers and their status as a despised minority, their mere presence on the country’s political scene scared the Southern planter elite and its northern allies. Famously, the freedoms of speech and petition enunciated in the First Amendment began to be breached in the 1830s, when Congress refused to receive abolitionist petitions (the ‘gag rule’) and the federal government used its control over the postal service to limit the dissemination of abolitionist propaganda. The accusations levelled at abolitionists verged on the conspiratorial (the accusation of being in favour of miscegenation was common and damning). The measures taken by the defenders of slavery, both legal and extra-legal, were usually far out of proportion to the abolitionists’ influence, and fuelled the development of a narrative about the ‘Slave Power’ exerting its control over the country which became a staple of later anti-slavery rhetoric.

The abolitionist cause began to pick up steam, and its arguments began to win converts beyond its original Whig/evangelical base. One such convert was William Leggett, a radical Jacksonian journalist in New York. Leggett had originally been repelled by early abolitionists’ religious zeal, and shared the common idea of the time about them being subversives. Throughout the 1830s, as Leggett applied his political principles to the question of slavery (he was close to the radical free-market ‘Locofoco’ wing of the New York Democratic Party), he found it impossible to defend the institution and became an abolitionist. It was through the likes of Leggett that abolitionism spread beyond that Whig/evangelical base and found a home in certain factions of the Democracy (notably among Martin van Buren’s followers in the Empire State).

As they began to acquire political power, abolitionists began to endorse (and refuse to endorse) candidates for office. Though still a small minority of the population, they were well-organised enough to be the swing demographic in various congressional races. (Admittedly, they were also assisted by support from abroad, especially after slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.) Prospective candidates who sought the abolitionist vote were given questionnaires by anti-slavery organisations, and their voting records vetted to ensure that they had never supported the Southern cause. These methods have become an essential part of American political culture, where, due to the lack of tight party discipline, the voting records and published opinions of individual candidates can often be more important than their partisan affiliation.

After the questionnaires, the next step, given that abolitionists lacked the numbers to take over the Democratic or Whig parties, was the formation of a third party. The first such endeavour, the Liberty Party, failed to make an impact in the 1840 or 1844 presidential elections, but the growth in anti-slavery feeling helped the Free Soil Party (whose ticket was headed by former President van Buren) in 1848, which ran second in New York and (arguably) attracted enough Democratic voters to throw the election to the Whig ticket. In doing so, abolitionists continued their multi-faceted strategy: they built a base in each of the major parties, used third-party candidacies to force the major parties to move further towards their ideals in order to capture their votes, developed an ideology which drew from both Democratic and Whig ideas (the ‘free labor’ thought most famously analysed by Eric Foner), created a (quasi-conspiratorial) narrative about their enemy (the ‘Slave Power’), and supplemented these with direct action.

During the 1850s, the salience of the slavery question caused a major realignment in the party system. The old system of competition between Democrats (economically egalitarian, pro-westward expansion, anti-Sabbatarian) and Whigs (pro-commerce, evangelical, nativist) ended with the Whigs’ demise after the 1852 presidential election. Thereafter, Whigs in southern and border states and among the merchant elite of major northern cities (who had business dealings with the southern planter elite) moved en masse into what was once the party of the working class, while anti-slavery elements in both major parties joined third-party and non-party activists in Ripon, Wisconsin (a former socialist commune) in 1854 to found the Republican Party. Thanks to the polarisation of public opinion brought about by the abolitionists, the Jackson-van Buren model of a two-party system cross-cutting (and thus overcoming) sectional allegiances was rendered unsustainable, and the United States now had a northern/anti-slavery party facing a southern/pro-slavery one. (That is, once the Know-Nothings, who represented the final attempt of political actors to find an issue to distract from the slavery question, disappeared.)

The results of the 1860 presidential election. Shades of blue represent counties carried by Abraham Lincoln; red, Stephen Douglas (the northern Democrat); yellow/brown, John C. Breckinridge (the southern Democrat); and green, John Bell (last of the southern Whigs).

