In the Hands of the People by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

6

REFLECTIVE PATRIOTISM VERSUS REFLEXIVE PARTISANSHIP

JEFFERSON WAS CLEAR that the rights and benefits of citizenship come also with obligations. He was realistic, too, that partisan feeling was an inevitable, if lamentable, feature of free government. He often engaged in heated political debates, but he never lost sight of the fact that what united the American people was far more important than what divided them. The key challenge for American citizens was to strike a proper balance between the common good and individual appetites; between party loyalties and the public interest; between a general loyalty to the diversity and promise of the American experiment and one’s own personal designs.

Jefferson also recognized that America was a diverse nation, with people of many different religions, ethnicities, and cultures, and would be more diverse over time. It was essential, then, that people would engage across those differences to discuss and debate issues of national importance. Doing so could produce new insights and assist the people to work together to solve complex problems. As a result, Jefferson embraced a vigorous but civil public political discourse (refusing only to engage publicly with dogmatic extremists who had no interest in polite discourse, compromise, or a democratic government).

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PIERRE SAMUEL DU PONT DE NEMOURS, APRIL 24, 1816

Experience hath shewn that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibiteth that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes….

THOMAS JEFFERSON, A BILL FOR THE MORE GENERAL DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO CHARLES YANCEY, JANUARY 6, 1816

Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other.

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO ROBERT PLEASANTS, AUGUST 27, 1796

Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO RICHARD PRICE, JANUARY 8, 1789

No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its effect towards supporting free and good government.

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO THE TRUSTEES OF EAST TENNESSEE COLLEGE, MAY 6, 1810

It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.

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