Tag Archive: Populism

The art of ignoring the voters

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which is running until October 20 at my local community playhouse, isn’t my favorite kind of historical drama — it’s an aggressive mashup of anachronisms that can’t seem to decide how true it wants to be to the real story that it’s telling — but if you read it pretty narrowly, as a skewering of populism and a certain kind of revolutionary, it has some clever points.

Some of the play’s most biting elements don’t involve Andrew Jackson the man or his actual presidency, both of which are pretty heavily fictionalized. Instead, the show works to paint a picture of the American public as a bunch of willfully ignorant simpletons who just want a big strong leader to come along and make the tough decisions for them. And what’s fascinating about this idea isn’t so much how accurate it is, but how central it is to basically every ideology’s political vision, including the moderates. Actually, especially the moderates.

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