Salon.com > Thomas Jefferson

Is being liberal a choice?

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

It’s become something of a fad of late to apply neuroscience to partisan behaviors. A recent brain scan study distinguished the Republican from Democratic amygdala: The first is more driven by fear and reward, the latter by more generous-spirited emotional connectivity. In several books, the well-established linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues the basis for Republicans’ attachment to a rigid concept of paternalistic discipline and enforced obedience to an idealized authority.

Then there are last year’s two similarly inspired treatments: journalist Chris Mooney’s "The Republican Brain" and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s "The Righteous Mind." Despite their different training, both authors approach modern tribalism from a similar angle. Mooney wears his partisanship as a proud badge, making much out of the wider-ranging libraries of liberals and the inability of conservatives to accept science as an agent of positive change. Haidt, if liberal-leaning, steers a middle course, advising Democrats to “stop dismissing conservatism as a pathology and start thinking of morality beyond care and fairness.” In other words, you don’t have to endorse fear and loathing when you show compassion for the conservatives who reserve their compassion for the group of like-minded folks with whom they identify. There is, potentially, he says, a way to find common ground – and not just as there was when liberals joined with conservatives in the climate of fear after 9/11.

Who is the real Thomas Jefferson?

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:30:00 +0000

The firestorm over author Henry Wiencek’s unsparing portrait of Thomas Jefferson, "Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," has taken to the pages of the New York Times and other media outlets with a vengeance. Amid tepid praise for Jon Meacham’s folksy best-seller, "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power," which skirts the complex world of slavery, it is Wiencek’s hubristic treatment that has returned Jefferson to center stage in historians’ long-standing war over whom to blame first and foremost for our racist underpinnings as a nation.

Wiencek seizes upon stray notes in Jefferson’s hand in which the Virginia planter performs cold calculations on the monetary value of slaves. A Scrooge-like Jefferson becomes cruel and uncivilized as he obsesses over the slave economy – which he comes to see as a “convenient engine” of American growth. You don’t remove the human face from slavery and come out ahead. But that is what Henry Wiencek has done to Thomas Jefferson.

Jon Meacham: I’m not letting Thomas Jefferson off the hook

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Presidential reputations always rise and fall, but few have come off the pedestal quite like Thomas Jefferson.

As the journalist and historian Jon Meacham notes in "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power," the "DNA findings and subsequent scholarly reevaluation that established the high likelihood of his sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings -- a liaison long denied by mainstream white historians -- gave fresh energy to the image of Jefferson as hypocrite."

Meacham, however, a Pulitzer winner for his biography of Andrew Jackson, argues that perfection cannot be the standard by which presidents and politicians are judged. He suggests our best leaders must "transcend (their) constraints and overcome those faults in order to leave the nation a better, more just place than they found it." Jefferson, he writes, "did his best ... and his best left the world a definition, if not a realization, of human liberty that has endured, and gave America the means to ascend to global power."

By that standard, slavery is just one of the many issues Jefferson had to strike a political balance on. And it's a question which hangs over his book: How do we judge great men who nevertheless fell horribly short of greatness on the most important issues of their day?

“Master of the Mountain”: The real truth about Thomas Jefferson

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 22:00:00 +0000

No founding father wrote more eloquently on behalf of liberty and human rights than Thomas Jefferson, and none has a more troubling record when it comes to the "peculiar institution" of slavery. At present, the popular understanding of Jefferson's shilly-shallying on this issue doesn't extend much deeper than knowing smirks about Sally Hemings and the (unacknowledged) children Jefferson fathered with her. We tend to assume that the dirtiest secrets of the past have to do with sex. But, as Henry Wiencek explains in his new book, "Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," the real filth is in the ledger books.