It's called Feudal Modernity

I just read an article by a Ms Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review entitled "Our New Jeffersonian Era".

It was an attempt to explain the success of the Republicans in the last election. To me it clearly illustrated the dumbing-down of American history by the conservative press in their attempts to define modern America.

She quotes a Dr Lara Brown, I think, as her prose is unclear, whose focus is on the fact that Jefferson's clothes were slightly worn-ignoring the fact that this was a deliberate move by Jefferson. He came from Virginia, a rural slave-owning state, and took great pains to position himself, scion of a planter's family, as the champion of the yeoman farmer distrusting cities and financiers.

She goes on to say that this anti-elitist pose by Jefferson is the source of fast food, plaid shirts, cowboy boots and jeans. That is one way to describe a cultural wasteland. Actually sounds suspiciously like GW?

Ms Zito goes on to explain how the Tea Party is a return to a Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian nation. Who is she kidding? Jefferson's agrarian ideal included plantations with hundreds of slaves and the forced removal and extermination of Native Americans.

But that is not my theme today. No, I want to focus on the manipulation of the populist dream of an agrarian utopia that never existed, except for the elite few. There is an air of the Luddites in her message. Granted, she has exchanged a Washington-centric government for a revolt against the advent of industrialism, but the two are intimately connected.

The rise of National Socialism was also carried on a wave of nostalgia for an agrarian past equally mired in a feudalistic society. The reality was an incestuous relationship with big business/industrialists, although there was a place for the little man to live out his agrarian fantasy as a soldier-farmer on the edges of the empire.

Sound familiar?

What I find most striking is Ms Zito's closing quote of the inscription on Jefferson's statue in Washington.* It is the most rational statement one could wish for, proclaiming an understanding of progress, enlightenment and cultural evolution. I would have thought it anathema to the Tea Party and its supporters. But then again it might be too long a quote.



*"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times."