What Would Jefferson Do?

Earlier this week, I wrote a post stating that without elections, there would be "anarchy". Immediately, my watchdog-colleague Cavington corrected me, more precisely defining anarchy as a state of true personal liberty - "chaos" was the word I was looking for. You'd think that systems of government, as vital and intrinsic in all of our lives, would be something standardized at this point. Something streamlined. Something that, if not perfected, should at least have a clear vision of what it wants to be.

However, that isn't so. Anarchy has multiple connotations and derivations; so too does America's own republic. The republic we see today is not the republic that our founding fathers envisioned. Thomas Jefferson loved freedom; he loved it so much that he despised and feared debtors and manufacturers. Manufacturers, Jefferson argued, are not free, because they are enslaved to the pernicious price fluctuations of their wares; debtors cannot be free because they live their lives in the shadows of men to whom they owe the fruits of their labor. In fact, Jefferson argued the only free people are property-owning farmers; only they can provide entirely for themselves, without the outside help by peers or the government.

This argument, however, precludes certain freedoms that today's America considers necessary. Jefferson - and other important Brits and upper-class Americans - did not think that non-property owners should have the franchise; property-owning rule, NOT rule by everyone, was considered the key tenent to republicanism. After all, reasoned Jefferson, those without jobs and property are resigned to lives of being rabble, constantly stealing and panhandling, incapable of supporting themselves. How can those unable to support themselves support a nation? One of Jefferson's friends, Andrew Fletcher, supported a plan to enslave (enslave!) property-less whites so they would not cause trouble.

This view was extreme, but its general sentiments were not out of line with its time (John Locke, for example, encouraged a "working school" idea which essentially enslaved children). These views are obviously not anywhere close to mainstream in today's idea of a republic. What does this mean? Maybe it means we can't always look to our Founding Fathers for advice. They were certainly smart guys with great vision for our country, but in the last two hundred plus years, their views and ours have grown distant. What seemed logical to Thomas Jefferson does not seem logical today - and that, in turn, may not in two hundred years to that time's leader of the free world. In other words, maybe we should stop pushing our "American" brand of governance onto other states.

We don't exactly know what it is ourselves.