The closest analogue to today's US politics is the Jacksonian era. Wasn't an era of sectional politics, but one where a monarchical presidency was wielded by unstable, anti-PMC factions of capital. The PMC of the day were pre-millenial evangelicals w their home in the Whig Party
![“The liberalism and individualism which fired the minds of the Revolutionaries were more repulsive to many French people than the corruptions of the Ancien Régime. The ‘people’ in whose name the execution of the monarch would be carried out didn’t want more modernity, but less. Many of the ordinary folk who took to the streets in protest, explains Schama, ‘had never been much enamoured of economic liberalism or individualism. Much of their anger had been a reaction against the unpredictable and impersonal operation of the market…They were not only indifferent, then, but actually hostile to much of the modernising and reformist enterprise embarked on, first by the monarchy and then by successive revolutionary inheritor regimes’.[4]
In France, as it turned out, the actual people (in contrast with the abstract notion of ‘The People’) wanted justice from their rulers rather than their beheading. Their aim, if they could be said to have one, was to make customary ways work better for them, not to overthrow them all from the bottom up. The elite Revolutionaries, though, had other ideas: those ‘customary ways’ were obstacles to be swept away, and once that was achieved, a new world would triumph. It’s[…]”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:bblrvbttqkzjsnrj265n5dmp/bafkreibj42edvai3xpbpnteqazdm4g3dmg4z3jz54agqit6i6z25tcipey)
