No matter who wins the election, the American people have already lost it - opinion

The Battle of New Orleans was at its height when Gen. Andrew Jackson went to check his artillery batteries’ aim as they bombarded the British forces. Noticing they were overshooting their targets he told his cannoneers: “Elevate them guns a little lower.”

Accurate or not, such tales echo the charming side of the war hero who as president gave birth to American populism, two centuries before its grand return.

The analogies between his and Donald Trump’s presidencies are striking. Jackson, the first president who did not hail from the Eastern elite, was a brash racist who displaced Native American tribes, fought the Supreme Court, and waged war on the central bank (then called the Bank of the United States) in order to hand out economically reckless cheap loans.

A man of fights and quarrels, much like Trump, Jackson fought multiple duels, and in one case killed a man who called him a coward. The same attitude inspired his politics. When the Treasury opposed his cheap-money policy, Jackson fired the Treasury Secretary, and then also his successor, so the third would understand he was there not to say what he thought but to do as he was told.

Such comparisons between Trump and Jackson have been popular over the past eight years, not least because they prove that the current populist resurgence is not unprecedented, and suggest that it, too, will ultimately end.

However, as America prepares Trumpism’s verdict, these parts of the Jackson analogy are all beside the point. What matters right now is that the Jackson era was underscored by decisive electoral victories, as he won 11 of 18 states in 1824, and 15 of 24 in 1828. Today’s America is in an entirely different place.

JACKSON’S QUEST to replace the veteran elite with the “simple people” represented a vast majority. Moreover, it epitomized a national condition, a society on the move, both geographically and socially.

Having crossed the Appalachians to settle in Nashville, Tennessee, Jackson was part of the westward migration. And having earned his fame in battle, he was the antithesis of the well-born president he unseated, John Quincy Adams, whose father was also president.

American society had a clear direction those days, and Jackson merely accelerated its march. The America that will go to the ballots next Tuesday has no such direction, or indeed any at all.

On the face of it, the choice American voters face is between policies. Trump wants strong government, minimal immigration, smaller spending, lower taxes, stronger policing, and global isolationism, while Kamala Harris wants a strong judiciary, social compassion, abortion rights, and economic interventionism that will reduce housing prices and healthcare fees.

Several million voters will also consider the candidates’ records on the Middle East, an issue on which Harris has come across as less passionate, and not much more knowledgeable, than Trump.

Even so, policy is not what this election is about. More than anything else, this plebiscite will be a contest of identities. Millions will go to the polls not to chart their country’s path, but to declare who they are; to say “I am educated” or “I am undereducated,” or “I am wealthy” or “I am poor” or “I am Black” or “I am white,” the way voters in Iraq effectively declare whether they are Sunnis, Shi’ites or Kurds.

As they enter the voting booths, most Americans will not be thinking of what should be done with their schools, roads, or troops, but whether machismo turns them on or revolts them, whether profanities impress or appall them, and whether their leader can or cannot be a convicted felon.

Worse, not only will this election be about identities, it will also be decided by the narrowest of margins, unless polls prove woefully unfounded (which they always might). That is why, unlike the effect of Jackson’s victory, American society is set to emerge from this duel even more divided than it already is.

JACKSON’S RIVALS attacked his policies and detested his style, but they accepted him as their nation’s leader. So did Democrats after George W. Bush’s razor-thin defeat of Al Gore, and so did Republicans after Bill Clinton unseated the elder Bush. That is not what will happen now.

With American society fractured as deeply as it is, Republicans will not accept an elected Harris as their leader, and Democrats will never accept an elected Trump, much less will either camp just respect the other’s leader, should he or she win. Worse, Tuesday’s winner will be unequipped, if at all motivated, to inspire the reconciliation American society now begs.

Underlying the clash of identities is a contest of emotions. Both sides feel their adversaries are not merely wrong in their plans or flawed in their merits; they feel their rival is out to steal their country, and the dream that it was all about.

For some, that dream is the freedom, justice, opportunity, and humanism delivered by the Constitution that one candidate seems ready to shed. For other voters, the American dream is the racial status, cultural identity, social stability, and economic security that their parents enjoyed and they have lost.

Though light-years apart in any other respect, these inverted electorates feel with equal intensity and justice that they lost the same thing; the most fundamental feeling that America promised, generated, and embodied: confidence.

America radiated confidence not only to its people, but also to us non-Americans, who happily followed its global lead. Now this confidence is dented, and come Wednesday it may well emerge altogether shattered. That is why no matter who wins this election, the American people have already lost it, and so has the rest of the West.

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.