Thread by @EricLondonSEP

Today I’ll be posting threads on the history of the Democratic Party, focusing on critical episodes in its past. It’s necessary to study history to understand revolutionary strategy today.

This thread: 1828 and its aftermath.On what basis was the Democratic Party founded?

1/21

Essentially, the use of race/identity politics & political bad faith to maintain social stability & protect private property. The Democratic Party is one of the oldest bourgeois political parties in the world, formally founded in 1828.

2/21

It was consciously conceived of by Southern slave owners and Northern Tammany politicians as an alliance to protect the interests of the slave owners & preserve social stability in both South and North.

3/21

The ideological glue of this alliance was an obsessive focus on race & identity, directed first & foremost against blacks, indigenous people &, later, the Chinese.

Two figures stand out in the enunciation of this strategy: John C. Calhoun & Martin Van Buren.

4/21

Democrat John C. Calhoun, South Carolina senator & vice president during the presidencies of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, was an extremely class conscious slave owner, aware that slavery could not politically survive on the basis of sectionalism alone.

5/21

In 1828, he appealed to rich Northerners: “After we [the planters] are exhausted, the contest will be between the capitalist & operatives [workers]; for into these two classes it must, ultimately, divide society.The issue of struggle here is the same as it has been in Europe.” 6/

The historian Richard Hofstadter labeled Calhoun the “Marx of the Master Class,” writing:

“Calhoun proposed that no revolution should be allowed to take place. To forestall it he suggested consistently—over a period of years—what Richard Current has called...

7/21

[Hofstadter cont'd] ...'planter-capitalist collaboration against the class enemy.' In such a collaboration the South, with its superior social stability, had much to offer as a conservative force. In return, the conservative elements in the North should be willing to hold...

8/

[Hofstader cont'd]...down abolitionist agitation; and they would do well to realize that an overthrow of slavery in the South would prepare the ground for social revolution in the North.”

9/21

Calhoun said in the Senate:

“There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict; and which explains... 10/

[Calhoun cont'd]...why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding states has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North… The experience of the next generation will fully test how vastly more favorable our condition of society is to that of other... 11/

[Calhoun cont'd]...sections for free and stable institutions, provided we are not disturbed by the interference of others, or shall… resist promptly and successfully such interference.”

12/21

Calhoun’s alliance was forged in no small part through the political talent of New York’s Martin Van Buren, known as the “little magician” & “the Red Fox of Kinderhook.” He headed the Democratic ticket after Jackson’s 2nd term, becoming president for one term from 1837 to 41. 13/

Van Buren was a master politician who, well before he became president, understood that growing Northern cities would become centers of class struggle and that the ruling class needed a strategy to maintain social order.

14/21

The historian Daniel Walker Howe describes Van Buren’s own class conscious political motives for forging the Democratic alliance:

“Leaders preoccupied with sovereignty and authority sensed a very real problem in America: the danger of anarchy...

15/21

[Howe cont'd]...Significantly, when Martin Van Buren was in England at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, his comments on it had to do not with improving the quality of representative government but his fears for maintaining order.

16/21

[Howe cont'd] Such concerns among Northern elites led Calhoun to comment that those elites feared ‘the needy and corrupt in their own section. They begin to feel what I have long foreseen, that they have more to fear from their own people than we from our slaves.’”

17/21

Through the Jackson administration and afterward, fanning racial hatred of the slaves and freed blacks became the Democrats’ ideological mechanism for tying the northern political machines to the political interests of the southern slave owners.

18/21

In both cases this racial politics had equal utility, maintaining slavery in the south and maintaining profits for the urban northern industrialists. Poor whites and arriving immigrants were informed by the Democrats that it was not their class...

19/21

...but their race that determined their social position. They should fear a race war if the slaves were ever freed.

20/21

This became the glue that held together the Democratic Party’s cross-regional alliance—solidified by efforts to twist Northern workingmen’s organic hatred of the new capitalist exploitation by idealizing slavery as the lesser evil.

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