10/09/07 – Jeff Taylor – The Scott Horton Show

Jeffersonians living in a Hamiltonian world.
That's what James Ostrovsky said about Paul in tears, those Ron Paul revolutionaries on the show yesterday.
And that sounds about right to me.
And it seems to also be the diagnosis of our current predicament by our guest today, Jeff Taylor.
He teaches political science at Western Illinois University and is author of the book Where Did the Party Go?
William Jennings, Brian Hubert Humphrey and the Jeffersonian Legacy.
He's written for Green Horizon Quarterly, Chronicles, Counterpunch and LewRockwell.com.
And welcome to the show, Jeff.
Thank you, Scott.
I'm happy to be with you.
Well, I'm really glad to have you on here.
And I got an email from Doug Fuda.
I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
I'm sorry.
At the anti-war league who said, hey, you really ought to check out this guy, Jeff Taylor.
And I'm really glad I did.
He got a great bunch of articles here.
I'm particularly interested in starting the interview today with, I guess, asking you if you can explain to the listeners sort of kind of 101 on Jefferson versus Hamilton and this fight that sort of lasted throughout our history, the fight that Jeffersonians like yourself and my guest from yesterday, Jim Ostrowski, have apparently been losing this whole time.
Sure, I'd be happy to, Scott.
Well, it goes back to really the founding of the republic, back to the 1780s.
And you had two brilliant, ambitious men.
You had Alexander Hamilton, who was kind of the son that George Washington never had.
He was his aide de camp during the Revolutionary War and was one of the organizers of the Constitutional Convention that decided that we needed a stronger central government and became an author of the Federalist Papers, successfully convincing at least the people who had a chance to vote that we needed to ratify the Constitution.
And he went on to become the first Secretary of the Treasury in the Washington administration.
And then his rival in terms of philosophy and ideology would have been Thomas Jefferson, who instead of the New York-centered Hamilton, Jefferson was further south out of Virginia and he was, of course, the author of the Declaration of Independence and also served in the Washington administration as Secretary of State.
And both men were friends of George Washington, but they had diametrically opposed views on just about everything.
In the case of Jefferson, what I do in my book, it's really an analysis of not so much the evolution of the Democratic Party as the degeneration of the Democratic Party.
I start with Thomas Jefferson as the primary founder of the Democrats and I say, well, what did he stand for?
And in terms of his ideology, he was much more of a believer in democracy rather than aristocracy, so rule by the many rather than rule by the few.
He understood that we lived in a Republican system so it wasn't a direct democracy sort of thing that we had under Athens, but it was trying to make popular sovereignty as real as possible, whereas Hamilton was very much an elitist, or in his day they would have called him a devotee of aristocracy or even monarchy.
Jefferson also was an advocate of decentralization, so he wanted to spread both political and economic power out as widely as possible.
And states' rights, which over the years kind of acquired a negative connotation at least among liberals as kind of code word for racism or segregation, in Jefferson's mind, that wasn't what it was all about.
It was intended as a way of keeping government accountable and as close to the local level as possible, so it was linked to his belief in democracy.
Now, in terms of, I don't want to get too far off on a tangent, but if I can parse Jefferson a little bit here, here's the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence that says everybody owns himself as an individual and at the same time is this big promoter of democracy which I guess I consider myself a Jeffersonian in a lot of ways and yet I completely distrust democracy and I don't really believe in popular sovereignty at all.
What right do you have to pick my ruler, you know?
Whether here or whether in D.C.
Well, in Jefferson's case, there's two ideological camps in American politics that look to Jefferson as a father.
You've got populism which is the belief in democracy above probably all other values and you've got libertarianism which is upholding freedom, individual rights and they actually both can trace themselves in many ways back to Jefferson and not just him as an individual but he certainly had friends and allies who believed the same sorts of things.
I think he probably trusted that if the majority really had the power that they would choose liberty.
Yes, yes, and I do think certainly sometimes democracy and freedom can clash with one another but I think more often than not they actually have proven to be allies over the years.
I think democracy has gotten a bad name partly because you have demagogues who exploit that and it's kind of seen as a way to excuse or to justify whatever it is that they want to do themselves usually from motives that have nothing to do with majority rule.
