#87: Thomas Jefferson or “Is Chuck Schumer a Pauline Pope?”

January 23, 2011

I’ve just completed reading Ron Chernow’s new biography of Washington and despite a number of recurring annoyances in the book I found it enormously interesting and informative. In particular, it drew me into a very popular past-time, that of attempting to characterize the founding fathers in terms of our current political parties. In even finer detail, it got me thinking of the central figures of Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson.

While there were no official political parties right after the revolution, there were what they then called “factions,” loosely organized individuals who argued politics in published pamphlets and newspapers, and the main two factions were the so-called “Federalists” and the so-called “Republicans.” The Federalists, as their name implies, believed that a strong central government with wide ranging powers was essential to the survival and prospering of the new union of states. The Republicans, quite different from today’s party of that name, took their name from the Roman republic, a government that in its ideal form ruled by the people through their senatorial representatives. Of these two, the latter are the more difficult to locate in today’s terms than the former. And of the four founders I mentioned above, only one was a Republican, and he was Jefferson. What makes an account of early American republicanism even more difficult is that Jefferson himself was apparently quite content to live with many inconsistencies. Like today’s Jefferson, William Jefferson Clinton, Thomas had the ability to “compartmentalize” his views and his activities. While Thomas Jefferson was an original “Republican” and William Jefferson a contemporary Democrat, they actually had much more in common than a name.

At the macro level, the difference between the Federalists and the Republicans poses no problem: the former believed in a powerful central government, while the latter rejected this. The original republicans associated centralized power with monarchy and could see no form of centralized authority that was not tyrannical. In the divergence of opinion that emerges from the revolutionary war, we see two different underlying psychological postures vis a vis the British Crown, two postures that only revealed themselves in and through the war. The first was not hostile to the Crown itself, it was only hostile to how the Crown was treating the American colony. As the war progressed, the population with this psychology did grow passionate for American independence, but it did not attempt to invent itself as a new un-Britain. The second posture, on the other hand, was definitely hostile to the Crown with a passionate hatred and to monarchy in general, and it did want to define itself as a new un-Britain.

What this implied, among other things, was that the original republicans tended to find their intellectual mooring not in the British democratic tradition that came to America through the writings of John Locke, but rather in the writings of the French Enlightenment. The Federalists accepted their Anglo cultural inheritance and sought to build on this, while the Republicans wanted to create a new nation ex nihilo, relying only, like the Enlightenment Philosophes, upon pure unaided human reason. This difference was manifest, for example, in the Federalists remaining faithfully Anglican (or what we now call Episcopalian), while Jefferson, the leader of the Republicans, was at the very least a Deist, if not an atheist. In addition, the hostility to the British Crown among the Republicans made them aggressively in favour of “states’ rights,” made them hostile to any treaties or reconciliations with Britain, made them ecstatically pro-French revolution, tolerating its Terror, thrilling to its anti-Clericalism and its rage against the aristocracy. All of these positions placed them at odds with the Federalists.

In brief, the way I read this history, the Federalists, while as committed to American independence as the Republicans, favoured cultural continuity and a working relationship with Britain, while the Republicans wanted a radically un-British America and nothing to do with Britain at all, favouring making France America’s “special friend” (not unlike America’s current Affirmative Action President). [As a side-note, since the French revolutionary Directorate declared an unofficial war on the U.S. during the Adams administration, this Republican objective seems to have been a poor idea from the outset.]

What is puzzling about this picture is that the French Enlightenment did not lead to the idealized Roman “republicanism” envisioned by Jefferson, it led rather to the worst kinds of Socialist tyranny and statism imaginable. Ironically, had Jefferson taken more note of the actual later history of Rome, he might have been more nervous about using it as a model. Nero, Caligula, and Heliogabulus were nothing for a small “d” democrat to be proud of. The centralised government emerging from the tradition of British democracy and defined in the U.S. constitution, on the other hand, has provided the greatest amount of personal freedom ever found on earth.

To be fair, Jefferson, like the Federalists, was committed to the objective of individual freedom, but he believed that the way to achieve this objective was by limiting government to the local sphere. Given the history of large governments prior to the American Revolution, it is easy to see how he could have drawn that conclusion. So what went wrong? Why didn’t the French Enlightenment by way of the French Revolution lead to a paradise of individual freedom instead of to Stalin’s Gulag?

I suspect that what Jefferson missed was that populations that limit themselves to small local governments are by their nature peculiarly vulnerable to being hijacked, that the same characteristic that promises individual freedom makes the population ripe for a tyrannical hijacking either from within or from without.

This first occurred to me when reading Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels. She has since written books in which she criticizes her earlier work, but I don’t recall her withdrawing what seemed to me to her central thesis. In that book, she discussed the Jewish sect called the Essenes described in the scrolls found at Nag Hammadi. She treated the Essenes as an early form of Christianity with a democratic non-hierarchical command structure and argues that they lost out and disappeared in a competition with Pauline Christianity. If I remember accurately, she identified specifically the hierarchical nature of Pauline Christianity as giving it its competitive advantage. In other words, Christianity began as fully democratic in the Essenes and was hijacked by Paul in a version of it that differed crucially by having centralised control.

Very much the same thing happened in Russia in 1917. There were actually two Russian Revolutions, one in February and one in October. The February Revolution was a spontaneous worker’s revolution in which the participants envisioned themselves as being governed by small democratic councils called “soviets.” In October, the workers’ revolution was hijacked by the Bolsheviks, and the rest is bloody, bloody history.

