Word: jeffersonianism
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...reckoning of Dumas Malone, the world's preeminent Jeffersonian biographer, "No other American document has been read so often or listened to by so many weary and perspiring audiences" as the Declaration of Independence. Certainly new records were set this Fourth as the words of Thomas Jefferson about "self-evident" truths and "unalienable rights" were beamed from the base of the Statue of Liberty around the globe. "Those well-worn phrases have never lost their potency and charm," insists Malone, though at the time they were first introduced, Jefferson was still miffed that his original text had been edited...
Many Americans back then gloried in the Jeffersonian eloquence, then turned away from the tasks it prescribed for them. Too many Americans still do that, says Malone, who is 94, and spent 50 years compiling his six volumes on Jefferson, 5 1/2 of which follow the events that came after the moment of creation in July 1776. Common sense about the things that still plague mankind flowed from Jefferson's extraordinary pen for half a century after that date in papers, letters and laws...
Kelley expresses a Jeffersonian concern for the survival of the small farmer. "I see us destroying a way of life, destroying one of the most critical segments of the foundation of democracy," she says...
...reptilian brain. Viet Nam changed American notions about the virtues of masculinity and femininity. In the '60s, during the great violence of the war, masculine power came to be subtly discredited in many circles as oafish and destructive. The heritage of the Enlightenment (the scientific method, progress, that dreamy Jeffersonian clarity of mind that told us all problems could be solved) now seemed drawn into a darker business. D.H. Lawrence once wrote that the essential American soul was "hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer...
...grouped under the term of neoliberalism--certainly no easy task. Tsongas, the Massachusetts senator who was in early on the idea, has called it "compassionate liberalism," Rothenberg tells us, and Sen. Gary W. Hart (D-Colo.), who has wrung it for all its worth, has dubbed it "Prairie Populist Jeffersonian democracy." A better term is "anything but"--that is, anything but the formulas of the New Deal, from which neoliberals recoil in horror. Despite his deadly earnest attempt, Rothenberg doesn't really help us in the quest for definition. Grouping as disparate politicians as North Carolina's Gov. James Hunt...