"[C]redulous historians have championed Jefferson and Jackson as the creators of 'our mythic democracy' — in reality..."

"...  a sham democracy driven by personal ambition, partisan corruption, and shameless pandering that disguised the powerful interests truly in charge [according to Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, in 'The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality']. 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 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."

Writes Sean Wilentz in "The Problem With High-Minded Politics/John Adams and John Quincy Adams’s virtuous disdain for partisanship was at the root of their failures" (The Atlantic).