As the anti-slavery cause was pursued electorally by the Republicans, militant abolitionists continued to polarise public opinion. In Kansas, they fought a dress rehearsal for the Civil War against pro-slavery settlers, and in 1859 a federal arsenal in Virginia (later, West Virginia) was attacked in a rather farcical fashion by John Brown’s forces. Despite the almost comical failure of Brown’s revolt, the (over-)reaction of the South (where it was believed that Brown would be followed by more abolitionist rabble-rousers) ensured that it would be the spark which ignited the Civil War. The anti-slavery movement was a classic case of militants forcing change while more moderate politicians (such as Lincoln) could reap the benefits of their actions while making conciliatory noises to slaveholders.

Although the rationale for the Civil War offered by the Union was initially based around the idea of keeping the country together, by its end, the war had come to be seen as having been fought for the purpose of emancipating the slaves. The demands of the war made it impossible not to recruit black troops into the Union army, and the slaves who escaped and fled to the Union lines couldn’t be sent home. The system of race relations in America changed with a frenetic pace: in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation freed most of the slaves (immediately and without compensation, in stark contrast to the British experience in 1833), in 1865, slavery was banished forever by the Thirteenth Amendment, and in 1868, sixty former slaves and thirty non-slaveholding whites formed the bulk of the 125-member South Carolina constitutional convention. For a brief, shining moment, it seemed that the abolitionists had triumphed, and that the United States would move from being a republic of white men to an egalitarian, multi-racial society.

Mélenchon’s The One!

George’s Political Blog is proud to make its first endorsement. In the first round of the upcoming French presidential election, it will be rooting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, MEP for the Left Party, candidate of the Left Front, and compulsive blogger.

The decision was an easy one. Apart from two Trotskyist nobodies who will struggle to poll one percent of the vote, Mélenchon is the only candidate in the race who opposes both Europe’s neoliberal economic consensus and the racist demagoguery of the Sarkozy regime. Mélenchon is an old-school French socialist, whose rhetoric is infused with that secularism and universalist republicanism that makes France exceptional among the world’s nation-states. Having served as a minister in the Jospin government (1997-2002), he split from the Socialist Party in 2008, taking another Socialist MP and a Green MP with him to form the Left Party, which forms a part of the Left Front alongside the French Communist Party and a few smaller outfits.

 So far in the campaign, Mélenchon has tapped into the resentment of a large part of the French electorate (his polling numbers are now consistently in double digits and have been as high as 15%) at the injustice of the current culture of austerity emerging in Europe. His rise should be viewed as part of a broader trend across the continent, in which far-left parties are finding success when they ditch their ideological rigidity and adopt a non-specific economic populism. Die Linke in Germany, SYRIZA and Democratic Left in Greece, Left Ecology Freedom in Italy, and Sinn Fein in Ireland have all achieved results by this method. (If only we had such a party in Australia…) Best of all, if he finishes in third place ahead of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen (as polls are starting to show him doing), his performance will help to recalibrate French politics leftward and deliver a blow to the emerging European far-right.

In the second round, François Hollande is the choice by default. If France is forced to suffer another five years of the Bonapartist racist reactionary Nicolas Sarkozy, the heritage of the Revolution will be much worse for wear. But Hollande is a Blairite Third-Wayer, and needs a strong force on his left (in terms of both presidential voting and parliamentary seats) to scare him away from the political centre. For that purpose, Mélenchon’s the one!

Thoughts on the Republican nomination

 As the circus known as the 2012 Republican presidential nomination continues, it is beginning to look more and more like the Democratic nomination in 1980. In that year, incumbent President Jimmy Carter was challenged by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, with California Governor Jerry Brown also in the mix. Early in the campaign, Carter won a string of victories, largely thanks to the effects of the Iran hostage situation, making it mathematically certain that he would have a majority of delegates at the convention. Not quite ready to give up his quest for the White House, Kennedy stayed in the race, and towards the end of the primary season he romped home with a series of strong wins.