So your point is well taken and certainly Jefferson was a big believer in individualism and civil liberties not just mindlessly following the masses but at the same time he believed if you have to choose somebody to rule in society which is really kind of the foundation of government well who do you choose?
If there's going to be some government do you have rule by the few or do you have rule by the many?
To him it was preferable to have it rule by the many because at least you disperse power as widely as possible and you don't let one man or a handful of men wield their power over everyone else.
Whereas Hamilton was an avowed fascist.
Pretty much especially if you're defining fascism as a kind of state capitalism or partnership between kind of private economic privilege and political privilege.
Well that's what Mussolini called it.
Well yes and I think we believe really the founder of fascism so I think we have to take him in his word and yeah I would say Hamilton was a fascist in that sense.
Hey can I tell you a funny story?
When I first got the internet in 1997 I was surfing around and I found this page called miscellaneous Jefferson and it was not even formatted there was no punctuation or paragraphs it was just tons of Jefferson all on this one page in this one long column and I don't even think it had any capital letters and I was just scanning through all this stuff and one of the things I found was a letter from Jefferson to James Madison talking about a confrontation that he had on the capital steps I guess in Philadelphia with Alexander Hamilton and it's Jefferson explaining to Madison I tried to talk him out of promoting the central bank I explained how bad the inflation would be and how it would be you know bad for liberty and I also explained to him that it was unconstitutional it would set the precedent that Congress can do things that aren't in the Constitution it was such a bad idea but you know Madison I think that Hamilton is just hopeless he's been to England and somehow he got the idea in his head while he was over there that the permanent moneyed interests here in the private interest must have their destinies intertwined with those of the state and I don't think we'll ever be able to talk him out of it.
That's right that's right well Jefferson was a believer in the laissez-faire idea of Smith whereas Hamilton right he wanted to unite private economic privilege with political privilege and which is just kind of a lethal combination you know in the case of Jefferson all of these different ideas that he stood for you know I mentioned democracy, decentralization of course you're bringing up the idea of strict construction you know literal interpretation of the Constitution he was he believed that the legislative branch should be preeminent over the executive branch he was suspicious of the judiciary because it was in his view it was an unelected oligarchy that was the least democratic branch of government and the most dangerous as a result of that no accountability at all to the people he was a supporter of civil liberties in terms of spending and taxing he wanted a small central government that lived within its means didn't have burdensome taxation on the people and then when it came to foreign policy although he wasn't a pure pacifist he was much more peace minded than most of his contemporaries he at different times after he left the White House he referred to the Quaker policy of peace kind of bemoaning the fact sometimes with John Adams that that concept just had no popularity among the leadership in Washington and in terms of foreign policy you know sometimes he's referred to as an isolationist although that's kind of a slur that FDR came up with in the 1930s to attack those who didn't want to go to war but essentially what he wanted was a was a foreign policy of neutrality and kind of minding our own business and his famous quote from his first inaugural address he said that we should have peace commerce and honest friendship with all nations entangling alliances with none now in each of these particulars Hamilton took the opposite position he looks forward to an empire at times he talked about maybe conquering Mexico and South America he cast a cautious gaze all over the world thinking that the US should emulate the British Empire and wanted a standing army and he was a military man himself and had these visions of glory for himself and for his nation and you know unfortunately the Hamiltonian vision has won out and my book and a lot of my writing focuses on the fact that if we're going to have a two party system it would be nice to have contrasting options in terms of policy but unfortunately what you get the Democratic Party founded by Jefferson has embraced Hamiltonianism as well and we haven't had a Jeffersonian nominee by the Democrats in the past hundred years so that's kind of where we're at it's sort of a sad fact but I think it's good to be realistic about the situation as we figure out what's the best move that we should try as we move forward.
