But you try to hard too acquit Jefferson. The excesses of the French Revolution did not turn him against the Revolution. Rather he grew more radical in his defense of that Revolution. He never advocated a French-style upheaval in America -- we didn't need it, having been spared feudalism and absolutism -- but he didn't abandon the French Revolutionary cause while that Revolution was in progress.
A quarter century later, Jefferson did admit to Adams that he had been wrong about France's Revolution, but at that point even the French had rejected revolution. For Jefferson to say that France ought to just pick up where it left off in 1789, was a bit like a long-time Communist admitting in 1989 or 1991 that the October Revolution had been a mistake. It was a recognition of the practical failure of the movement, not a repudiation of its goals or means.
To say that the other kids with their long enthusiasms for the Russian Revolution "got off" while only our Tom with his temporary flirtation with radicalism is made to pay for his youthful indiscretions is special pleading: if Tom weren't your kid, he'd look a lot more like the other boys who never wanted to understand and admit the horrors of the revolutions they'd loved. Since he is yours, you want to let him off easier than he deserves.
Your idea that the Federalist were "taskmasters" in a way that Jeffersonian Republicans weren't doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. A lot of the efforts to interpret American politics along narrow class lines have failed: too much is unaccounted for, rich men and poor men stood on both sides of the party lines. More to the point, prominent Republicans like Jefferson and Madison were "taskmasters" themselves in so far as they were slaveowners.
The idea that one can escape regimentation and control by embracing slavery may make sense to you, but for moral reasons such a policy is condemned. And rightly so, given how societies that adopt the maxim "greater freedom for us through enslavement of others" behave. It might strike some as a fine thing to be a master and have slaves, but the idea that slavery could truly be a path to greater freedom or a stable or just society is unlikely.
And workers in factories and stores generally had the right to find new employers, a right denied to slaves. The sturdy yeoman himself might well find himself in the position of a stern taskmaster for his wife and children, and increasingly, as the country grew more settled, for hired help. Or, losing his land, he might find himself forced to seek one of his former peers as taskmaster and employer.
You seem to presume that there is some absolute freedom attainable and maintainable. Maybe that was true for the first explorers, hunters, and farmers, but as civilization progresses that freedom is inevitably lost. The development of cities and industries is as much a response to that loss as the cause of it.
The old schema that make Jeffersonians and Jacksonians the party of liberty has been called into question because of the Democrats stronger support for slavery and territorial expansion. It's entirely justified that someone concerned about slavery or sabre-rattling might have found his way into the Whig or Republican parties. And someone who feared or abhorred Jefferson's support for French radicalism and deism or Jackson's unruly democracy or the rickety finances of Democratic state governments might well find his way to the Federalists or Whigs. No apologies are necessary. They made rational, and often a moral choices, and their choices, the reasons behind them and the consequences that grew out of them were at least as beneficial as those of Jeffersonian Democrats.
You may want to make the case that such Americans doomed the agrarian paradise. But it was not a paradise, and was doomed by increasing population, foreign competition, national defense needs, and falling commodities prices. And you might give a thought to what was prevented or removed by America's increasing industrialization -- the prospect of a society based on radical forms of subjugation and unfreedom.
The conclusion that I draw from our history -- and it's clearer now than was ever the case before -- is that "good guys" and "bad guys" aren't always so distinguishable. One can't point to some party that had all the right ideas and was composed entirely of good people. I'd think the rebelists would be contented with the fact that one can't put all the good on the Northern side and all the evil on the Southern side. Instead they keep trying to prove that the opposite caricature was true, a conclusion that just won't stand up in court.
Well, we've had this discussion before, and it doesn't seem to lead anywhere. A lot of the controversy has to do with whether there is one key value that needs to be maximized above all else, or whether there are many different desireable values that have to be balanced against each other. But if you do want to absolutize that one value, you have to seriously consider its different meanings, how they stack up against each other, and just how possible it is to maximize conflicting definitions of the same value. You might take a look at David Fischer's discussion of various American ideas of freedom in Albion's Seed before your thinking hardens into a bizarre Shigalevist embrace of slavery as a means to true freedom. Alongside anarchic ideas of absolute freedom, there is the idea of freedom in society. Chasing the will of the wisp of the former, may mean dangerously neglecting the latter.
