Jefferson/Jackson
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It’s good to see Democrats move away from Jefferson/Jackson dinners at the state level. There’s no real reason to tie the party to two long dead white slaveowning men who believed in white agrarian rule. I’m more ambiguous about dropping Jefferson since at least he had ideals modern Democrats can believe in, hypocrite as he may have been, as opposed to Jackson where there is nothing positive to remember. But fine. I’m significantly less concerned with the complaining of party elites that this move takes the party away from fighting for economic democracy:
“What does the Democratic Party stand for?’’ asked Andrei Cherny, a Democratic writer and a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. “Jefferson and Jackson and the ideas they stood for, spreading economic opportunity and democracy, were the beginnings of what was the Democratic Party. That is what unified the party across regional and other lines for most of the last 200 years. Now what unites everybody from Kim Kardashian to a party activist in Kansas is cultural liberalism and civil rights.”
Barney Frank, the former Democratic congressman, has lamented his party’s difficulty winning on economic issues but said, “In politics, you tend to go where you’re going to be most successful.”
“Democrats continue to believe in the economic piece, but the fact is, and I wish it weren’t the case, that the return on the affinity issues for us is better than on economic issues,” Mr. Frank said.
Remind me how much regular voters in 2015 are moved to vote for Democrats because of Andrew Jackson’s position on white male democracy? Oh right, none. And even if past figures did help define a modern party publicly, Jefferson and Jackson don’t do that for Democrats. If we want to rename these dinners Roosevelt/Kennedy, fine. I’d rather it be LBJ but obviously that little Vietnam thing makes that impossible. But while I think historical memory matters a lot, it only matters if people actually remember the history. Normal people don’t care what these dinners are called. Politically aware liberals rightfully remember Jackson especially as a person who did awful things. But no one, and I mean no one, is going to assume the Democrats won’t support working people because they changed the name of elite party events to reflect someone less offensive than Old Hickory.