Yeah well agreed the problem is we have this split between this kind of vague definition of liberalism and this vague definition of conservatism much of which is simply cultural you know you like country or you like rock and roll kind of thing and both have half of the Jeffersonian legacy and both abandon half of the Jeffersonian legacy and I absolutely agree with you I think we ought to whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats I'm not sure which and I don't really care at this point but one of them needs to be the party of taxes, tyranny and death and then the other party be the party of liberty and in that way we can just choose pure and simple I mean here we have the most Jeffersonian candidate in generations running for president and he's a Republican he could never be confused for a liberal Democrat at all he's a Republican Ron Paul.
That's right well you're right both parties have elements of Jefferson's program but neither party is faithful to really any of the elements so they pay lip service the liberal Democrats will pay lip service to civil liberties for example but when push comes to shove they're willing to sacrifice them you know in fact the Patriot Act for all of the howling that people on the left have done about the Patriot Act and deservedly so it's an awful piece of legislation Bill Clinton set the stage in the 1990s with his terrorism act and the Democrats went along with that so it's like they don't live up to their end of the bargain and in terms of the Republicans the same thing supposedly they believe in economical government and strict construction and states rights and all you have to do is look at the Bush administration he's basically a Hubert Humphrey Republican sitting in the White House right now he's betrayed conservative principles and you know in every area so you're right we've got Ron Paul running who is really a pure Jeffersonian a great candidate and there is sort of a remnant within the Republican Party even though that party in terms of its dissent historically really has its roots with the Federalist Party of Hamilton even from the very beginning there was always kind of a minority of Jeffersonians within the party and we saw that through history with Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and to some extent at least rhetorically with Ronald Reagan and now we see it again with Ron Paul Well we had a lot of southern Democrats who basically all at once within a few years all switched to the Republican Party That's right and that certainly infused the party with some of that Jeffersonian sentiment as the fortunes of George Wallace and some other conservative Democrats waned in the 1960s and 70s right there was kind of a mass migration of what eventually became known as Reagan Democrats in the south and also you know blue collar Democrats in the north which you know sad to say the Republican Party has sold them out in many ways with kind of wider trade agreements and so on that kind of gutted our manufacturing base And now with the shift in the parties that's taken place is well it's a shift in ideology I think the old right considered themselves liberals but also considered themselves the victims of a theft basically that socialists came along and wouldn't call themselves socialists and refused to allow themselves to be identified as socialists by anyone else and so they stole the name liberal from liberals In Europe right now socialists are called socialists and liberals are called liberals Right that's right you know part of the confusion is that politicians and those that follow these kind of elite politicians they put labels on like they put a code on and off it doesn't really matter to them what they use as long as it's politically advantageous at the moment So right the word liberalism was kind of co-opted at a time when it was popular Now later on in the 1970s and 80s as liberalism became less popular let's take the example of the Republican Party it was kind of a toxic label by the 80s and the Republican Party nobody wanted to refer themselves as a liberal anymore because it didn't have the same ring that it used to it was associated with too many negative qualities so the old Rockefeller liberals in the party they decided well now we're going to call ourselves Reagan Republicans They became conservatives and eventually formed this alliance with the neo-conservatives who were ex-Democrats basically liberal Hubert Humphrey Democrats and you've got this kind of unholy alliance now running the Republican Party of a mixture of Humphrey Democrats and ex-Trotskyites and Rockefeller Republicans Well now this is very oversimplifying the way you said is I'm sure much more accurate but there's also this this group of kind of West Coast Barry Goldwater at least they thought Goldwater conservative types who I guess you know when you look at some of the faction fights and stuff it really seems like in terms of power and policy like a lot of times it's the West Coast conservatives and the neo-cons who've joined up against the Rockefellers you think that the Rockefellers really have just changed their name and that they are the same old Rockefeller liberal establishment is the modern conservative movement?