O'Brien does try too hard to hang Jefferson. The Oklahoma City Bombing seems to have released a lot of passions in him that it would have been better to keep in check. Six years after it was written, O'Brien's article already has a dated feel......it certainly looks like Jefferson never expressed such great enthusiasm for the Jacobins again. But you try to hard too acquit Jefferson. The excesses of the French Revolution did not turn him against the Revolution. Rather he grew more radical in his defense of that Revolution.
Point one, I'm glad you noticed O'Brien's overdoing it. His tendentiousness jumped out at me, and it was so noticeable that I was amazed at his brashness, retailing his Jefferson-bashing in both liberal and conservative magazines and tailoring his argument for his readership in both cases. Apparently, others noticed, too, and judging by his lack of a second, discounted his philippic.
But now Jefferson is under attack from a quarter O'Brien predicted, to-wit, quietly racist blacks who want white names taken off their schools (never mind that they were built by somebody else), beginning with Confederates and extending to anyone who ever owned a slave. I drove by a big new school, a middle school, in Missouri City Saturday -- named for Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP pleader and political appointee to the Supreme Court. The Balkanization continues apace, and eventually it will threaten the faces on Mount Rushmore. I don't know how much O'Brien has had to do with it (he wrote his articles and book spearing Jefferson almost eight years ago now -- how time flies!), even among his liberal readers. I don't detect much influence (correct me) among conservatives, except maybe for the few Declarationists who follow Harry Jaffa in extolling Hamiltonianism and Lincolnism (to me, the two are organically related), who would be extolling and controverting regardless of anything O'Brien had said. I contingently include you in this group.
My point in defending Jefferson is that there has been a consensus for liberty in America, which Jack Kennedy referred to when he gently rebuked his assembled prima donnas as they sat at dinner in the White House. However, in respect of the wider trends that the article points out which you helpfully linked to, concerning the rising challenge of Confucian values to Western ones, I am very sensitive to the idea that considerations of power and discretion -- the hateful kind of discretion amounting to dominion, exercised in locked rooms by unaccountable men -- may eventually overthrow the ideals of the Enlightenment and return us, as you commented, to the norms of European despotism. If that happens, the American Experiment will have been repudiated if the rest of the world does it and will have failed if we do it. The article's author, a "surrender monkey" if I ever saw one -- Afrikaners called such people hensoppers, which translates to English roughly as "hands-uppers" -- seems to think that we would have to go along to get along, if the rest of the world turned away from American values. So I defend Jefferson, out of felt need: and yes, it is an extended consequentialist argument. Hamilton is too close, I think, to the age of tyrants, and to their apologists like Hobbes, and so I routinely attack his supporters, the better to sustain their freedom to praise him.
[Jefferson] never advocated a French-style upheaval in America -- we didn't need it, having been spared feudalism and absolutism -- but he didn't abandon the French Revolutionary cause while that Revolution was in progress.
Wouldn't it be possible still to be an enthusiast of the Revolution while wishing to minimize the mayhem of the Jacobins?
As for the differences between France and the English-speaking countries in their emergence from feudalism (which England, too, experienced, from 1066 to 1215 and Magna Carta, and beyond), Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror is instructive. She points out that the Jacobin fury fell on the Second Estate mostly because of the nobles' own arrogance and recalcitrance in the centuries following their crushing of the movement for middle-class rights in the 14th century. The English thanes managed to secure grants of rights from the King that later inured to the commons as well; but the French knights crushed any attempt to achieve anything like Magna Carta in France. So France eventually vomited them out, and then fell on them. They thoroughly deserved to be roughly handled as a group; but of course civilized people recognize that one doesn't execute groups, but individuals, and that condemning a person because of group status is unjust and indefensible. Absent any statement by Jefferson to the effect of "kill them all, they're all guilty", I can't join you in assigning him the onus of extremism, or more properly, of bloodthirstiness.
As you say, we've had this discussion......and just because I live in a city doesn't mean I'm under some moral or teleological injunction to accept a Pendergast machine or a Daley machine, or a gauleiter for that matter. Freedom is not "inevitably lost"; there is no entropy in human affairs that requires us to become slaves when gross domestic product rises to a certain level. You've been reading too much Toynbee.
Making concrete statements about the benefits of freedom doesn't mean one aspires to an "absolute freedom" in your terms, and working to increase and preserve freedom doesn't make one an enemy of material progress.