{"id":13241,"date":"2020-06-23T03:49:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T00:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/theyre-aiming-at-jefferson-but-the-real-target-is-america\/"},"modified":"2020-06-23T03:49:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T00:49:00","slug":"theyre-aiming-at-jefferson-but-the-real-target-is-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/theyre-aiming-at-jefferson-but-the-real-target-is-america\/","title":{"rendered":"#They\u2019re aiming at Jefferson, but the real target is America"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#They\u2019re aiming at Jefferson, but the real target is America<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n They\u2019re coming for Thomas Jefferson.<\/p>\n

This was always obvious, but now it\u2019s even more plain. Protesters in Portland used axes and ropes to topple a statue of Jefferson. The New York City Council is agitating to remove a statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence from its chambers.<\/p>\n

At this rate, the Sage of Monticello will be lucky if the Jefferson Memorial isn\u2019t bulldozed and if he isn\u2019t effaced from the nickel.<\/p>\n

Jefferson is, to use the argot of the day, the most \u201cproblematic\u201d of the Founders. The Virginian was a slave-owner who, despite his high ideals, never jettisoned an attachment to the Peculiar Institution that was a hideous injustice and, in the fullness of time, nearly \u00addestroyed the country. But that isn\u2019t what we honor him for.<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson isn\u2019t memorialized on the Mall in Washington, DC, and elsewhere around the country because of the racist things he wrote in \u201cNotes on the State of Virginia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jefferson doesn\u2019t have a place of honor in American history because of his \u2014 now widely accepted by historians \u2014 sexual relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, who was the half-sister of his wife. He isn\u2019t held up as among our most exalted Founders because of his fear of slave revolts and his ever-closer association with the slave South as he grew older.<\/p>\n

No, Jefferson is on a pedestal for achievements that still define the country today \u2014 for the better.<\/p>\n

He wrote the ringing lines in the preamble of the Declaration that eventually took on world-historical importance and were used as a rhetorical and philosophical cudgel against the slave system and white supremacy by the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.<\/p>\n

He was a theorist, champion and able practitioner of what we know as Jeffersonian democracy, \u201cgovernment of the people, by the people, for the people,\u201d as Lincoln \u00adfamously put it at Gettysburg.<\/p>\n

He wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that became a model for the First Amendment and worked to abolish feudal relics such as entail and primogeniture.<\/p>\n

As president, he doubled the size of the country in a stroke with the Louisiana Purchase.<\/p>\n

He was a man of the Enlightenment, with incredibly wide-ranging interests from architecture to natural history and, in addition to serving as president, secretary of state and governor, founded the University of Virginia.<\/p>\n

All of this speaks to his greatness \u2014 but none of it is to deny his miserable human failures and his woeful hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

Hypocrisy, though, cuts both ways. Would we have preferred that all of America\u2019s 18th-century slave-owners were intellectually consistent and hewed solely to the doctrine of white supremacy? Or do we demand that all our heroes be spotless, uncomplicated and without sin? There are such people, but most of them have not been notable statesmen.<\/p>\n

That Jefferson was deeply compromised by the slave system and yet rose above his own sectional and selfish interests to enunciate timeless principles should be considered an accomplishment, not a reason to relegate him to the ash heap. He \u00adalways maintained that slavery was unjust and early in his career tried to abolish slavery in Virginia and prohibit the introduction of slavery in new Western lands.<\/p>\n

He could have been John C. Calhoun, the South Carolinian who poured himself into discrediting Jefferson\u2019s defense of natural rights and justifying the South\u2019s coming secession. Instead, he was a much more complex, praiseworthy and consequential figure \u2014 tragic and flawed, to be sure, but unquestionably an adornment to his country.<\/p>\n

The woke philistines who are targeting him are incapable of thought or discernment and want to jettison much of the country\u2019s heritage. A historian once said, \u201cIf Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong.\u201d Those who want to grind his memory to dust clearly accept both parts of that formulation \u2014 and indict not just Jefferson, but the America he helped define.<\/p>\n

Twitter<\/a>: @RichLowry <\/em>\n <\/div>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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“#They\u2019re aiming at Jefferson, but the real target is America” They\u2019re coming for Thomas Jefferson. This was always obvious, but now it\u2019s even more plain. Protesters in Portland used axes and ropes to topple a statue of Jefferson. The New York City Council is agitating to remove a statue of the author of the Declaration…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26096,26095],"class_list":["post-13241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-but-the-real-target-is-america","tag-theyre-aiming-at-jefferson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}