If you read a really good book about the causes, the aftermath, and the behavior of the common man and of his elected officials, The Civil War And Reconstruction, by J G Randall, you get a real flavor for the demagoguery, and the rabble to which it appealed, that has certainly been rampant in American politics since the beginning.
Barbara Tuchman had said, in The Proud Tower, that what passed for the upper class here, an upper gentry really, which had set a somewhat higher tone for American politics, abandoned politics altogether, to a demagogic rabble, by the time of the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson, in 1830.
You can kid yourself about it until you are purple, but that is the history.
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