ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes two primary categories of cultural dilemmas. The first involves the president with some blend of egalitarian and individualist cultural propensities. All Jeffersonian and Jacksonian presidents labored, with varying degrees of success, to square their own and their followers' antiauthority principles with the exercise of executive authority. The second type is the president of hierarchical cultural propensities. Cultural theory is not a substitute for historical analysis. The instruments of policy emerge in interaction with historical experience. The Jacksonian movement was a self-conscious revival of Jeffersonian political culture. The Republican amalgam of economic individualism and social hierarchy would dominate American politics for the next half century in the same way that Jefferson's and Jackson's alliance of egalitarianism and individualism had dominated the previous half century. Abraham Lincoln behavior as president reflected an acute awareness of the paucity of support for leadership in America.
