The best move the Republican Party could make right now would be to kidnap — so to speak — Thomas Jefferson.
The Democrats are fixing to excommunicate our third president, because he owned slaves. It’s not my intention to put the gloss on the slaveholding of any of the revolutionary American leaders, including George Washington.
But the Democrats’ sudden desire to distance their party from its patron saint is an opportunity for a GOP that needs a big tent.
Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina — someone in the GOP could give a major speech offering Jefferson a home in the party. Why not at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded?
This drama has erupted in the wake of the decision of South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag that had been flying in front of its capitol. That was after a racist killed nine African-American Christians at a prayer service in Charleston.
South Carolina was smart to take down the confederate flag. Although there are said to be those who fly it to remember the best of the South, it will always seem to northern Republicans as an emblem of treason.
No sooner was the flag of Dixie taken down, though, than calls started erupting for the Democratic Party to renounce Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence has become an embarrassment to the Democrats.
Despite his flaws, there was a revolutionary, heroic and patriotic side to Jefferson — as we all know. But his virtues also comprised principles that fit right in with the modern GOP.
This turns out to be a hot topic in New Hampshire, where the presidential primaries kick off. The state’s Democratic Party has actually assigned the question of Jefferson to a committee, the Manchester Union-Leader reports in an editorial.
“This is an important conversation to have,” the Union-Leader quotes the titular head of the state’s Democrats, Gov. Maggie Hassan, as saying this week. The newspaper reckons the governor is just waiting to see which way the wind is blowing.
The Republicans would be smart to take the wind out of the Democrats’ sails. Jefferson was a founder of what was then called the Democratic Republican Party. It opposed the Federalists of George Washington and John Adams.
Washington and Adams wanted a strong central government (although they would be horrified at how far the modern Democrats have taken it).
Jefferson and his crony at the time, James Madison, also a Virginian, wanted decentralized power.
Jefferson believed in what is sometimes called the classical, European-style liberalism of limited government. As things have evolved, he’d have been right at home in the modern Republican Party — which needs all the help it can get.
Myron Magnet, one of my favorite members of a band of New York historians who focus on the Founders, thinks I’m whistling Dixie. He wrote a book called “The Founders at home,” and knows them intimately.
Magnet is for the least government — and taxes — possible. But, he warns me in an e-mail, “you can’t govern and tax so little that you make your successor damn near lose the War of 1812,” a blunder he lays to Jefferson.
There are only two political principles of Jefferson that Magnet agrees with, he tells me. They are that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
So what is that, chopped liver? The last Democrat to show any ardor for Jefferson was JFK who, Ira Stoll’s book “JFK, Conservative” reminds me, once said that “the Democratic Party, as intellectually inaugurated by Thomas Jefferson, stood firmly opposed to a strong centralized government.”
Which party does that sound like? The modern Democrats don’t even know what to say about Jefferson. A couple of years ago, Chuck Schumer tried to palm him off as the author of the Bill of Rights (that was Madison).
The reason this is so urgent is that the Republicans are trying to define themselves in the face of a Democratic Party that is lurching leftward. The GOP already has Lincoln, but it needs all the unifying figures it can get.
Plus, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whatever else one can say about her, is no dummy. She knows all about Thomas Jefferson. She was married to William Jefferson Clinton. The GOP wouldn’t want her showing up at an inauguration with a Jefferson on each arm.
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