I wouldn't go that far there is there is a conservative movement still that is distinct from that but they are increasingly marginalized so you'll have people some of which are kind of centered in DC in the suburbs there people like Richard Vigory and Paul Weyrich and the people kind of going back to the new right of the 1970s Phyllis Schlafly Bob Barr Bob Barr yeah now they're certainly still distinct from that whole neo-con Rockefeller coalition but they just don't have much power anymore and a lot of the mainstream sources of conservatism like human events and national review they have tended to go along with the predominant view or they've objected pretty meekly because George W. Bush has embraced that and he at least until his popularity started taking a nosedive he defined conservatism for most Republicans and you know sad to say it just doesn't have anything to do historically with real conservatism so yeah there was that West Coast and libertarian opposition it's still there but it just hasn't been very strong and unfortunately even a lot of the mainstream conservatives who do have the scars of battling with the Rockefeller liberals in the 50s, 60s and 70s unfortunately a lot of them have signed off on the war in Iraq and that has kind of blinded them and it's protected Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and that whole crowd from criticism by genuine conservatives and that's why a lot of them detest Ron Paul I think maybe deep down they know he's right but they've made too much of a commitment and his anti-war stance just rubs them the wrong way.
Where do you put Houston in this pile of conservative infighting?
I'm sorry who did you ask about?
Houston, Texas.
James Baker.
Okay, James Baker.
You're talking about Secretary of State Baker?
Right, the lawyer for every oil company in the world.
Baker is a Rockefeller Republican is what he is.
He was the campaign manager for Gerald Ford in 1976 when Ronald Reagan challenged Ford from the right and if you remember back then Nelson Rockefeller actually was the vice president that Ford chose to complete his team and Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State so Ford was not just in the 70s but from the start of his career thoroughly an establishment Rockefeller type of liberal Republican and James Baker he brought him on board out of Houston to run his campaign and then four years later he ran George Bush Sr.'s campaign when he ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980 for the nomination.
Now a lot of conservatives felt betrayed when Reagan was elected president and then who did he choose as his chief of staff for the White House?
Well, he picked Baker who really had no roots in the conservative movement so he is a Rockefeller Republican and there are a number of Rockefeller Republicans who have been somewhat skeptical of the neo-con vision of conquering the world in the name of democracy so people like Brent Scowcroft and Baker there has been some criticism but even a lot of that has been kind of criticism of convenience.
They waited until the war became increasingly unpopular.
Right, well see on the other hand and I wish I had magic powers and I could be a friend on the wall because I really don't know these things and I am just lucky that I have someone who likes talking about the same stuff.
James Baker went on This Week with George Stephanopoulos and said, Why are we not talking to Iran?
Waving his arms in the air and saying, This is crazy.
We've got to talk to Iran.
Right.
Skidner Brzezinski who I would identify and I don't know how close they are anymore but who at least came to prominence with the help of David Rockefeller, Nelson's younger brother says to the United States Senate under oath on C-SPAN, Don't let them bomb Iran.
We're going to end up owning everything between Jordan and India and it's going to be an absolute disaster and it's going to destroy the empire we worked so hard to build forever and in fact one more along those lines is James Baker's guy, Edward DeJarian.
Well for that matter the whole foreign policy crew over there at the Washington note, Steve Clemons and all those guys, they seem to be as opposed to Frederick Kagan and the surge as I am.
Yes, well I agree and I don't want to be flippant by saying even a broken clock is right two times a day but that is a little bit of my view there because the people you're talking about, Brzezinski, Baker, Scowcroft would fit into that category too.
They'd be considered foreign policy realists and they're kind of whether they're Rockefeller or Republicans or Rockefeller Democrats like Brzezinski, they have kind of a realist foreign policy which in the 1970s tended to be associated with Henry Kissinger.
He was kind of the personification of that.
Another Rockefeller guy.
Yeah, he was Nelson's top foreign policy advisor in fact before Nixon took him on.
That is coming from certainly it's a different perspective than the neo-conservative sort of utopian Wilsonian which is supposedly based on some kind of moralistic view.
To me it's kind of a phony moralism but at least they pay lip service to that idea instead of just naked national interest which is what the realists are focusing on.
So I'll give the realists credit.
They are being more realistic about this.
They are less messianic and really insane in their approach to world management but they do have the same goal.
I mean that's my problem with them that they can be strategic allies in particular fights but they really do have the same goal as the neo-conservatives.
They want to control the world which I don't.
So they feel that there are better, more successful ways that you can accomplish that using tactful diplomacy, multilateral alliances, more of a reliance on the United Nations.
They have kind of the same end but they choose means that are different and give Baker credit for saying that.
