Word: jeffersonianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Freedom in America, however, has been represented by the past. This is not difficult to see think of constant references to the liberties handed down by the Founding Fathers--the definition of freedom in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, which Jefferson himself believed was based on a nation of small, freeholding farmers. Virtually every group in American politics--including workers believes that the past contained a great measure of true freedom, and that the degree of liberty present now can be calculated by our distance from the idea of the Constitution...
...counterculture of the '60s--which was genuinely in opposition to advanced, bureaucratized capitalism and the stilted, unspontaneous him in beings it created--could not transcend this vision of the past. The hip Left's retreat into rural communalism and undisciplined, leaderless opposition was essentially in keeping with America's Jeffersonian traditions. In American style, a large part of the '60s Left could not make a virtue of organized planned collectivism but instead tried to create a vision of society which was small scale, often rural, and largely anarchic. In a society and economy as interdependent and complex as U.S. society...
...first characteristic can come reformism and perhaps even a type of democratic socialism: but out of the second comes the most interesting feature of the American working class--its revolutionary opposition to capitalism reflected in a culture that hallows a distant and mythical past existing prior to capitalism, a Jeffersonian past...
Lippmann's distrust for ordinary people and events permeated his writing. The simplest matter was likely to set him pontificating about the need for a synthesis between Jeffersonian liberty and Hamiltonian authority, or half-whimsically going back to liberal first principles. And though such an attitude seems particularly silly for a journalist presumably dedicated to letting ordinary readers know about day-to-day events, it's precisely this quality that folks this week were praising...
...relate intricate New York politicking, with reformers pitted-as they still are today-against regulars. As a freshman state senator, Franklin often stood bravely on his principles-but wavered on other occasions when he sensed the possibility of serious political damage. He was still very much the country-squire Jeffersonian, rather slow to understand the problems of the urban workers as Fellow Democrats Al Smith, Robert Wagner and Frances Perkins did. But he worked, he learned and he grew...