Jay Cost argues that another “Jacksonian moment” may be upon us:

We might be on the verge of another Jacksonian moment: a time when the people awake from their slumber, angrily exercise their sovereign authority, and mercilessly fire the leaders who have for too long catered to the elites rather than average people. The first time this happened was in 1828 – when the people rallied to the cause of Old Hickory to avenge the “Corrupt Bargain” of four years prior. It’s happened several times throughout the centuries. Most relevant to today, it happened time and again in the 1880s and 1890s, as the people hired then fired one Republican and Democratic majority after another in search of leaders who could attend to the people’s interests instead of the special interests. That age saw the birth of the Populist Party. It was a time when so many felt so disgruntled by the political process that young William Jennings Bryan – just thirty-six years old and with only two terms in the House – came within a hundred thousand votes of the presidency.

I wonder if we’ve returned to that kind of dynamic. In true Jacksonian fashion, the country fired the Republicans in 2006 and 2008 because they bungled the war in Iraq and allowed the economy to sink into recession. They might soon have another Jacksonian moment, and fire these equally useless Democrats for hampering the recovery, exploding the deficit, and playing politics with health care.

Cost may be right that the public will punish the Democrats severely for perceived and real mishandling of economic, fiscal and health care matters. Looking at the House and Senate race ratings, it seems improbable, but the midterms are still almost a year away and things could change. It could be that the collusion with insurance companies that is producing the current health care legislation, the ongoing government alliance with financial interests and the ever-growing public debt will provoke a major political uprising. The trouble is that the opposition party is almost perfectly ill-suited to take advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction. If someone with Andrew Jackson’s or William Jennings Bryan’s politics arrived on the scene today, the first people to try to run them out of town would be mainstream Republicans and conservatives. There is a growing anti-Fed movement on the right, which is probably the closest thing to a Jacksonian faction among conservatives, but it receives nothing but disdain from party and movement leaders. It is true that all but one of the nays on Bernanke’s confirmation in the Banking Committee were Republicans, but this is just as much a function of reflexive partisan opposition as it is proof of any understanding why Bernanke should not have been re-confirmed. Even then, three Republicans, two of whom are from safe Republican seats, voted aye.

Matt Continetti’s fantasies aside, there is no Jackson-Bryan political tradition in the modern GOP. There isn’t even a LaFollette tradition in the modern GOP anymore. That’s a terrible thing, but that is how things stand right now. As far as domestic politics are concerned, Republicans are not really Jacksonians, and most of them wouldn’t know how to be Jacksonians if they wanted to be. It is not enough to be angry at people back East and resent “elites.” What Rod has called Palin’s conflicted populism simply becomes pseudo-populism at the national level, because the GOP is simply not built as a vehicle for seriously challenging entrenched and highly concentrated economic interests. While a small-state Western governor might recognize the danger of collusion between corporations and government, a national Republican leader has to deny or minimize that danger at every turn.

Tim Carney has been doing outstanding work critiquing such collusion for years, and he has apparently done so again in his new book Obamanomics, but the political difficulty with leveling this critique at Obama from the right is that he is simply continuing the practices of the administrations that came before him. Another problem is that the actual Republican leadership in Congress has a poor record in opposing such collusion. This started long before controversies over bailouts. Anyone who supported the prescription drug benefit, which greatly benefited pharmaceutical corporations at the public’s expense for decades to come, is in no position to complain that the other party is trying to enrich insurance companies at our expense. It would be rich indeed to hear from Bush loyalists that Obama is trying to push legislation through for nakedly political reasons when Medicare Part D was jammed through Congress for no other reason than to try to buy votes for Bush’s re-election. It is possible that outrage over the shape of health care reform will generate a backlash because it will directly and pretty quickly affect everyone in a way that the prescription drug benefit did not, but all those would-be Jacksonians out there did not rise up and throw out the Republicans because of that legislation. They did not rise up, even though the liabilities they and their descendants will owe because of that benefit far exceed anything being discussed right now.