Going into the convention, Carter had the numbers, but Kennedy looked the winner because of his superior momentum. (Consider that the American media emphasises the winner of each primary held, and buries the details of how many delegates each candidate scored down the page.) Kennedy attempted to find a way around the fact that most delegates are legally pledged to their candidate, in the hope of prising away enough Carter delegates. Of course, he wasn’t successful, and ended his presidential aspirations with the famous ‘the dream shall never die’ speech.

The comparisons with 2012 thus come easily – Romney as Carter, the presumptive front-runner and favourite of the party establishment who mathematically wrapped up the nomination; Santorum as Kennedy, the insurgent who fell behind the front-runner early on but who finished strongly and monopolised key demographic components of the party’s base; and Gingrich or Paul as Brown, the interesting sideshow who was ultimately squeezed between the two main contenders.

Even if Romney has a majority of delegates in Tampa and is comfortably nominated in the first round of voting, his lack of control over the party could manifest itself in three ways:

• First, if John McCain couldn’t force his preferred running mate down the party’s throat in 2008 (he wanted Joe Lieberman but got Sarah Palin), it’s difficult to imagine Romney being able to do so. Instead of a Marco Rubio or a Cathy McMorris Rodgers (the obscure Spokane-area congresswoman who has recently crept into the lists of potential VP nominees), Romney could be saddled with someone far to his right, possibly inexperienced, and gaffe-prone.
• Second, weak nominees often have difficulty controlling the agenda of the convention – for example, in 1968 the Johnson/Humphrey delegates were forced by the RFK and McCarthy supporters to accede to the reforms which were pursued by the McGovern-Fraser Commission, and which completely changed the presidential nominating process. A more recent, and Republican, example is 1992, when George H. W. Bush felt it necessary to give a speaking spot in prime time to his primary opponent, Pat Buchanan, who went on to scare independents away from the ticket with his ‘culture war’ speech. Does Romney have enough clout to stop Rick Santorum, or someone similarly conservative, from making a prime time convention speech attacking whatever ideological bugbear is flavour of the month among conservatives? (As a corollary to this, does Romney have enough clout to ensure that the convention floor is not filled with birther/truther/deather signs and rhetoric?)
• Third, there’s the question of third-party breakaways. Although this comes up every election cycle, there are a few factors which might make it more likely this time around. Romney’s inability to close off the Santorum challenge, and the fact that Santorum’s victories have been won with much less money and with hardly any big-name endorsements suggest that the party establishment has little control over some elements of its base. Also, the combination of apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the Obama administration’s ‘agenda’ and the perceived illegitimacy of a Romney nomination (due to his fundraising advantage and Santorum’s late surge) could spell trouble.

All in all, Romney’s victory is unlikely to be as clear-cut as he would like it to be. The Santorum surge, the use of proportional representation to allocate convention delegates, and the long, drawn-out, and nasty campaign will ensure that the Santorum/Gingrich forces (though perhaps not Paul, since he and Romney seem to be such good friends) will have the opportunity to extract their pound of flesh from the presumptive nominee. Romney should win the nomination, will have less control over the party than John McCain did in 2008.

Film review: El Calentito

I don’t usually look at TV guides, and when there is nothing on, I put on SBS as my default channel, and am often pleasantly surprised by what comes on. In this manner on Friday night, I was treated to a fantastic film. El Calentito is a coming-of-age story set in Madrid during Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy. In the course of an hour and a half, it managed to entertain as well as educate about the political background to western Europe’s last serious coup d’état attempt.

Sara (the one on the right in the above poster) is a young woman from a family of conservative franquistas. After a drug and alcohol-fuelled night at a bar named El Calentito, she ends up in bed with Carmen, a lesbian punk rocker whose band (‘Las Siux’, or ‘The Sioux’) needs to replace a departed member in order to secure a record deal. Over the course of ten days, she goes from good Catholic girl to punk rocker, and is ready to play her first gig, scheduled for El Calentito on the night of 23 February, 1981. In the meantime, the old guard from the Franco regime are preparing to use the country’s political instability and the threat of Basque terrorism to overthrow Spain’s fledgling democracy.

