Comment: Transplantationist history

From What other organization would you choose?, by "Skex":

(edited for readability)

We are the true patriots[.] [W]e are the ideological decendents of those they revier[sic][.] [I]f Thomas Jefferson were alive today he'd be a Democrat.

They were intellectuals[.] Jefferson would [have] thought of Das Kapital as required reading. Thomas Payne[sic] would have cheered Castro and his defeat of the oligarchs in Cuba. Washington would have condemned our invasion of Iraq as exactly the sort of adventurism against which he warned in his farewell address.

I think we always tread on dangerous ground when we try to intuit what people long dead would say, do or believe when taken out of the context of their own time and thrown into the modern world. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, that's the precise kind of thing that the Nazis did with Beethoven.

Would Jefferson have thought that Das Kapital would be "required reading"? On May 30, 1790, in a letter to Thomas Mann Randolph recommending books for the study of law, Jefferson wrote: "...in political economy I think Smith’s wealth of nations the best book extant..." (Of course I must make a disclaimer, because 'Wealth of Nations' tends to be one of those books, like the Bible, that ideologues constantly refer to and revere despite never reading it. It's worth noting that Smith did not espouse what we know of today as economic libertarianism. In the book he argued, for example, for what we would now call progressive taxation, as well as government intervention to redress the dehumanising effect of the division of labour on workers.) Would he have read it, were it made available to him? I have no doubt that the man who donated 6,487 books to the then-new Library of Congress would have quite likely voraciously read it as he apparently did with any book he could get his hands on. To say he would have made it "required reading", however, is a bit credulous.

How can we say for certain that Jefferson would have been a Democrat if he were around today? He died in 1809. But we can say that, despite co-founding the Democratic-Republican party, he did so chiefly because he opposed the Federalists. In his writings, he recognised the necessity of political parties, but also once wrote that

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."

Thomas Paine (not Payne) may very well have cheered Castro's revolution... if it had taken place in the 18th century. He was an ardent supporter of revolution; emigrating to America to support ours, then moving to Britain then France where he was greatly influential in the French Revolution. For his role in the latter he was elected to the French National Convention — despite not knowing a lick of French — then subsequently imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. His pleas for release were met on deaf ears, as the American ambassador to France at the time, Gouverneur Morris, did not press the issue with officials back home who denied Paine's claim to be an American citizen. Paine had become anathema to officials in the fledgling republic, where his radical politics and views on religion had become noxious to members of the Federalist Party. He nevertheless condemned Napoleon for doing what George Washington did not; declaring himself emperor after a successful revolution. But he also blamed Washington himself for his imprisonment in France, and years later wrote an open letter to him which concluded by saying that "the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any." So while he may indeed have cheered Castro's revolution, it seems doubtful that he would have remained a fan of Fidel.

As for George Washington himself, he was indeed a non-interventionist, but so was much of America during the time he lived. A lot has changed in the 212 years since his death, and non-interventionism is no longer the majority consensus in this country. I am tempted to say that, being an intelligent man, he would likely have not have accepted the claims of the Bush administration in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and thus opposed it; but we can't say for certain what Washington would think about that issue, the modern world or about the drama that's been America since he died. That drama has changed the American character as a whole in ways we still do not fully grasp, so to think that he or any of the people who were integral to the formation of the United States would have necessarily thought one way or the other had they lived in our time instead of theirs is folly.