It has pained me to watch Sean Wilentz act like such a tool during this election year, because I really admire his historical works.  ("Chants Democratic" and "The Rise of American Democracy" are both well worth reading.)  He has accused Barack Obama of playing the race card when his opponents launched controversial personal attacks, while blaming the Senator from Illinois for his inability to win over certain voters.  (Those would be the mysterious "white working class" we hear so much about, who supported Obama in Wisconsin and Oregon but not in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states.)  His latest salvo in the Huffington Post -- "Barack Obama and the Unmaking of the Democratic Party" -- reaches all the way back to 1828 to show why Obama is going to ruin everything.  In the process, he fails to explain the roots of the real forces at work here: white solidarity, anti-intellectualism, and racism.

Wilentz points to the 1828 battle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams as a formative moment, when white working class support became essential to the success of the Democratic Party.  Almost in spite of himself, Old Hickory became the face for a broader  movement aimed at breaking down barriers to opportunity, liberalizing business and politics, which also happened to be a movement that both aspiring capitalists and frustrated workers (i.e. all white men) could get behind.  Businessmen wanted to be able to get easy credit to develop the West, and they wanted to overturn laws that required them to obtain approval for each new corporate charter from legislatures.  Workingmen wanted to end all property qualifications for voting, and supported the idea that ordinary people could serve in government jobs -- a policy that Jackson embraced in office, developing the "spoils system" of handing out positions to party supporters.  The working people were also facing the loss of autonomy and economic security as industrialization began to get underway.  Jackson became the vehicle for many different economic, social and political aspirations in those days, helping to invent modern, democratic party politics.  With a rapidly expanding economy and an opening political system, white men could rally together behind the banner of equality and opportunity that the Democratic Party raised.  Instead of pitting working man versus business man, all classes of white men could band together against different foes.   A lot of inchoate resentments and grievances solidified in the support of the self-made man Jackson, and naturally opposed the stuffy old-money Bostonian intellectual, Adams.

Richard Hofstadter touched on this curious combination in his essay, "Andrew Jackson and the Rise of Liberal Capitalism," in which he wryly notes that Jackson, the frontier aristocrat who defended the
creditors in Tennessee, became the hero of debtors a few years later.  (Hofstadter also wrote a whole book on the history of anti-intellectualism in American history.)

It's easy to say it all goes back to populist Jackson against the know-it-all snob Adams, but it goes much deeper.  The earlier Federalists thought the people who knew best should run the show, while Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans were the ones who praised the wisdom of the common yeoman, creating the embryo of a partisan patronage system (the idea that any ordinary person could serve in government, which Jackson embraced).  It was a debate left over from the Revolution, when many felt that a republic could only work if the leading citizens, the gentry, were in charge.  Jefferson's people gradually broke down the idea, and Jackson's bunch finished it off.  

Wilentz is right that this pattern goes back a long way.  What drives me crazy is that he takes such a high hand as a historian (know-it-all elitist!) and schools us that Obama is going to destroy the Democratic party because he can't win the same electoral map as Jackson did in 1828.  "Without the votes of workers and small farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as a strong Democratic turnout in New York City," he writes, "Jackson would have lost the Electoral College in a landslide."  So what if Obama could not win the same coalition that a Democrat summoned in 1828?  You might as well say Jackson's victory was illegitimate because he couldn't win Alaska or New Mexico!

This determination of his to show how important the "white working class" is for the Democratic Party is understandable.  His insistence that they (however defined) are the only group that matters, and that racism played absolutely no role in this campaign, is truly perplexing.  He knows as well as anyone where the historical roots of racism lie: in the fear of competition for scarce jobs and small wages, in the deliberate pitting of workers of different races against each other on shop floors and across picket lines.  "All of the evidence demonstrates that white racism has not been a principal or even secondary motivation in any of this year's Democratic primaries," Wilentz maintains, ignoring the fact that most people are reluctant to come out and say, "I'm a bigot!" -- and the fact that a quarter of voters in West Virginia and Kentucky actually admitted that "race" affected their choice of candidate.  I agree that allegations of racism have been thrown around too lightly during this campaign, but Wilentz seems to react to this unfortunate fact by denying that racism played any role -- just as some Obama supporters (a small minority, as far as I can tell) try to argue that sexism played no role in the problems of Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps a tradition of anti-elitism or anti-intellectualism has shaped voters' decisions in some of these contests.  When Bill Clinton said the real division in the election is between the regular people and those who think they're better than everyone else, he was speaking to a powerful current in American politics.  This phenomenon certainly does go back to 1828 and beyond.  Maybe we can admit to ourselves, no matter which candidate we support, that there is some good old-fashioned racism going on here too.  In any case, it is just plain wrong to look at an underdog candidate, who managed to build a winning coalition that crosses lines of race and region, campaigning in the face of the biggest political machine in Democratic politics, and blame him for his lack of support in one segment of the electorate in the context of a primary.  It is far wronger still to accuse him of single-handedly shattering the 180-year legacy of a political party by achieving that victory.

See Wilentz's side of the story at:

"Race Man"

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=aa0cd21b-0ff2-4329-88a1-69c6c268b304

""Barack Obama and the Unmaking of the Democratic Party"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-wilentz/barack-obama-and-the-unma_b_103353.html