While rogue military officers are occupying the Parliament, the gig goes ahead more or less as planned, although illegally as gatherings of more than four people have been banned. In an allusion to the real-life occupation of the Parliament, an old man living next door to El Calentito occupies the bar, firing shots into the air, although he is eventually disarmed. In the early hours of the morning, King Juan Carlos I addresses the nation, proclaiming his opposition to the coup. (The film uses real footage of this event, which as a historical reference point, serves as Spain’s equivalent of 9/11 or the JFK assassination.) Safe in the knowledge that the fascist Thermidor has been thwarted, everyone lives happily ever after – Las Siux finish their set to cries of ‘¡Libertad!’, and Sara loses her virginity to the bisexual son of the transsexual bar owner. (Only on SBS!)

As a political scientist, I was fascinated by the attitude of the film’s reactionaries, chiefly Sara’s mother and the elderly man who holds the bar hostage. The historical period in question witnessed some progressive reforms such as the right to unionise and to strike, the legalisation of divorce, autonomy for the regions, and the legalisation of the Communist Party. (Alas, sex change operations are not yet legal, so El Calentito’s owner, Antonio, plans to go to Morocco to become Antonia.) All in all, these were fairly standard political and social changes which turned Spain into a constitutional monarchy and core EU member, and all undertaken by a centre-right government – the Socialists wouldn’t get into office until 1982. Regarding to the potential loss of Sara’s virginity, her mother says something along the lines of “this wouldn’t happen if Franco was still in power”, while the old man makes endless transphobic slurs against Antonia and calls the bar patrons ‘communists’.

These vignettes provide a glimpse into the thinking of the political right – because Spain’s new liberal democracy isn’t policing women’s bodies as they would like, they call for the re-imposition of fascism. The large cross above Sara’s bed and the reference to her having attended a convent school serve to remind the viewer of the intertwining of fascism and Catholicism in Spain between 1936 and 1975. (As do the latex nun outfits worn by the band members for part of their gig.) The role of anti-communism in franquista ideology is also significant – the first plans for a coup in the post-Franco era were partly fuelled by the Communist Party’s legalisation, but the party has never returned to power, and in fact has to form an electoral alliance with the Greens and a few other leftist parties in order to be ensured of winning parliamentary seats. Nevertheless, communists were to the Franco regime what the Muslim Brotherhood was to Hosni Mubarak – the potential alternative government whose prospect frightened the West so much that they felt compelled to stick with the incumbent. Due to the film’s setting in Madrid, it doesn’t get a chance to explore the anti-regionalist side of Spanish fascism, though one of its early scenes shows a television news report referring to the Basque terrorist group ETA. The centralising instincts of the Spanish right are still an important feature of the political landscape, and talk of Catalan independence in 2006 was met with speculation among senior military figures about a coup.

Sara’s mother’s longing for the return of Franco stands in contrast to Sara’s fellow band-members – the house which they share has a vandalised picture of the former dictator on a wall, just metres away from a blow-up sex doll. Although not formally active in politics, they relish the personal freedoms afforded to them by the downfall of the old regime. One of the most poignant scenes in the film is the horror on the faces of Antonia and her friend, a fellow pre-op transsexual, when they hear of the coup attempt. Their fear of what will happen to them overwhelms them, and they make plans to flee the country in the event that the coup is successful. Their little bar may be run-down, under-staffed, and full of unhygienic toilets covered in anarchist graffiti, but it is a refuge from the outside world in which punks, goths, and LGBTs are free to be themselves.

