Perhaps I’m expecting too much, but I was struck more by the liberalism of this passage.

For instance, although Jefferson makes religion a constituent element of the nation, he defines this religion in a way that places few demands on the individual.

The religion is “benign”; there is a choice between its “various forms”; Providence simply delights in our happiness; religion inculcates qualities that few atheists of the time would have objected to such as honesty and gratitude.

Nor does Jefferson make any real connection between being an American and ethnicity, apart from a reference to there being room for “our descendants.”

And he does include liberal principles as part of his description of the nation, including talk of equal rights and a rejection of inherited forms of status.

I agree with Mark Richardson’s point that the religion Jefferson describes is more like a democratic or New Age religion, with a God who just wants us to be happy. I disagree somewhat with his point on ethnicity. Jefferson is saying the Americans are a people, that this is their land, and that they and their descendents will occupy it for all imaginable time. A people sharing a way of life together over a long period of time—that would seem a pretty good definition of ethnicity. Also, I’m not offended, as Mr. Richardson seems to be, by the idea of a man being recognized for his individual abilities and character as Jefferson describes it here. After all, that is a substantial part of the actual AMerican tradition.

But the point is not whether we happen to agree with each and every point in Jefferson’s description of America. The point is that Jefferson is seeing America WHOLE, as a physical, moral, religious, ethnic, political, economic entity. That’s why I find it a beautiful and inspiring passage. Moreover, this national entity, as Jefferson describes it, is not an ideology seeking to revolutionize mankind. It is an actual people developing and enjoying its own existence. There is a sense of gratitude for what substantially is.

When I posted the quote I had the feeling that some conservatives, despite its obvious value from a traditionalist point of view, would nevertheless be dissatisfied with it because of its liberal elements. I don’t think you can have either a historical description or an ideal of the American nation that doesn’t have liberal elements. The point is not to denounce and deny all those liberal elements, but to balance and contain them with non-liberal elements.

“to honor and confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them.”

This is Jefferson taking a very eloquent swipe at aristocratic forms of government and social status.

Jefferson’s view is part of a longer term trend within liberalism to reject anything that is not chosen by individual will and reason. This includes anything that an individual is born into or inherits.

In Jefferson’s time this principle had been taken so far as to undermine the idea of inherited class, but it was gradually to extend to a rejection of gender, of race, of paternal authority, of absolute moral codes and of inherited and stable forms of national identity.

It is this trend that concerns me, with Jefferson’s statement, no matter how appealing in itself, being one step along the way.

Jefferson certainly emphasizes the particularity of America here, but the particularity was almost a bare fact—America was this particular people in this particular place, but the qualities he attributes to it were universalizable and the overall moral setting was one in which security and prosperity are the highest goods conceivable. As a result, there weren’t many defenses against the conversion of America into the nation whose specific defining quality it is to be universal. All that was needed was continued large-scale immigration from non-Protestant countries to destroy the bare factual particularity of America so that it could no longer be said to be the country of this particular people. Once that happened all that was left (from the standpoint of someone in the Jeffersonian tradition) was universal principle and America as a proposition nation.

Far from rejecting aristocratic forms of government, Jefferson is annunciating here his life-long belief in government by the “natural aristoi.” He wanted society to be led by the men with the best abilities and character, whatever the circumstances of their birth. He’s not rejecting standards at all. To say that the preference for government by natural aristoi is part of a trend to reject anything not chosen by the individual will is going too far. Which is not to deny that there is much in Jefferson’s overall philosophy that does lead in that direction.

I am a longstanding critic of Jefferson’s, finding much of his public conduct and beliefs objectionable. But to carp at every single thing he said because it doesn’t exactly fit with a medieval order of society is expecting too much, I think.