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When the Clock Broke is now in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there.
In case you missed them, two screen appearances; The online salon I did with Anna Gát for Interintellect about When the Clock Broke is now up on YouTube:
As is my brief appearance on All in with Chris Hayes to talk about the 60 Minutes debacle:
Earlier this week, I talked to Elle Reeve about her book Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet, Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.
Daniel Walker Howe, author of one of my favorite histories of the United States, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, died this past week at age 88. What always struck me about Howe’s opus was the way in which America, although a vastly different place today than it was in the early to mid-19th century, still contains recognizable traces of that era, almost as if haunted by our past. The Age of Jackson feels strangely familiar.
… .Jackson’s combination of authoritarianism with a democratic ideology, his identification of his own will with the voice of the people, worked well for him politically. He defined himself as defender of the people against special interests and advocated—unsuccessfully—a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college and choose the president by direct popular vote. The populist rhetoric of Jackson and his political associates combined ceaseless condemnation of elite corruption with the antigovernment political ideology they had taken over from Randolph, Taylor, and the Old Republicans.
A large segment of the American electorate shared Jackson’s belief in the legitimacy of private violence and the assertion of male honor, his trust in natural rather than acquired abilities, and his impatience with limitations on one’s own will. But Jackson’s values and suspicion of government were far from commanding universal assent, and they were to prove exceptionally divisive in the years ahead. The “age of Jackson” was not a time of consensus. It is unfortunate that the adjective “Jacksonian” is often applied not only to Jackson’s followers but to all Americans of the period.
The one unambiguous commitment in Jackson’s inaugural address was to what he called “reform”: the purging of federal offices. Duff Green, the editor of the Jacksonian United States Telegraph, had announced this goal during the campaign itself. Jackson would “REWARD HIS FRIENDS AND PUNISH HIS ENEMIES” through patronage, Green’s newspaper trumpeted. This was not just a prediction; it was a threat. Green was deliberately prodding officeholders (customs and land officers, U.S. attorneys and marshals, postmasters and others) to declare for Jackson, on the premise that if Adams won, it would not matter whom they had supported, but if Jackson won, they faced dismissal unless they had endorsed him.
[John Quincy] Adams had tried to put the federal patronage on a meritocratic basis. For his pains, the opposition press had vilified him as dealing in special privilege. Now, the pro-Jackson journalist Amos Kendall could not help observing that what the Old Hero’s supporters really wanted was “the privilege of availing themselves of the very abuses with which we charge our adversaries.” A horde of office-seekers attended Jackson’s inauguration. It was they who turned the inaugural reception into a near-riot, damaging White House furnishings until they were diverted outside onto the lawn. Later historians have cast this event in an aura of democratic exuberance; contemporary observers of every political stripe expressed embarrassment at it. “The throng that pressed on the president before he was fairly in office, soliciting rewards in a manner so destitute of decency, and of respect for his character and office,” observed a New England Jacksonian, was “a disgraceful reproach to the character of our countrymen.”
And this does not even begin to touch on the racial politics of Jackson.
