Republicans - A One Minute History

In America, the first Republican was Thomas Jefferson. He referred to himself as Republican, and to the hated opposition as Federalist. Jefferson stood for freedom from gov't while the Federalists, led primarily by Hamilton, Adams and Washington, stood for a belief in strong central gov't, despite the obvious lessons of world history from which Jefferson created America. Federalists, correspond to modern day Democrats who share that same identical Federalist belief in gov't over freedom. Indeed, the battle joined by Jefferson and Hamilton (largely won by Jefferson in the election of 1800) to define the meaning of the American Revolution goes on today with no significant changes, despite attempts from many directions to maintain peace by hiding America's eternally unresolved founding from us.

Today, instead of Federalists, monarchists, royalists, and loyalists (the 1/3 of Americans who were loyal to and sometimes fought for England during the Revolution) , we have communists, socialists, liberals, and Democrats. Republicans remain unchanged in their steadfast belief that all of the evil in human history was and is caused by gov't, and that America's Jeffersonian gift to humanity is to demonstrate this precise principal which, tragically, has always been perfectly antithetical to mankind's dominant and most fundamental herd instinct.

Oddly, to Republicans the above concept is elementary, but to Democrats it is utterly mysterious. In the end, attempting to teach it to them is like teaching calculus to gold fish. It is just not possible within the context of a limited Democratic mind. In fact, Democrats energetically cling to their Santa Claus big gov't feelings with a kind of unshakeable, brainless bigotry. They stand proudly as objective symbols to why it is that most governments in all ages have been mostly evil, while freedom has only found one voice in the person of Thomas Jefferson without whom even America would have had no freedom.

Interestingly, the derivation of Jefferson's Republicanism is mostly unknown, even to Republicans. Most have forgotten or never knew that Jefferson was a physiocrat. This means, essentially, that he believed all wealth came from land. He therefore believed America should be a land of yeoman farmers tied to the land. Physiocrats were the leading economists of the time, and proponents of this theory to which Jefferson subscribed. If you had said to them that manufacturing and services would come to dominate the economy in the coming centuries and that farmers would only constitute 3% of the population they simply would not have believed it possible.

Oddly, it was Alexander Hamilton, the leading Federalist, who seemed to understand the industrial Revolution (already far along in England) far better than did Jefferson, and who wanted to organize American Federal govt to take full advantage of it. But neither Jefferson nor Hamilton understood the economic wisdom of Adam Smith whose well known book "The Wealth of Nations" ( published in 1776), has become the basis of modern Republican economic thinking. Accordingly, Hamilton was adamantly and hawkishly in favor of England, big business, central banking, manufacturing, gov't regulation of business, and centralized American gov't, while Jefferson was in favor of France (literally decapitating their own Federalists at the time) , farming, state banks, and very limited American gov't.

To make matters more complicated, Jefferson believed, as did the Federalists, that only land holders should vote since only they were real stakeholders in America. But Jefferson went further in the belief that farming maintained the purity of the human soul while being an urban wage slave in a manufacturing economy was inherently prostitution, and corrupting to the soul. This thinking oddly was echoed by Marx too who similarly believed that when mankind was separated from the means of production and the product of production, his life became alienated, meaningless, and trivial. After all, they reasoned, if you grow your own food, build your own house, and make your own clothes, these natural necessities of life have a certain value and interest to you both as necessities and as the creation of your own labor. When you merely buy them in exchange for mere money their importance is significantly reduced. In short, life could flow from a nut on a car or , more meaningfully, from a wide variety of talents, labors, and creations.

If, for example, a man's life is reduced and simplified to putting a nut or bolt on cars as they proceed down an assembly line, he cares little about the cars, because his contribution to and responsibility for the finished product is so minimal, despite it consuming his entire working life. Moreover, he little appreciates the goods and services which he merely buys for consumption from unknown people. They are made by unknown manufacturing processes, and in unknown places. His fate is merely to buy them rather than design and create them as a vague manifestation or affirmation of his own being. The yeoman farmer, in theory, suffers from none of these problems. He is empowered , ennobled, and engaged by the freedom to independently define, manage, and create his own life and, moreover, to play a respected and instructional role in his own family.

To make Federalist/Democratic alienation still worse, a highly compartmentalized life teaches that when you need or want something you vote Democratic, dial 911, go to the store, or call someone to fix or solve your problem or satisfy your needs. You learn dependent helplessness. In terms of gov't, this conditions people to vote for Democrats who warrant that a distant gov't will simple deliver the solution to all of life's problems as do Walmart, Home Depot, and an assembly line job. The habit is to assume that other people, in other places, of unknown means, with mysterious, arcane methods can solve all the world's problems, whereas freedom, conversely, assumes a certain joy in the liberty of self-sufficiency .

And on top of all that, what does a man to do after work in an urban Democratic setting? According to Jefferson, he hangs out with corrupting strangers for whom little love is lost. Thus, bizarre anti-social urban behavior is encouraged that would not be considered back on the farm where immediate family members on whom one, in theory, is genetically predisposed to make a better impression, are always present. Interestingly, in the case of Jefferson the cherished gentlemanly farmer life that he wished on everyone was made possible only by slaves, at least one of whom he slept with! So much for civilized familial farming!

In the end, the Republican Jefferson was completely wrong about many important things. He had seemingly little idea about the nature of civilization, human psychology, economics, or the most basic elements in the future he was creating for us. But, as pure evolutionary luck would have it, he stumbled on the greatest truth in all of human history and became perhaps the greatest human being in all of human history. Without his largely accidental intellectual luck, his Republican knowledge (based a genius IQ, slavery, a perverse moral sense, and an absurd economic dogma) that an America created around the idea of freedom from gov't would save the world, there would be only Democrats who have never had even one tiny bit of intellectual luck, and so exist, to this very second, only on the insane premise, confuted by all of human history, that gov't is good and freedom is bad. But, if Jefferson could stumble on to earth shattering, sea changing wisdom, perhaps Democrats will too. The question is: can we survive in the mean time?

Comments: bje1000@aol.com
Ted Baiamonte
www.thedumbdemocrat