Is President Trump a “Jacksonian”? He apparently believes so: On his fifth day in office he installed a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, and he recently visited the last resting place of his presidential predecessor in Nashville. His top political strategist, Steve Bannon, has said that the president likes to compare the populist movement behind him to a similar movement that supported Andrew Jackson and which infuriated the entrenched elites of his day.
And infuriate he did. Court historians and other propagandists for the state and state power have long portrayed Andrew Jackson as a country bumpkin, an ignoramus, a tool of corrupt bankers, and worse. The ultimate Ivy League snob, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was especially disdainful of Jackson in his writings. Based on this fact alone, you know the man must have been one of the better presidents.
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Murray Rothbard thought so. In his book, A Monetary History of the United States (page 91), Rothbard wrote that “[N]o movement in American politics has been as flagrantly misunderstood by historians as the Jacksonians,” thanks to all the misinformation about Jackson produced by the leftist, state-worshipping history profession. The Jacksonians were not “ignorant, anti-capitalist agrarians,” or “tools of the inflationary state banks,” as some historians have incorrectly portrayed him as being. “They were libertarians, plain and simple,” wrote Rothbard. (Note to libertarian purists: Murray Rothbard did not say that Jackson and his followers were as pure as the driven snow, like yourselves. They were imperfect human beings, as most of us are, but in the grand scheme of things,…