Word: jeffersons
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...Jefferson was a man of action too. In the 1790s, he became convinced that the Revolution was being betrayed by "deserters from the rights and interests of the people," led by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton, a fellow Cabinet member. A political brawl ensued. Jefferson helped found and back a friendly newspaper, the National Gazette, to help disseminate his views. He and his collaborator James Madison hurled pointed charges at his foes and assembled an influential coalition to oppose what he called "aristocrats" and "monocrats." His aggressive behavior, and Hamilton's, finally drew formal rebukes from the consensus-loving President Washington...
...play the enlightening, fascinating and occasionally disquieting game of trying to picture Jefferson now and apply his ideas and policies to 21st century American issues, one first has to imagine a sort of figure who hasn't existed for a long, long time and seems unlikely to appear again soon: a philosopher-President. The son of wealthy, high-born, landed parents, Jefferson trained as a lawyer in the days when this meant memorizing and analyzing centuries worth of British common law. Along the way, he mastered Latin and Greek, several of the leading European languages and enough philosophy, science...
...Jefferson also had isolationist instincts. "Jefferson saw France and England as capricious monarchies," says Lehigh University political scientist Richard Matthews, author of The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson. "He believed in waging war for the right reasons--for example, a threat to U.S. sovereignty--not for capricious ones." Factoring into Jefferson's belief that America should restrain itself from engaging in international conflict was his optimistic image of the country's utter physical vastness and geographic impregnability. Here is how he characterized the nation in his first Inaugural Address: "Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating...
Distances have shrunk since then, of course, and Jefferson's notion that the country's population would never strain its seemingly limitless resources comes off as ridiculously shortsighted now. What's more, the Virginian couldn't have foreseen the way in which America's thirst for oil would place it at the mercy of foreign powers. A global economy changes everything...
Some things haven't changed since Jefferson's time, though, and one of them is the country's ongoing struggle with the role of religion in civic life. As the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which prohibited government interference in people's religious beliefs, Jefferson took a hard line in this regard, and it isn't difficult to imagine where he would stand on current debates about prayer in public schools, say, or faith-based funding for social projects. "If there is one field of constitutional law, and law generally, where Jefferson was amazing...