Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to “make hard work cool again.” The long-shot Republican candidate has been visiting places GOP politicians typically avoid, like college campuses, preaching the supposedly countercultural virtue of toil. His messaging won’t win him the nomination, much less address the crises of the American labor market. Yet they are a striking reminder of the stability of Whig ideology in our political life across nearly 200 years.
Whig ideology—or “the Whig Counter-Reformation,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it—denies the existence of enduring social classes in the United States, or else suggests that there are no enduring conflicts between the classes. Social misery is the product of either rare misfortune or the failure of indolent individuals to seize opportunity. And reform isn’t a matter of redressing imbalances in power through politics. No, it’s the heart or “the culture” that has to be reformed. Hard work has to be made “cool again,” as Ramaswamy says.
In framing things this way, Ramaswamy stands in an old tradition. Whig ideology was the response mounted by America’s market elites to the Jacksonian uprising. For decades since the Founding, America’s market system had chugged along, industrializing the economy, proletarianizing its once-independent working men, and imposing enormous new stresses on the yeomanry. But it wasn’t until the crash of 1819 that the frustrations of the many, and their sense of vulnerability relative to the few, congealed into what then–Secretary of War John C. Calhoun described memorably as a “general mass of disaffection.”
Not unlike Donald Trump in 2015-16, Andrew Jackson was the unlikely outsider who gave voice to the disaffected. His 1824 presidential bid began as a ruse by local oligarchs against their enemies in his native Tennessee but soon resonated nationally. Old Hickory, who had been left in debt by his own failed stint as a land speculator, blamed paper money and banks for the people’s suffering. Blocked by the “corrupt bargain” between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay in 1824, Jackson clinched the presidency four years later. His anger soon found a more specific target in the imperious Second Bank of the United States. The BUS was a private, profiteering institution that was chartered and partially funded by Congress but that strenuously resisted democratic control. This, although it effectively acted as a central bank and disciplined the flow of credit by buying and holding—or selling and demanding specie for—the paper notes of much weaker state banks.