Jefferson wouldn't have burned Bibles, just done a cut and paste job. Imagine what he could have done with internet access in his post Presidential years at Monticello.
Jefferson wouldn't have burned Bibles, just done a cut and paste job. Imagine what he could have done with internet access in his post Presidential years at Monticello.
Ironically, the Southern planter Jefferson, as the representative of the "left" of those days, received the majority of Jewish support. That's the start of American Jews' love affair with what is today the Democrat party, but you have to realize that these "left wing" Democrats espoused an interpretation of the Constitution and of the Union that in our day is considered "rightwing" (ie, proto-Confederate "states' rights" and strict Constitutional constructionism). Meanwhile the "right wing," which was paranoid about "French atheists," was strongest in what we think of today as the secular northeast, which was Federalist, loose constructionist, and nationalist.
Neo-Confederates like to claim that Puritanism is the direct lineal ancestor of contemporary Northeastern liberalism. And while the charge horrifies me, there is no doubt that if you look at a political map today you will see that the "blue states" are the states traditionally associated with the historically conservative Federalist/Whig/Republican tradition, while the "red states" are states associated with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian radicalism.
So is contemporary liberalism merely the continuation of the "lordly purse-proud aristocracy" that the Jacksonians railed against? I don't like to think so, but nature makes no leap, and the conservative Federalists certainly were more sympathetic to native Blacks and Indians than to "French atheists." Could this be connected with contemporary Eastern liberalism's preference of "Blacks and Hispanics" to European immigrants? Or were the McKinley/Bryan campaigns, in which the socialist was a Biblical Fundamentalist and the "conservatives" associated with the Old Ivy Leage Establishment connected to today's Coastal/Heartland political divide? And shoot, is there some logical reason that Vermont, historically the most Republican state is today one of the most radical while the conservative ones (including even New England's New Hampshire) were historically Democrat?
I certainly hope none of this is true, but it's hard not to notice.
It is certain that today's red states were historically Jacksonian and the blue ones historicall Federalist/Whig/Republican. It's also certain that the radical populists blamed all their troubles on the Eastern bankers, and that for much of the past one hundred years radical conservatives have blamed the same villains for being "secretly behind Communism."
Maybe at the turn of the twentieth century our universe collided with another one where John D. Rockefeller was the radical and Williams Jennings Bryan was the conservative, and their personalities got mixed up. Maybe the Eastern blue-bloods turned against conservatism when conservatism ceased to consider eugenics (for the purpose of worldwide white supremacy) as one of its primary causes (the "conservative" Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color, was a eugenicist and friend of Margaret Sanger). Or maybe the Eastern Establishment was merely so terrified by the leftwing assassination of William McKinley they decided to coopt the Left and take it over (which may be one reason the American Left is so non-anarchist and committed to the historical American government; the American Left, far from advocating revolution, seems to have nightmares about camouflaged rightwingers marching on Washington and overthrowing the government). All one can say is that the historically conservative regions have turned radical and the historically radical regions have turned conservative. One could also point out that in the nineteenth century John D. Rockefeller's pastor was the Fundamentalist Baptist and chr*stian Zionist William Blackstone; in the twentieth his pastor was the notorious liberal Harry Emerson Fosdick, who gave Fundamentalists their name (and it wasn't a compliment).
So I don't know. What do you think is going on?
PS: Please don't ping this to the neo-Confederates. They're unbearable enough as it is!