The Militarism of the ‘Jacksonians’

Jordan Michael Smith has written a long essay on the changes in Republican and conservative foreign policy thinking. The entire piece is worth reading, but I want to focus on the discussion of “Jacksonian” foreign policy. Smith describes the bulk of the GOP as “Jacksonian” in its leanings:

Jacksonianism is as much a gut instinct as it is a coherent set of ideas, a hyper-patriotic expression of anger and resentment at those designated as globalists or internationalists. Political parties are heterogeneous, and not all of the new right-wing perspectives can be classified in this way. Some oppose all interventions in other countries, while still others counsel restraint but favor selective interventionism. But Jacksonianism is the dominant strain at work, especially among the grassroots.

The “Jacksonian” label has never been very useful as a way of distinguishing one group of hawks from another. In practice, “Jacksonians” are simply hawkish by default and don’t take much prodding to endorse expansive foreign policy goals. If you were a “Jacksonian” Republican in 2002-03, you almost certainly supported the invasion of Iraq and cheered on regime change just like your “Wilsonian” and “Hamiltonian” allies did. “Jacksonians” didn’t and don’t believe in nation-building, but most of them have no problem with attacking other nations on the flimsiest of pretexts. In other words, “Jacksonians” are much more likely to support an unnecessary war than they are to oppose it at the beginning when it matters.

Insofar as “Jacksonian” Republicans sometimes express reservations about certain interventions (e.g., Libya or Syria), this usually happens because the president ordering the intervention is a Democrat and their partisanship leads them to find reasons to object to something they would otherwise support or at least tolerate. I submit that the same thing accounts for at least some of the skepticism we hear today from the Republican side about U.S. support for Ukraine. When we turn to specific issues, we will find that “Jacksonians” almost never disagree with conventional hawkish views because for all intents and purposes they are conventional hawks. These are the people Van Jackson calls the nationalist militarists, and I think that label describes them very well.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope that a “Jacksonian moment” will lead to “preventing overreach and curbing the default hawkishness that still predominates in Washington,” because the record show that when push comes to shove “Jacksonians” do not usually stand up to overreach or hawkishness. In most cases, they rally behind both. To the extent that they raise objections, they are typically criticizing the means being used for certain policies rather than the ends themselves. Like liberal hawks under Bush, they will quibble with how the administration is doing things but will not question the policy as such. When someone from their party is in power, most of them won’t even quibble.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.