Thomas Jefferson: “Industrialization is bad. The only people with any virtue are members of the southern planter aristocracy. I enjoy dominating an underclass of slaves” Progressives and Liberals from 1800-2010 for some reason: “This man is the progenitor of our intellectual tradition”
Wildest thing is being in an upper division American political theory class in college and reading all these abolitionists and trade unionists and progressive era reformers talk up Jefferson. Like really? This doesn’t make any sense save the fact he was a procedural radical I guess.
TJ: “We should allow constitutions to change as society changes” Liberal reformers:
They also equate Jefferson with the entire founding fathers and ignore that like you can’t even name 90% of them off the top of your head because they were all “generic power hungry Victorian era oligarch 1”.
Not the point of the post and still correct but they were in the Georgian era. Victorian wouldn't start until the 1830s...
Not to be a pedant, but it's actually quite important to note that it was decades to a century before the Victorian era.
Someone’s been reading for book club
The book club has only reminded me how fucking mad I was as a 21 year old government student lol
Idolization starts with how we teach history. The same people who treat Columbus as some sort of God-guided hero. 🙄
He wasn’t thinking about how history would perceive his words and character.
Jefferson wasn't really liberal though, kinda in between but leaned right of center
The left loved Jefferson for so long because in many ways his lifestyle is the goal of the working class: stable personal wealth and so much leisure time that you can partake in a bunch of weird hobbies and actually get get at some of them.
But these days, “Financial Independence; Retire Early” is extremely centrist/right coded.
It would be nice if people were not flawed but that is our reality. When it come to the ideas of people like TJ, I apply what Egg Shen says of Chinese Religion/Philosophy in Big Trouble in Little China, 'We take what we want and leave the rest. Just like your salad bar'.