The Tree of Liberty
Mustafa Abbas
Banker | Managing Director | University of Oxford | Finance & Investment Board Member
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants
- Thomas Jefferson 1787
For Jefferson, democracy is dynamic. Each generation should carry out its own revolution to renew democracy and keep those that govern honest and accountable. Whether Jefferson meant this literally or metaphorically, we can only speculate. What is certain is that the citizenry had a responsibility to ensure that the system of government endured, even if it entailed the death of those who would corrupt it or their own demise defending it.
Jefferson almost certainly had in mind a bottom-up revolution, not top-down. Jefferson’s imagined citizenry comprised citizen-farmers, citizen-shopkeepers, citizen-soldiers, that were aware of their responsibilities as citizens and direct participants in their own governance. These individuals had a direct stake in the democratic project, as embodied in the Constitution, itself grounded in universal rights and informed by notions of natural law and justice.
While the tree metaphor for liberty is intuitively appealing, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence based on the rights of man, was from today’s perspective a hypocrite. He was a slave owner and by virtue thereof made an absurdity of his self-professed egalitarian principles.
The insurrection last week at the U.S. Capital was not bottom-up, but top-down. It was incitation by the elected President to mob rule to subvert a fundamental democratic process. But these citizens were not what Jefferson had in mind. In Marxist terms, these were the Lumpenproletariat, the dispossessed, those who were not responsible citizens, but rather an underclass that had no stake in the success of democracy. Marx contrasted them with the real proletariat, which was not exploited by reactionary forces (think Trump) and had real revolutionary potential. Of course, Jefferson was essentially pre-capitalist and would never live to read the works of Marx.
While Jeffersonian thought offers rich insights into notions of self-government, it remains largely theoretical. For if history is any guide, the only thing exceptional about American exceptionalism (or any nation’s exceptionalism) is how unexceptional it is in adhering to its foundational principles.