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Question: Do you think he pined for the establishment of and recognition of an American aristocracy? I took from the reading less that Jefferson was desirous
by salawat 3y ago
Question:
Do you think he pined for the establishment of and recognition of an American aristocracy?
I took from the reading less that Jefferson was desirous of it, and more that he recognized the inevitability of something indistinguishable from it arising, and wishing to somehow thumb the institutional scales as it were to amplify the "aristocrat by virtue" rather than merely the "aristocrat that came into it by heritance". He was very concerned with the tendency of heritable wealth to snowball, but, also to result in increasingly incompetent wielders thereof.
Remember, this is the same guy who wanted a new Constitutional Convention every 19 years when the next generation came of age, and mandatory sunsets on all acts of government. To be clear, if you were an aristocrat in charge of things/in a position of power in Jefferson's imagined world, you were not in for a fun time. Wielding that power would be a hell of a lot of retread ground over and over and over and over. In fact, the only way to exercise power in that circumstance, would have been knowing how to use it effectively. There'd simply be no room for maintaining your personal capricious self-edifying precipises of power, because of the sheer effort of keeping them in place against the march of time, and the agreeableness of those you're sharing the world with, and who ultimately bear the burden of doing the work.
The system we have now, (First pass the post, and once it's in it's in forever) is quite the opposite.