Breaking the iron grip of a privileged elite and restoring a government to its rightful sovereigns requires courage and clarity.
More than two centuries ago, the American Founders proclaimed that ordinary human beings whom God made free and equal had a natural right to govern themselves.
In the nation’s infancy, Thomas Jefferson emerged as the most eloquent exponent and formidable champion of these republican ideals.
On June 24, 1826 — 10 days before he died — Jefferson penned his last surviving letter. Its subject? The impending 50th anniversary of his Declaration of Independence and the meaning of the American Revolution.
That document and that event, Jefferson wrote, signaled that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately.”
Of course, Jefferson and his fellow patriots of 1776 had to fight for liberty and self-government against monarchists and aristocrats.
Today, we confront an entrenched establishment full of globalist-minded elitists who view ordinary Americans and their pretensions to republican self-government with the same contempt as did the royalists of Jefferson’s day.
In 2016, those forgotten and despised Americans rallied around Donald Trump.
On Jan. 20, 2017, Trump delivered an inaugural address that encapsulated the meaning of his victory in the 2016 election.
The incoming president described his inauguration as an act of “transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people.”
“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” he said.
“Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.”
The establishment hated him for it and has not stopped trying to destroy him.
In the midst of it all, Trump demonstrated what looked from the outside like supernatural courage and clarity of purpose. But at times it also looked like he stood alone in his fight to put Americans first.
Then, during the ongoing race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy emerged as a viable candidate.
Are Trump and Ramaswamy carrying on Jefferson’s legacy?
More importantly, Ramaswamy campaigned on a platform designed to “take America First further than Trump.” This meant practical policies, of course, but it also meant defending Trump’s movement by explaining its proper historical context.
In addition to campaigning on America First, Ramaswamy regularly cited Jefferson. That was no accident.
At a CNN town hall in December, for instance, Ramaswamy noted that he, like Jefferson, made his mark on public affairs at a young age.
“Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. It’s going to take the next generation to revive this country,” Ramaswamy wrote in an X post accompanying a clip of that town hall.
Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. It’s going to take the next generation to revive this country. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/wQxB6HN68Y
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 14, 2023
Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, has made the Ramaswamy-Jefferson comparison quite explicitly.
“Vivek is Thomas Jefferson,” Adams said in a video posted to Rumble last week.
WARNING: The following video contains language that viewers might find offensive.
After Trump’s victory in Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Ramaswamy ended his campaign and immediately endorsed the former president.
“I’m going to ask you to follow me in taking our America First movement to the next level. It did not begin in 2016. It began in 1776,” he told his disappointed supporters.
👀 BREAKING – Vivek Ramaswamy Suspends His Presidential Campaign, Puts Full Endorsement Behind President Trump
“I’m going to ask you to follow me in taking our America First movement to the next level. It did not begin in 2016. It began in 1776. And for the next journey of this… pic.twitter.com/2Kw1kqbk3J
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 16, 2024
Then, at a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday, Ramaswamy appeared on stage with Trump and delivered a fiery message.
“We are in the middle of a war in this country,” Ramaswamy said.
That war, he explained, does not pit one party against another. “It’s between the permanent state and the everyday citizen.”
BREAKING: Vivek Ramaswamy is on FIRE as Donald Trump welcomes him to the stage in New Hampshire in his first appearance after endorsing President Trump:
“We need a Commander-in-Chief who will lead us to victory in this war.”
🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/fUeeBSP8Do
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) January 17, 2024
In short, by joining forces with Trump, Ramaswamy has amplified the America First movement’s Jeffersonian tenor.
Like the rest of America’s Pantheon-level Founders, Jefferson has long since entered the realm of myth. On social media, for instance, memes regularly attribute to him things he never actually said.
Nonetheless, when we turn to the real historical Jefferson, we find the worldview of an America First patriot. Notably, that worldview — then and now — combines anti-elitism with hostility to strong government.
In October 1785, while serving as U.S. minister to France, Jefferson reluctantly followed the aristocrats and various sycophants who comprised the court of King Louis XVI as they made their annual trek from Paris to the king’s nearby hunting retreat at Fontainebleau.
While out walking one morning, Jefferson encountered a poor woman from a nearby village. What she told him about the plight of France’s peasants prompted him to reflect and then, later that evening, to share his reflections in a letter to his friend and political ally James Madison.
“The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands,” Jefferson wrote of France, which was then less than four years away from the start of the French Revolution.
“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable,” he admitted. But that admission did not settle the matter.
“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right,” he wrote.
In other words, the few ran roughshod over the many.
At the same time, however, Jefferson did not look to the state as a benevolent actor.
“I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive,” he wrote to Madison in December 1787.
Jefferson put his hopes not in government but in ordinary Americans.
“Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty,” he added.
Jefferson even trusted the common people to chastise their own government. In fact, today some might brand him an “insurrectionist.”
“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive,” he wrote to Abigail Adams, wife of Founding Father John Adams, in February 1787.
“It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.”
Thus, Jefferson combined the modern America First movement’s appeal to the common citizen with its intense suspicion of elite-run government.
As years passed, Jefferson came to understand the elitists’ methods, which should sound familiar to modern readers.
For instance, while serving as secretary of state under President George Washington, Jefferson became alarmed at what he regarded as the deliberate swelling of the national debt and the corresponding creation of a fiscal system designed to enrich political insiders, including members of Congress.
“Of all the mischiefs objected to the system of measures beforementioned, none is so afflicting, and fatal to every honest hope, as the corruption of the legislature,” he wrote to Washington in May 1792.
In other words, elites used public finance to grow their own fortunes and exert control over the people’s elected representatives.
A national debt, of course, always redistributes wealth upward. And the best way to ensure a large debt is to engage a nation in perpetual war.
Madison — as much a Jeffersonian as Jefferson — explained why.
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other,” he wrote in 1795.
“War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few,” Madison added.
Four years later, Jefferson expressed a similar sentiment when he opposed a permanent military establishment, including a navy whose “expences and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burthens, & sink us under them.”
Naturally, therefore, Jefferson also opposed an imperialistic foreign policy or even meaningful engagement in foreign affairs.
“I am for free commerce with all nations, political connection with none, & little or no diplomatic establishment: and I am not for linking ourselves, by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe, entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance, or joining in the confederacy of kings to war against the principles of liberty,” he added.
The political battles of the 1790s involved high stakes and heated rhetoric. With that in mind, Jefferson regarded his election to the presidency in 1800 as a rebuke to elitists and a vindication of the principles of 1776.
“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels, in the form of kings, to govern him? Let history answer this question,” Jefferson said in his 1801 First Inaugural Address.
As president, Jefferson governed with a light touch.
“A noiseless course, [not] medling with the affairs of others, unattractive of notice, is a mark that a society is going on in happiness,” he wrote in 1802, the second year of his presidency.
“If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.”
In sum, Jefferson fought for common people in an age dominated by monarchists and aristocrats. He also viewed a strong government as a source of the people’s ills, not a remedy for them. And he urged them to resist when necessary.
Furthermore, he knew that elites used the government to enrich themselves and oppress the people, most ominously through war, debt and taxes.
Finally, he regarded an aggressive foreign policy as incompatible with freedom.
We have heard echoes of these principles from Trump. And we now hear them refined and amplified by Ramaswamy, who has done the America First movement an invaluable service by reminding its supporters of their Jeffersonian roots.