Despite the euphoria of the king’s speech, in which he firmly placed himself on the side of democracy, and in doing so allayed the fears of many that he was sympathetic to franquismo, I couldn’t help but recall why he reigns in the first place. Spain’s transition to democracy was carried out largely on the terms of the franquista elite, who foreclosed the possibility of restoring the Second Republic, which existed from 1931 until its military defeat in 1939. The fact that Juan Carlos I sits on the throne is a symbol of compromise between Franco and the forces of democracy – the restoration of the republic would have been a clearer symbol that the Franco era was over. Today, republicanism is a minority position in Spain, and support for the monarchy was helped considerably by the king’s statesmanlike performance on that winter night in 1981. The symbols of republicanism, such as the red-yellow-burgundy flag of the Second Republic, are still seen occasionally (most recently at the protests surrounding the suspension of firebrand anti-fascist judge Baltasar Garzón), and serve as a reminder of the more progressive Spain defeated in the Civil War and left unrestored by the messy compromise of the late 1970s. Thus, we are treated to the spectacle of punks and transsexuals being protected from fascist tyranny by an unelected aristocrat who owes his position to the fascists.

The character of Sara emerged as the true hero of the film. In a short space of time, she discovers the strength to leave the stifling environment of her middle-class, conservative, and devout family home. On the night of the gig and the coup, after a tearful phone call to her parents, she leaves El Calentito to have dinner at home, but is punched in the face by her mother as soon as she walks in the door. Perhaps this is supposed to be a metaphor – democrats making overtures to fascists, who then turn to violence as soon as things don’t go their way. The storyline of a young woman rebelling against her parents’ disapproval of her choice of cultural activity brings to mind such films as Bend It Like Beckham (a comparison which occurred to me when Sara’s little sister is prevented from playing soccer), but El Calentito managed to pull off that feel-good style while still interweaving some serious politics into the narrative.

El Calentito was a wonderful way of combining fiction with real historical drama, and of contrasting the underground counter-culture of post-Franco Madrid with the Catholic-fascist-nationalist side of Spain’s identity. It was sort of like the Civil War all over again, but this time with the republicans wearing spiky collars, The Ramones tops, and fishnet stockings. If only George Orwell could have been there to chronicle it.

So, as movie reviewers on TV say, ‘I gave it five stars, David’.

Political Philosophy: Part Five

 The fifth in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. In this post, I will cover the eclipse of self-managed working class organisation by statism.

Part Five: Progressives, Fabians, and Bolsheviks: the state against the people

It is common among American liberals to claim the Progressive movement as part of their heritage. In this telling of history, the likes of Theodore Roosevelt are champions of the working class who fought against concentrations of privilege. This narrative becomes especially problematic when the Populist Party of the 1890s is also included as an ancestor of modern liberalism – the Democrats’ Populist-backed 1896 presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, was labelled a “Jacobin” and a “Bolshevik” by Roosevelt. In The Age of Reform, Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote one of the best accounts of the differences between Populism and Progressivism, and differentiated between the bottom-up radicalism of the former and the top-down style of the latter – though he went overboard with his portrayal of the Populists as cranks and conspiracy theorists. The Progressives were generally drawn from the elites, justified their ideas using the language of straight-laced bourgeois moralism, and were hostile to popular self-organisation.

Prior to the Progressive Era, most major American cities were run by some form of Democratic Party machine. These machines were not an ideal way to govern a metropolis – they were corrupt, monarchical, and clientelistic, and had mixed results in governing their fiefdoms. One of their advantages, however, was that they allowed people of lesser means (and especially of non-Anglo ethnicity) to band together and use their numbers to overcome the advantages of wealth and notability possessed by elite politicos. (The most famous such machine, Tammany Hall in New York, was founded at the same time as the Democratic-Republican clubs mentioned in an earlier post.) By instituting such changes as at-large voting systems and independent agencies, Progressive reformers weakened the machines. Irish, Italian, and Jewish politicos lost power to Ivy League-educated Anglos, and African-Americans and Hispanics were pre-emptively prevented from following the same path to political power taken by other ethnic groups.

(For a first-hand account of the valuable social capital which political machines provided to working class and migrant constituents, the memoirs of Tammany veteran George Washington Plunkitt are an entertaining read.)

