I’ve decided that I no longer like Andrew Jackson at all, not even a little bit. I never realized that his presidency was the codification of White Supremacy, the moment when America’s uneasy truce between European, African, and Native American collapsed and the white people just started being utter assholes about everything. The Indian Removal Act was all him, he supported slavery and oversaw the codification of the slave system into absolute monstrosity, and he gave the millions of acres of land that he stole from the Indians to slavers so that they could greatly increase their holdings and the profitability of slavery. So at least he’s consistent. And you have to admit that he was personally a hell of a guy. But it really doesn’t matter to me any more, because he caused genocide and made slavery worse and essentially placed America on a collision course with the Civil War. He got rid of some corrupt bankers but only replaced them with other corrupt bankers, so big deal.
His combination of nativist race war and credulous suspicion of bankers, verging on conspiracy theory, is intensely familiar. I’ve seen this strain of Americanism before. Jackson was the first Tea Party president.
tl;dr I want Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill