I think I'm a Jeffersonian Conservative.
“The only security of all is in a free press.” Thomas Jefferson wrote these words to the Marquis de Lafayette at the age of 80. The reason Jefferson lauded a free press was that he wished, in tense political times, for the U.S. to function as a deliberative democracy, in which an increasingly better-educated citizenry monitored the policy decisions of its elected representatives and judged whether or not they deserved to remain in office.
A better-educated citizenry. That was Jefferson’s mantra, and it should be ours, too. Republicans in Congress have claimed Jefferson as their man, time and again quoting him as a champion of small government. One of their favorites lines is, “If it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution,” it would be “taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.” The Jefferson they do not pay attention to is the one whose lifelong dream was a well-funded public education system — the Jefferson who spent his post-presidential retirement years creating a beautiful public university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jefferson asked no less a figure than U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, notably the son of a Maryland tavern-keeper, to be its president. He understand that personal growth and national strength were best served by lifting up ordinary folks.......
Those of our time who would sacrifice opportunity for the young and shortchange students of all ages ought to heed the thought Jefferson expressed next. Taken out of context, or left to stand alone, it is a rallying cry for those who fear federal encroachment: “There is no safe deposit [for liberty] but with the people themselves,” he proclaimed. But the rest of his comment expresses the best Jefferson we know, the education champion. Liberty is never safe, he said, unless people possessed knowledge to make informed political choices; for, “where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Conservatives will certainly not appreciate one theory Jefferson put forward in the letter to Lafayette. He claimed that partisan ideologies were fixed in nature. Those of his day whom he labeled “Tory” or “aristocrat,” who wished to restrain the democratic rabble and keep the wealthy in charge, were, for Jefferson, “sickly, weakly, timid men” whose nerves could not withstand social change. Those who subscribed to his own, relatively liberal and open-minded belief in the educability of all (white) men were, he wrote, a “healthy, strong and bold” political interest.
Jefferson’s first priority was the intellectual elevation of those who were to succeed the founding generation — those who would sustain the values of the Revolution. He opposed all profligate spending, but he championed education spending. And he embraced the free press as the republic’s clearinghouse of ideas and the instrument through which political and ethical progress was insured.
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