Like so many negative trends in American politics, the Progressive takeover of working class self-organisation had a trial run in Britain. When founded in 1884, the Fabian Society took its name from a Roman general who used delaying tactics to win a battle, something which was seen as a metaphor for the Society’s support for gradual reform. Its actual thought, however, betrays something different. Early Fabian publications advocated imperialism, eugenics, and slum clearances, and used the language of racial hygiene and mercantilism. They shared these fixations with the Progressives across the Atlantic, who helped to turn the United States into an imperial power (via the Spanish-American War) as well as the centre of pro-eugenic thought and activism.

Between the 1930s and 1960s, when the Puerto Rican struggle for independence was at its height, American authorities enacted a number of measures aimed at reducing economic and population pressures – most notably Operation Bootstrap, which promoted emigration to the mainland, and forced sterilisations of Puerto Rican women. Although eugenic policies were carried out across the United States, Puerto Rico was singled out in particular, and the use of eugenics to artificially reduce its population was often advocated using racist language. (An internal document circulated within the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s called for the elimination of all Puerto Ricans.) Puerto Rican women were often sterilised without their consent, and were prevented from accessing information about birth control.

The sterilisation program was established during the New Deal era, when Rexford Tugwell, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s closest allies, was the appointed Governor of the island. The infrastructure, expertise, and propaganda which fuelled the effort were supplied by foundations such as the aforementioned Rockefeller Foundation, corporations such as Proctor and Gamble, and lobby groups such as Planned Parenthood. Although eugenics fell out of fashion after the Second World War, the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for Malthusian ideas has never abated – the Club of Rome, one of the world’s most prominent pushers of climate change hysteria, was founded in 1968 at the Lake Como estate of one David Rockefeller. It is little wonder that over the course of the twentieth century, ‘left-wing’ came to equal ‘big government’, but the constellation of political forces which inflicted eugenics on Puerto Rico could not be said to be left-wing, at least not in the sense that the radicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood the term.

It wasn’t only in the democratic world that supposed progressives were using the power of the state to suppress emancipatory movements from below. After taking power, the Bolsheviks began behaving the same way as the Progressives, the New Dealers, and the Fabians. Articles began appearing in the official press promoting the production-line methods employed by Henry Ford. Leon Trotsky, whose reputation as being a less authoritarian communist than Stalin is surely undeserved, sent in the Red Army when the sailors revolted at Kronstadt in 1921. It seems that once handed untrammelled state power, previously progressive movements absorb the mentality of the former elites, and begin to see their role as oppressing and disciplining the working class, as well as destroying any alternative sources of social capital which threaten their monopoly on the allegiances of the people.

The urge of the technocrats to micromanage the lives of the people continues today under the guise of ‘green’ politics and the nanny state. The former poses as a left-wing ideology, yet downplays the importance of economic inequality in favour of a Malthusian narrative of overpopulation. In addition, its critique of public works projects helps to reduce demand for public goods, something which can only mean a political climate more favourable to conservatism. As for the increasing remit of the nanny state and its arguable transformation into the ‘bully state’, it is the inevitable outcome of the Bull Moose-Fabian-Bolshevik style of politics.

Political Philosophy: Part Four

 The fourth in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. This post focuses on the progressive content of the American republican tradition.

Part Four: Locofocos and log cabins: the egalitarian tradition in the United States

The idea that the American Revolution made little change to the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies is a common one, and an incorrect one. While the top layers of political power may have been monopolised by a merchant and land-owning elite which was prominent before the Revolution, the 1780s and 1790s witnessed a flourishing of social capital among ordinary Americans. Despite lacking the right to vote, working class people (which in those days meant skilled artisans) organised mechanics’ societies and Democratic-Republican clubs to further their interests, make their voices heard, and disseminate political writings. When members of the elite such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were elected to the White House, they did so thanks to the campaigning and propaganda of groups such as these.

