Gordon Wood writes for Project Syndicate about similarities between political debates in the present day and those at the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency.
The Jacksonian era, like our own, was a time of extreme democratization and rampant anti-elitism. The Jacksonians insisted that anyone (by which they meant any white adult male) could serve in any political office. No longer would education, social status, and respectability matter. Such egalitarian claims alarmed the Harvard- and Yale-educated elites of the 1820s and 1830s, just as they do today.
Moreover, we, too, are living in an era when weakened traditional authorities are being challenged. …
… At any rate, the assaults on elite opinion by those championing ordinary judgment resulted in a dispersion of authority and, ultimately, of truth itself. With everyone being told that their ideas about medicine, art, and government were as valid as those of the so-called “connoisseurs” and college-educated “speculative men,” truth and knowledge became elusive and difficult to pin down. Ordinary Americans, confident of their ability to determine the truth for themselves, became deeply mistrustful of anything beyond what the writer George Tucker called “the narrow limits of their own observation.” This made them easy prey to hucksters, confidence men, and tricksters, who soon popped up everywhere. Edgar Allen Poe called his time the “epoch of the hoax,” a description that echoes clearly in our own age of fake news and alternative facts. …
… Like today’s elites and mainstream media, the nineteenth-century college-educated and traditionally-minded gentry protested in vain against this democratization of truth. Having come to believe that “the unalienable right of private judgment involves the liberty of thinking as we please on every subject,” most ordinary people in Jacksonian America were no longer willing to defer to the knowledge and judgments of those who had once been their superiors.
