Teaching In The Time Of Trump

On March 4, 1801, President Thomas Jefferson delivered one of the nation’s finest inaugural addresses, after participating in one of its most politically divisive election cycles. Seeking common ground in an inherently unstable democratic republic, the author of the Declaration of Independence urged his audience: Let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions…. Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.1 What were the necessary principles of American government that transcended the vast diversity of American life? The first on Jefferson’s list—and on the list of most democratic theorists ever since— was political equality: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political,” he explained. Not yet equality for those whose brutal enslavement powered the economy (and his own personal fortune), nor yet for women, or the poor, or countless others, but nevertheless a principled equality that allowed for reasoned deliberation among citizens.