The Democratic-Republican clubs supported the party of Jefferson, but went further than him in their advocacy of egalitarian principles, their views often being closer to those of Thomas Paine. They served a similar social and educative function to Britain’s radical schools and to Catalonia’s ateneus, but as with every form of popular self-organisation, the elites felt threatened and set about destroying them. The Washington Administration blamed the clubs for inciting the Whiskey Rebellion, just as the British government was trying a number of radical leaders in the treason trials of 1794.

Although the American Revolution (unfortunately) didn’t cross the Atlantic, the Industrial Revolution crossed it from the other direction. Between 1815 and 1850, the United States experienced what historians term the ‘Market Revolution’, in which a previously agrarian economy was industrialised, marketised, and made more unequal with the help of transport and infrastructure. Not all Americans were pleased with these developments – partisans of the Democratic-Republican tradition believed wage labour and the factory system to be contrary to egalitarian principles and profit-making to be a breach of republican ideas about civic virtue. They also made much of the pork-barrelling of certain Whig politicians and the concentration of wealth in institutions such as President Andrew Jackson’s bête noire, the Second Bank of the United States.

The Locofocos must surely be one of the most unfairly overlooked political formations in American history. They were a group of hardcore Jacksonians in New York who broke from the regular (Tammany Hall-controlled) Democratic Party in 1835, and who served for the next few years as the radical wing of the egalitarian, anti-bank tendency, both inside and outside the party. The issues on which they agitated are largely forgotten now, and modern observers would doubtless view them as libertarians due to their free-market rhetoric. They were, however, advocates of measures such as public education, but opposed state regulation of commerce (particularly the issuance of paper currency) as they saw it as always favouring the capitalists. Their support came from the city’s working class, and their leadership partially overlapped with the activists of the city’s early union movement. Like most Americans of their time, they viewed plutocracy as a product of state intervention in the economy, not the natural outcome of market forces.

Historian Sean Wilentz has written of an egalitarian thread in American republicanism, traceable back to Jefferson (who wrote that inequality caused “much misery to the bulk of mankind”), and which was grounded in the labour theory of value and in a belief in the impossibility of equal political relations between people who held vastly different levels of wealth. While observing the usual caveats about that thread not being extended to women and racial minorities, we can see its influence in radical and reformist movements throughout pre-Civil War America. Its ideas formed part of the rhetoric of the Jackson-era Democratic Party, working class movements, and abolitionists. (The latter often denounced slave-owners as aristocratic and parasitic on the producers of wealth.) This tradition continued to find its expression in progressive movements until the First World War. The Greenback and Populist parties, the Knights of Labor, and the Wobblies all used Jacksonian anti-wage labour rhetoric to attack the robber-baron capitalism of their own times. The Wobblies even harked back to 1776, calling their movement the ‘Continental Congress of the working class’.

To fully understand the egalitarian tradition described by Wilentz, we must compare it with modern American political rhetoric. The positions of both major parties on economic questions align with those of the Federalists and Whigs. Against the egalitarian, populist, and anti-monopoly rhetoric of the Jacksonians and unionists, Whig spokesmen argued that capital and enterprise were as worthy of respect as labour, that anyone could rise from poverty to start a business and live the American Dream™, and that egalitarian rhetoric was demagogic and divided Americans against each other. The Democratic and Republican parties of today make no attempt to challenge the prevailing Whiggish consensus, differing only in the extent to which the state should intervene; the shrill ‘class warfare’ slur which greets anything resembling egalitarian rhetoric, and the valorisation of ‘job creators’, would be very familiar to Jacksonians.

The other key difference between then and now is the link that was made between government intervention in the economy and inequality, the opposite of what is believed today. Wilentz dates the reversal to the first few decades after the Civil War, when the owners of the newly-emerging ‘trusts’ began to justify their monopoly control of entire industries as being the product of market forces, and the labour theory of value fell out of fashion. Since the rise of the Progressives and New Dealers, the energies of progressives has been spent trying to capture state power, in order to create what historian Arthur Schlesinger called ‘countervailing power’ against the corporate elite. The purpose of this series of posts, it should be clear by now, is to explain why those energies have been wasted. Perhaps what we need is a modern-day Locofoco movement.