Myron Ebell is a friend and a man I admire greatly. It was good to see this article in a British Paper:
Vexing the ghost of Thomas Jefferson
American idealism is infectious. I’m as cynical about my own country’s political system as the next world-weary Brit. But, whenever I go to Washington, I give in to that guileless enthusiasm which foreigners so often dismiss as naïveté. Like the James Stewart character in Mr Smith goes to Washington, I goggle reverently at the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the Battle Hymn of the Republic swelling in my mind. As regular readers will know, Thomas Jefferson is one of my heroes: he kept alive in North America a strain of British liberty that has all but perished from the mother country. So, at any rate, I have always believed.
I’ve just spent three days in Washington meeting the various conservative think-tanks and institutions: Heritage, Young America’s Foundation, the extraordinary Nordquist Wednesday meeting - plus a detour to the Fox studios in New York. The highlight was a private meeting with the 40 GOP Senators: the only time in my life that I’ve felt overawed before a speech. It was all put together by a wonderful woman called Lori Roman who runs Regular Folks United: if you’re American, and you haven’t yet come across her web page, go there now.
I gave the same message everywhere. Americans should cleave to their Jeffersonian heritage. Their country was founded on a series of premises: that concentrated power corrupts; that jurisdiction should be dispersed; that decision-makers should be accountable; that taxes should not be raised save by elected representatives, nor laws passed without popular consent; that the executive should be answerable to the legislature. In the current rush to statism - the bail-outs, the nationalisations, the stimulus spending, the profusion of federal programmes and tsars, the cap and trade rules, the state takeover of healthcare - America is breaching every one of these precepts. If we could hear clanking, I told my audiences, it was the noise of Jefferson’s shade rattling his chains.
This went down well, as you’d expect. Americans, like everyone else, are generally wiser than their politicians. But my paean of praise to their third president elicited a fascinating response from an exceptionally clever and thoughtful man called Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. (The CEI, by the way, is an outstandingly meritorious outfit, even by the standards of conservative Washington, in that it never makes the mistake of confusing the pro-business case with the pro-market case. But I digress). Myron was kind enough to write at some length explaining that it was Jefferson’s predecessor, John Adams, who was, perversely, the true Jeffersonian. Myron’s reasoning is so taut and provocative that I reproduce his email in full below. It’s quite a dilemma for me, though. I’d like to cling to my Smith-like idealism. On the other hand, I have seen enough of politics to know that Myron makes a convincing case. What do you think?
“On thinking in the U. S. about the division and dispersal of power, it was not Jefferson but John Adams who was the major figure. Indeed, Jefferson was on the other side, although his rhetoric was designed to mislead. Jefferson may have said that that government is best which governs least, but he never had a useful thought about how to keep limits on government except to recommend revolution in every generation. Which is of course disastrous. But he was a very silly man - a true, because superficial and calculating, product of the Enlightenment. While Adams was horrified by the French Revolution as soon as Burke was, Jefferson was still enthusiastic even after the terror had begun. Jefferson was the inventor of faux egalitarianism, which was a way of keeping the enlightened patrician (and slave-owning) class in power based on the rationale that they were protecting the interests of common folk. FDR and Teddy Kennedy are the direct descendants, and indeed Jefferson was FDR’s hero and model of a patrician who protected the interests of his class by “representing” and looking out for the working man. Jefferson founded the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was founded on the ruins of the Whig Party which was founded on the ruins of the Federalist Party. Unlike Jefferson, Adams was obsessed with how to keep elites in check by dividing power and balancing power against power. In this he is in the tradition of Harrington and Montesquieu and Hume rather than of Locke (Jefferson on the other hand admired Rousseau). He was the deepest thinker of the Revolution and also the most important political figure (as distinguished from leader) - he made the strategy that led to independence, he led the public campaign for independence, and was the leading proponent for independence in the Continental Congress both rhetorically and behind the scenes. He chose Jefferson to write the Declaration, chose Washington to lead the army, and was appointed by the Continental Congress to be supply master of the army before he was sent to Paris to gain French support (which won the war), which Franklin might have accomplished, but seemed in no hurry to do. There were of course good Virginians besides Washington (a poor general but a great leader who preferred acting nobly to gaining power), especially George Mason and Patrick Henry, and, in the younger generation, John Marshall, whom Adams appointed chief justice after being defeated by Jefferson in the 1800 election. Madison was a brilliant thinker but a follower influenced by whoever his leader and hero was at the moment. Thus, his role in the constitutional convention and in writing the Federalist Papers was supremely constructive. Later under Jefferson’s influence, he was a disaster, even worse as president than Jefferson (for example, they both intentionally let the Navy, which Washington and Adams had built up at great financial and political cost in order to prevent war with England or France, go to pot). A final distinction that separated the Federalists and Anti-federalists. Adams was vehemently opposed to slavery (and his son became the anti-slavery leader in Congress in the 1830s after his presidential term). Jefferson and Madison were not and were comfortable with the attitudes that made slavery acceptable. But this was not just a North-South divide or a division between slave owners versus yeoman farmers and merchants. Washington wrote in a private letter that he feared the Union would break up over slavery and if that happened he would have to leave Virginia and abandon his house and plantation and fortune and throw in his lot with a State that had abolished slavery. I have gone on about this because I think the past informs the present most usefully if we get our story straight.”