I mean it's certainly true.
Elite opinion in Washington, they don't want to listen to people like Ron Paul.
They don't take him seriously but they may listen to somebody like Baker or Brzezinski.
So it's something.
We shouldn't look a gift to us in the mouth.
I think probably you and I are sitting here in this conversation looking through a magnifying glass whereas in the larger view what we are talking about is actually a very narrow difference of opinion.
There are no Ron Paulians at the table saying Mr. Liberal Internationalist, Mr. Realist, Mr. Neo-con, you are all wrong.
That's right.
You are exactly right.
It's a difference of maybe a few degrees if you pull back and look at the bigger picture.
Which brings us to Barack Obama.
Yes.
You wrote an article for Counterpunch.org that just skewered this guy and he deserved it.
Tell us about Barack Obama and where he stands on the war issue, Jeff Taylor.
Well, you know Barack Obama, his campaign has been bragging about how courageous he was to oppose the war before it started.
I get my news sometimes from Reuters and Yahoo and I think some mainstream reporter took a look at that and said there was nothing courageous about it.
Yeah, he was opposed to it but he was a state legislator at the time and he represented a district that was overwhelmingly anti-war at the time.
So it's not like he took any political risk coming out against the war in 2002 and 2003.
And even the American people as a whole at that time were not enthusiastic about invading Iraq.
They didn't see it as a genuine threat.
It took months of propaganda to convince people that that was the right thing to do.
So first of all, I'm skeptical of his opposition in the beginning, of how principled it was.
And then secondly, he moved forward a year or two and you see in 2004 when he was questioned about Kerry and Edwards who both supported the war, his quote was Obama told NPR, I don't consider that to have been an easy decision for Kerry and Edwards voting for the war.
And he said certainly I wasn't in the position to actually cast a vote on it and I think that there was room for disagreement in that initial decision.
So that's not exactly a clear statement of the beast position or the neutrality position.
Well not as accurate as that.
There was room for reasonable people to disagree.
Give me a break.
Ron Paul was all over C-SPAN where no one could see him in 2002.
He was on Bill Moyer's show in 2002 and said this is ridiculous.
They're not a threat to us.
They haven't been able to shoot down a single one of our planes over their country in 12 years.
They have no navy.
They have no real ties to Al-Qaeda.
Look at all my footnotes.
And this was in the fall of 2002 before Congress voted on it even.
I read a quote in the newspaper where the reporter said, well Dr. Paul, do you go to the White House briefings in the secret classified information room on Capitol Hill?
And he said, no, no, I don't want to be confused about propaganda.
Well exactly.
And anybody with half a brain knew the score in 2002 and early 2003.
They could see through the scare tactics of the weapons of mass destruction and all of that.
They understood that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant.
He was a dictator.
But to a large extent he was our dictator until he decided to cross us at a certain point.
And he was no threat whatsoever to the United States.
And I really think the Democrats who went along with it, you have to say that they were either so stupid that there's no way they belong in the White House because of a lack of judgment and intelligence.
Or you have to say that they were being dishonest, that they knew the whole thing was a crock and they went along with it.
And I tend to believe the latter.
But Obama, out on the campaign trail, once the war became unpopular, especially among Democrats, he realized he had an opening there where he could hammer Clinton and Biden and Edwards and Dodd on that vote that they cast in supporting Bush's war.
And he sounds like Cindy Sheehan today when he's out there on the trail.
To see what Obama is really thinking, what I did in my article, I took a look at a couple of speeches he's given in the past year to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
It's kind of the local equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations that JP Morgan and company cooked up after World War I and David Rockefeller was the head of that for a couple of decades.
And the Council on Global Affairs, in November 2006, Obama said, ìThere is one other place where our mistakes in Iraq have cost us dearly, and that is the loss of our government's credibility with the American people.
According to a Pew survey, 42% of Americans now agree with the statement that the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.
î Isn't that awful?
It's scary.
Obama says, ìWe cannot afford to be a country of isolationists right now.
9-11 showed us that, try as we might to ignore the rest of the world, our enemies will no longer ignore us.
