Not that Trump’s name ever appears in their book, but the connection is hard to miss. In a published symposium in 2017, Isenberg and Burstein, who both teach at Louisiana State University, in effect affirmed Trump’s bumptious self-identification with Andrew Jackson. It was not a compliment. They loathe Jackson as a savagely partisan demagogue who built on the dubious legacy of Thomas Jefferson, “tapped into the democratic id,” exploited popular resentment of the educated elite, and crafted a cult out of his own violent personality. Jackson, in short, was the “proto-Trump.”

The Problem of Democracy presents a corollary argument that by implication renders the Adamses—the presidents defeated by Jefferson and Jackson—historical anti-Trumps. Isenberg and Burstein complain that credulous historians have championed Jefferson and Jackson as the creators of “our mythic democracy”—in reality, they say, a sham democracy driven by personal ambition, partisan corruption, and shameless pandering that disguised the powerful interests truly in charge. The Adamses had the nerve to point out the chicanery of this racket, and for that, the authors argue, historians have dismissed them as out-of-touch, misanthropic stuffed shirts.

Isenberg and Burstein want to recover and vindicate what they describe as a lost “Adamsian” vision of a more elevated, virtuous, balanced, nonpartisan polity, so unlike the system that defeated them, the all-too-familiar forerunner of our own. By the Adamses’ standards, Trump is not an aberration. He is an exemplar of everything in our politics that they resisted in vain, especially the fraudulent party democracy that substitutes tribal loyalties and celebrity worship for informed debate.

But this view of the past and the present is flawed, historically as well as politically. The Adamses were chiefly the victims not of undeserving charlatans but of their own political ineptitude. And the crisis that has given us Donald Trump has arisen not from the excesses of a party politics the Adamses despised, but from the deterioration of the parties over recent decades. Trump, the celebrity anti-politician, exploited this decline ruthlessly, winning the White House through a hostile takeover of a badly shaken and divided Republican Party, which he has now transformed into his personal fiefdom.

Trump is not a creature of the party politics pioneered by Jefferson and Jackson. He is its antithesis, a would-be strongman who captured the presidency by demonizing party politics as a sham. He will be stopped only if the Democrats can mount a reinvigorated, disciplined party opposition. In that struggle, the Adamsian tradition is at best useless and at worst a harmful distraction.

Isenberg and Burstein greatly exaggerate the unpopularity of the Adamses among historians. Until Lin-Manuel Miranda rebranded the imperious Alexander Hamilton as a hip-hop immigrant superstar, no Founding Father (except perhaps George Washington) had been lionized by contemporary writers as much as John Adams, above all in David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography in 2001 and the HBO series that followed. No fewer than four admiring biographies of John Quincy Adams have appeared since 1997. In an era when the public’s regard for party politics has cratered—and a variety of independent candidates, from John Anderson and Ross Perot to Ralph Nader and Jill Stein, have played on this alienation—historians’ estimation of the anti-party Adamses has soared higher than ever.

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The Problem of Democracy does add rich detail and insight to an established pro-Adams narrative about the politics of the early republic. The book’s chief contribution is to entwine the biographies of father and son, deepening our appreciation of their personal and political lives. It is not always a happy tale. John Adams, a self-made political striver, could in private be difficult to abide—a gloomy, often touchy man who, as Isenberg and Burstein neatly observe, “did not encounter the sublime in the world he traversed.” John Quincy Adams, born into public service, was raised to match severe paternal expectations. (In 1794, when he momentarily postponed any political ambition, his father told him that if he failed to reach the head of his country, “it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy.”) The son was afflicted all his life by what he called an “over-anxious” disposition that looks today like clinical depression. He nevertheless made it to the top of the heap—unlike his less fortunate younger brothers, Charles and Thomas, both of whom fell into hard drinking, and one of whom died young of alcoholism.