Thomas Jefferson was the original neocon (user search)
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  Thomas Jefferson was the original neocon (search mode)
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Author Topic: Thomas Jefferson was the original neocon  (Read 1037 times)
All Along The Watchtower
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« on: January 21, 2018, 05:05:31 PM »

Jefferson turned out very different as a President than his ideals he wrote about before power, so god knows.

Well since Washington and Hamilton had already set the precedent for the Presidency being an office with real, substantial power; and since political parties (or what would very obviously soon become political parties, at least) had pretty quickly started to form in the 1790s, it's not surprising in the slightest that Jefferson "betrayed" his ideals.

And I'd absolutely make the argument that Jefferson's Presidency paved the way for Andrew Jackson to use the office as a means of aggressively defending uh, "states rights" republicanism (more accurately, the independent, "self-made" Common (White) Men of the country) against the elitist, anti-democratic US Congress and the "special interests" who thwarted the Common Good and the Will of The People.

You can see updated versions of this in the 20th century with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and even more so with Franklin Roosevelt and every President since, to one extent or another. Wilson himself explicitly justified a powerful Presidency on the basis that (paraphrased) "the entire country is his constituency - he represents everyone", as opposed to all the individual Congressmen and Senators with their narrow, local and parochial interests. It's not a huge leap from that to not just FDR's expansive view of presidential and executive powers, but also the ideology of the Unitary Executive as defined by conservatives in the Nixon-Ford and Reagan-Bush I administrations, and especially the second Bush administration.

Obviously Dick Cheney was among the most aggressive and effective proponents of extraordinarily expansive presidential powers throughout this period- particularly in national security and foreign policy matters. There's your connection to the neo-cons. And both Obama and Trump have more or less expanded on and consolidated these trends in unchecked, unilateral presidential power.
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