Brion McClanahan

The Jeffersonian Tradition Brion McClanahan

America needs more Thoams Jefferson and less Abraham Lincoln. That is the key to unlocking the American tradition. These might seem like incompatible things. After all, Lincoln supposedly channeled Jefferson in his Gettysburg Address. This is a lie, and historians have known it for decades. The historian Gary Wills wrote Lincoln "revolutionized the Revolution" in 1863, meaning that to that point, most Americans considered the event to be far less radical than modern "proposition nation" acolytes on both the Left and Right believe. Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal" but gave more emphasis to the establishment of "free and independent States" and the prospect of secession than any lofty rights of man. In fact, federalism became Jefferson's core political philosophy. Recovering that part of the American tradition is the essential cure for the oppressive American "nation state" and the plunge into centralized chaos. The fifty-five essays in this book explain how vital the Jeffersonian tradition is to our future as a federal republic and a reconciled Union-politically, culturally, and economically.