Whiggery in the White House

[Draggingtree]

American Greatness

Whiggery in the White House

By Hayden Ludwig| February 12, 2018

Since the day it became clear Donald Trump was a serious contender for the presidency, political pundits of all stripes have tried to put a name to the movement he leads: Trumpism. Liberals and conservatives alike have called him a neoconservative, a traditionalist, a nationalist, a crypto-fascist, and a populist, or have simply written him off as a political iconoclast. Among the more popular of the theories to explain him, however, is the notion that Trump is somehow at the front of some Jacksonianstyle revolt.

 But let’s get one thing straight: although there are some Jacksonian elements to Donald J. Trump, he is not really a Jacksonian. If anything, you could say he more closely resembles an old-style Whig.

Nineteenth-century Whigs and Jacksonian Democrats agreed and disagreed on many things, but whereas the Whigs created a systematic worldview that survived the death of their party, Jacksonianism largely died out with the rise of European progressivism within the Democratic Party.