John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson

[TDAS04]

?

[RINO Tom]

JQA (R)

Racist
Populist
Southerner

Sorry, I identify with zero of those terms.

[Mr. Smith]

Adams (Not a nepotist,expansionist or slavery advocate)

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Good question. Although I loathe Jackson the man and his rotten administration, I can't deny that the ideas that led to his rise were ultimately better than the cosy old corruption of the First Party System. Also JQA was one of those presidents with a personality, err, unsuited for the role.

I like to compare the relationship with Jackson and the pre-Jacksonite elites to Thaskin Shinawatra compared to the Bangkok elites. Shinawatra is not a nice person and his administrations seem more interested in funnelling favours to a different set of HP's; but I cannot deny that the fundamental idea behind his rise - that democarcy should be respected, even if privileged urbanites complain - is sound.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Adams (Not a nepotist,expansionist or slavery advocate)

you support Adams because you are not a nepotist?

[H. Ross Peron]

John Quincy Adams was without doubt the far better man.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Jackson is despicable, so not him (though I admire his Unionism and prefer him to the likes of Calhoun).

[Miles]

Jackson (D), my favorite President.

[The Mikado]

Adams (Not a nepotist,expansionist or slavery advocate)

John Quincy Adams was very much an expansionist, though by the end of his life he had grown skeptical of expansionism and rejected the war with Mexico. Adams (while Secretary of State) advocated and pushed through the treaty annexing Florida from Spain, for example. It even has his name on it.

[Flake]

Jackson (D), my favorite President.

Watch you get attacked for being a genocidal maniac, while they idolize LBJ, who killed more than 50x the amount of Vietnamese as Jackson killed Indians.

To be fair, the war started under Kennedy, and he was pressured by war hawks in congress and many key advisers to escalate the war, where he was very reluctant to go further into war with the Viet Cong.

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If you remember, this was the heyday of the red scare, and the majority of people were saying "we must stop the communist spread" (or something like that), so Johnson was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Jackson was pretty happy to go to war with whoever.

[SWE]

JQA

[Torie]

Since the years when I was at about the median age of Forumites, Andy Jackson's fall from grace has been the most precipitous of any POTUS. Back then he was romanticized as a man of the people, a populist, a foe of the predatory banks, the end of aristocratic governance, lionized along with Jefferson by the Democrats in the Jefferson-Jackson speech day, and now he's viewed as a vicious racist, who kicked the Native Americans out of their ancestral homelands, on the trail of tears to make the deep south safe for slavery, reckless with finances, and corrupted and worsened politics, and was a war monger who loved guts and blood to boot.