î Oh, he didn't say that.
He did say that.
He said, ìSo we need to maintain a strong foreign policy, relentless in pursuing our enemies and hopeful in promoting our values around the world.
î America, the sleeping giant attacked on 9-11, huh?
Exactly.
We were attacked because we were ignoring the rest of the world.
The lesson of the Russian war in Afghanistan is that when the Russians left, we should have occupied that place and helped those people, and we abandoned them.
Well, I suppose that's the ignoring.
It's just kind of incredible, basically blaming 9-11 on the fact that provoking the terrorism with isolationism is what provoked them.
Obviously, it was the opposite.
It was interventionism.
It was meddling throughout the world that provoked the terrorists.
It doesn't justify the terrorists, but it helps to explain.
There is a rational reason.
They're not just crazy.
That's one of his statements.
In April of this year, he told the council, ìI reject the notion that the American moment has passed.
I dismiss the cynics who say that this new century cannot be another, when in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.
I still believe that America is the last best hope of Earth.
We just have to show the world why this is so.
The President may occupy the White House, but for the past six years, the position of leader of the free world has remained open, and it's time to fill that role once more.
So basically, here's the neo-conservative messianic rhetoric popping up in Obama's mouth, where we need this Pax Americana.
We're going to continue to be the leader of the world if Obama gets in there, because he knows how to do it.
He's going to be smoother than Bush.
He's not going to have this kind of cowboy clumsiness that Bush has.
I just don't think that's the answer.
Obama is no alternative to Hillary Clinton, and I don't think John Edwards is either.
All three of the frontrunners of the Democrats embrace the same idea of a global American empire.
They just think that it needs to be done in alliance with Europe and the United Nations, and our style needs to be a smoother style than we've seen from Bush, and that's going to yield better results.
To me, it's still the wrong track.
Specifically, in the last Democratic debate, they were asked, will you promise that American combat forces will be out of Iraq by the end of your first term in 2013, and Hillary, Obama, and John Edwards refused.
These are politicians.
These people are liars.
What would be so hard about just lying?
That is interesting.
Why didn't they lie?
Because overwhelmingly Democrats, grassroots Democrats, want us out now.
They don't want us out a year from now.
They want us out now.
They couldn't even promise at the end of their term that we would be out.
It was incredible, first of all, that the question even got through and was actually uttered out loud.
That's incredible, and the fact that they told the truth.
Other than just maybe their establishment patrons, they knew that they were looking over their shoulders, and it was too risky to make that commitment.
It's the primaries now, but it will be the general election in just a few months.
They've got to run to that center at some point.
You're right.
You're right.
I think, unfortunately, as is usually the case, last time we really seen a clear difference was probably in 1964 when Goldwater was in the race.
Unfortunately, both parties are kind of set up to nominate Hamiltonian establishment candidates, both of the Republicans and Democrats.
I'm hoping that Ron Paul will continue to prosper and that he'll surprise the critics and lightning will strike, but the odds are against him.
Let me ask you this.
This whole Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian thing came up yesterday with James Ostrowski, and I think he was actually paraphrasing George Will as saying, The American people have always been Jeffersonians and yet have always voted for and tolerated Hamiltonians.
That's the way we've always been.
It doesn't seem like it's going to change.
It reminds me, I don't know if you've ever seen that episode of South Park, where Cartman goes back in time to the debate over the Bill of Rights, and they're deciding whether they ought to allow free speech or not.
They ended up deciding they'd allow free speech.
That way, they could wage war against anyone they wanted, and half the population could still be against it, so the whole world wouldn't hate the whole country.
They would only hate the people who were at war.
And then we could get away with continuing to wage war forever.
We'd be at war always, and we'd have some protesters in the street always, and it'd be a great balance.
And it sort of seems like as long as you and I keep promoting this Jeffersonian myth, what we're really doing is aiding and abetting the Hamiltonian imperialists that run this country.
Now, when you say promoting the myth, how do you mean that?
Well, that it's even attainable, that somehow we can, somehow America will be some Jeffersonian constitutional republic that never has been.
Well, right.
I think you've got to be realistic about it.
