When Henry Clay Led the #Resistance

There are times when history rhymes, and times when it just seems to be plagiarizing. If you want to get a sense of the quandary currently facing the Democratic Party, it's helpful to examine the plight of a short-lived party from two centuries ago, the National Republicans.

The National Republicans of the late 1820s and early '30s are generally considered the precursor to the Whigs, one of America's two major parties until the 1850s. They were also often referred to as the Anti-Jacksonians because their primary function and orientation was opposition to Andrew Jackson, whose 1828 election and norm-breaking administration stunned political observers on a nearly daily basis.

That's not to say Andrew Jackson is a perfect analogy for Donald Trump or that National Republican leader Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky is the forebear of today's establishment Democrats. But the parallels are still striking.

As Michael Holt describes in his 1999 book The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Clay and others were horrified by Jackson's 1828 election. They worried he was a potential despot who would undermine the nation's fragile institutions and democratic norms. They simultaneously dismissed his election as a fluke. "They regarded the outcome," Holt writes, "as a triumph by the magnetic Jackson over the aloof and colorless [John Quincy] Adams. Hoopla, demagoguery, and Jackson's refusal to take a stand on matters of national policy, they thought, had temporarily dazzled voters, while sheer opportunism had engaged politicians with divergent policy goals in the Jackson cause."

The National Republicans at first pursued a passive strategy of opposition to Jackson, confident that people would naturally turn against him once he was forced to take stances on actual policy issues. But they had misread the public and underestimated Jackson. ...