The same thing happened in Castro’s takeover of Cuba.

And something very similar was true, arguably, of the French Revolution, namely that it began as a “people’s” revolution and ended as a tyranny. The moral of the story seems to be this: if you’re gonna have a grass-roots, bottom-up peoples’ revolution, make sure that it has a centralised and hierarchical control structure from the outset. Unfortunately, the former does seem to preclude having the latter.

What should have tipped off Jefferson was that the native American Indians were politically structured in much the way he fantasized that the whole of the new union should be, the only difference was that they were hunter-gatherers rather than land owners and farmers. He should have been able to see that this form of social organization was unable to compete with the military forces of a powerful central government and that an America organized along the same lines would have been as unable to defend itself as the Indian nations had been.

Now I don’t remember that Washington, Hamilton, and Adams were specifically exercised about internal hijackings (I will have to have a look at the Federalist Papers to see if this comes up), but they were definitely concerned about the ability of the Union to survive external aggression and of individual states to survive external aggression without the existence of a strong central government.

The Federalists were as aware as Jefferson of the poor track record of powerful central governments, but unlike him, they believed that survival in the absence of such a government would be simply impossible. In consequence, they attempted an entirely new experiment, namely that of a strong central government that is constrained and limited by a powerful Constitution. In metaphorical terms, they knew that they couldn’t get along without a big dangerous guard dog; but they also knew that dogs of this kind had always eaten their owners. So they tried a desperate gamble in the form of a special new leash and muzzle that they hoped would allow the dog to keep trespassers at bay while at the same time keeping him from their own throats. That leash and muzzle was the U.S. Constitution.

Interestingly, all the founders, Jefferson included, thought of the Constitution in precisely these terms, as a leash on the government, but it was predictably Jefferson who was the strict constructionist, arguing for a very literal reading of the document. It was Hamilton, the Federalist, who wanted to treat the Constitution as a “flexible” instrument subject to “interpretation.” This makes perfectly good sense, since it was Jefferson who was far more afraid of the central government than the others. If the Federalists were far too willing to play fast and loose with the Constitution, Jefferson was far too paranoid about centralised power for the safety and prosperity of the nation.

So what does this say about Jefferson in more contemporary political terms? While it is tempting to treat him as a modern Libertarian, I think this group is too heterogeneous to be helpful here. The Libertarian designation covers people of very different stripes, some of whom would be quite unhappy with many of Jefferson’s views. In today’s terms, on the surface it would seem that Jefferson ought to be a modern Republican. After all, it is today’s Republican who is against big government and today’s Democrat who is for it. But it is also today’s Republican who tries to retain the religion of his forefathers and who maintains a respect for tradition. It is the Democrat who rejects tradition, rejects religion, and casts his eyes towards the European continent to his inspiration.

To put the conundrum baldly, Jefferson is emotionally and culturally a modern Democrat who happens also to believe in small government (and because of that in a strict reading of the Constitution). Like many a modern Democrat, Jefferson was academically brilliant, cosmopolitan, educated, had aristocratic pretensions, and continental preferences. Like the modern Democrat, Jefferson spouted high-flown ideals while violating them constantly in his private life. Jefferson, for example, was an outspoken critic of slavery, while he kept slaves. It was certainly not unusual for a Virginia Planter to hold slaves, it was just hypocritical for Jefferson to do so while spouting anti-slavery rhetoric. This is not unlike our California and N.Y.C. Liberals who spout all sorts of humanitarian rhetoric about illegal immigrants, while keeping them on at slave wages as nannies and gardeners.

I’m inclined, after all is said and done, to say that there is no contemporary box into which we can neatly fit Jefferson, and that the closest we can come is a slightly older niche. The most recent Jeffersonian political nook I can find is actually neither British nor French, it is Russian. I suggest that Jefferson might have found the pre-Revolutionary Russian anarchists much to his liking, perhaps one like Prince Peter Kropotkin. There is a literary biography of Jefferson that might shed some light here, and I must look at it; he may very well have had acquaintance with anarchist works.

While the caricature of the anarchist that still remains is that of a malign, hunched over, black robed figure holding a round black bomb with a burning fuse, the anarchists tended not to be hostile to all government, but only government that extended beyond the local, and this they had in common with Jefferson. But even beyond that, just like Jefferson, their source of inspiration was the French Enlightenment.

I conclude that Jefferson was culturally a modern Democrat, while Washington, Hamilton, and Adams were culturally modern Republicans. What this means is that one could say that the cultures of the contemporary American parties existed at the founding, but that intriguingly they seem to have reversed their original stands on the role of the central government and states’ rights. In point of fact, this is more apparent than real.

The contemporary Republicans, under pressure from Libertarians in the form of the Tea Party, have not reversed their original stand (as Federalists). The Federalists understood the need for a powerful, but limited and controlled central government, and this is what our current crop of Republicans are after: to return the central government to it’s originally conceived limited role. The contemporary Democrats, on the other hand, have indeed done a turn-around.

Here’s the punch line. While the current Democrats share Jefferson’s personal culture, their faction in the form of a contemporary party have succumbed to precisely to the same vulnerability I described for grass-roots revolutions of the past. While the ideals of individual freedom may still exist among genuine Democrats out there in the field, their cleaving to a radical form of that in practice like the late 19th c anarchists has made the party easy prey for a well organized hi-jacking. In effect, the idealistic Democrats are the Essenes of today, while the ultra-left apparatchiks are the Pauline Christians. Jefferson was an Essene, while Chuck Schumer is a Pauline Pope.