Was Thomas Jefferson Wrong? #TEXIT Argues No!
Jefferson’s Ideals Were and Still Are Timeless
Jefferson’s Ideals Were and Still Are Timeless
(M. Andrew Holowchak, Abbeville Institute) - The republicanism that Thomas Jefferson envisaged has never enrooted in America. Over its many decades, it has moved increasingly away from a model of thin, decentralized government, where the states are sovereign—a model at least that Jefferson hoped would slowly emerge, beginning with his two terms as president—to thick, centralized government where the federal government is sovereign and economic measures are instantiated to increase the powers of the federal government at the expense of those of the states.
Jefferson, in his years of retirement, noticed the beginnings of that decline, which he dubbed a neglect of moral law. He elaborates in a letter to Benjamin Rush (22 Sept. 1809):
the interest I have taken in the success of the experiment, whether a government can be contrived which shall secure man in his rightful liberties & acquirements, has engaged a longer portion of my life than I had ever proposed: & certainly the experiment could never have fallen into more inauspicious times, when nations have openly renounced all the obligations of morality, and shamelessly assumed the character of robbers & pyrates. … if it can pass safely through the ordeal of the present trial, we may hope we have set an example which will not be without consequences favorable to human happiness.
Jefferson writes of enduring the harsh times and then hoping that the “pendulum will vibrate the more strongly in the opposite direction,” so “nations will return to the…