I mean, I'm a Jeffersonian.
I believe in it.
Every now and then, someone will actually win an election based on Jeffersonian principles, and the person will carry through and actually vote as he promised.
But that's the exception.
It's not the rule.
And I think we do have to be realistic about it.
What are the odds that either major party is going to be captured by Jeffersonians?
Very unlikely.
Even in the case of Goldwater, he got the nomination in 1964, but he couldn't control the national machinery of the party.
And as soon as he lost the election, it fell back into the hands of the Rockefeller republicans and the pragmatic Nixon republicans.
So it's very unlikely to happen, but at the same time, if you're going to be involved in politics at all, I think, well, it doesn't hurt to kind of be aware of the lay of the land, and it doesn't hurt to vote and work for your candidate, as long as you keep an element of realism about it.
Otherwise, partly you can just become so disappointed that you completely drop out.
And I guess we should admit, too, that politics, electoral politics, isn't necessarily the best way to change the world either.
It's one avenue.
But considering how stacked the deck is, perhaps it's not the best way to go about it.
I really think that the best way to go about it is by saying the word Jefferson and Jeffersonian over and over again on the radio, because as imperfect as the guy was, after all, he raped people that he owned.
Yeah, sort of the worst evil imaginable in that sense.
But if you read what the guy wrote and you spend any time actually really studying what Jefferson believed, not necessarily what he practiced, boy, there are some really great slogans for liberty in there and some well-reasoned arguments, too.
That's where I learned my libertarianism was not from Mises or Rothbard, but from Thomas Jefferson.
Exactly, and he's kind of unimpeachable when it comes to, at least for most Americans, he's kind of unimpeachable as far as you can't be accused of being un-American or unpatriotic if you're following someone like Jefferson.
And it's true, he wasn't perfect as a man.
He made compromises as a politician.
And even the whole idea of Jeffersonian, he didn't invent these ideas.
They were out there.
You could refer to Sam Adams or Tom Paine or Patrick Henry, John Taylor.
There were many of his contemporaries who had the same kinds of ideas, but they were just less famous, less influential in history.
So Jeffersonianism is kind of a shorthand for that whole idea.
Scott, would you mind if I give you my website address if listeners are interested in learning more?
Of course not.
In fact, I noticed in my notes right after I introduced you that I forgot to say the name of your website, but I was going to try to work it in at the end here.
Okay.
Basically, my website, I don't have a blog where I'm commenting daily on the news.
It's just sort of a clearinghouse website for my book, Where Did the Party Go?and also kind of links to different articles and things that I've written on the web.
But it's Popcorn78, so P-O-P-C-O-R-N-7-8 dot blogspot dot com.
And it's a very interesting site, too.
I read all kinds of great quotes.
I think a quote from somebody in 1933 calling Hamilton a fascist, the original fascist.
Yes.
I picked up on that.
That was Amos Pinchot.
Amos Pinchot was a Pennsylvania political activist.
He was a lawyer and he and his brother, Gifford, were actually friends with Theodore Roosevelt until they had a falling out in 1912.
They were founders of the Bull Moose Party and Theodore Roosevelt wanted a very establishment party that was bankrolled by Wall Street and essentially acted as kind of a vehicle for this cult of personality that had risen up around TR.
So he kind of excommunicated Amos Pinchot from the movement and said that he was something equivalent of a political lunatic.
Essentially, he just sang you a crackpot and that's usually a good sign.
If the mainstream sources are referring to you as crazy, you may have something.
Yes, chances are.
That was the year 1912, the year that whole Bull Moose contraption that made sure that Taft would lose and Wilson would be president the next year.
Exactly.
Exactly.
In the back of my head, I have dark bells tolling and stuff.
I wish I was quick with the bumper music here.
Hey, listen, I've got to thank you very much for your time and let you go.
It's Jeff Taylor.
He teaches political science at Western Illinois University.
He's the author of Where Did the Party Go?
William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy.
You can find what he writes at Chronicles, Counterpunch, LewRockwell.com, and his blog, again, Popcorn78.blogspot.com.
Thanks again, Jeff.
I appreciate it, Scott.
Take care.