Crystal added a quote:
"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
" — Margaret Thatcher

Crystal added a quote:
"Consensus: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’”" — Margaret Thatcher

Crystal read and liked Julie Sandhaus's review of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson:

"This book is a well disguised attack on Jeffersonian ideals of smaller government...accomplished through lengthy "psychoanalytic" attacks on Jefferson's character. It amazes me that so many find this illuminating and deserving of the Pulit...more This book is a well disguised attack on Jeffersonian ideals of smaller government...accomplished through lengthy "psychoanalytic" attacks on Jefferson's character. It amazes me that so many find this illuminating and deserving of the Pulitizer Prize. Ellis chiefly does this by showing Jefferson to be a secretive, ultimately anarchic radical who was incapable of perceiving the need for political governance under the Constitution (the "necessary evil" described by Paine in Commons Sense).

Perhaps most telling is the fact that Ellis goes out of his way to explain that he does not consider Jefferson to be insane: "Jefferson was not--let us be clear and emphatic on this point--a mentally unstable person or a man with latent paranoid tendencies. The conspiratorial character of his political thinking in the 1790s...was a common feature of the political literature of the time, and substantial traces of the same feverish mentality can be found in the private correspondence of the entire political leadership...Unless one is prepared to make sweeping psychiatric charges against the vanguard members of the entire revolutionary generation...psychiatric appraisals of Jefferson himself should be recognized as both misleading and unfair." (pp. 155-56 of the paperback edition).

If this in fact is how Ellis really feels about Jefferson, then WHY does it take him 155 pages to get to this statement? And Ellis loses no time in renewing his attack; indeed only letting up on Jefferson long enough to allow him one moment of reverential glory in his description of Jefferson's First Inaugural Address (pp. 214-221).

Indeed, Ellis' other major attempt at denying his own methods of psychological attack is not contained in the main narrative of the book at all; rather, buried in the footnotes for pages 183-186 (note 65). In it Ellis discusses his mistrust for psychohistory and the empirical methods of modern psychoanalysis, whether Freudian, neo-Freudian, or Ericksonian. If Ellis is so skeptical, then why is he so eager to embrace their methods?

The problem with Ellis is that he simply does not agree with Jefferson's ideals. Do not miss his afterword, "The Future of an Illusion," in which he asserts "after 1865, Jefferson's...convictions about the proper distribution of power between state and federal governments, if not completely washed away, were permanently put on the defensive" (p. 352); "the New Deal was in fact the death knell for Jefferson's idea of a minimalist government" (p. 353); and "no one seriously contemplates the elimination of Social Security or the Federal Reserve Board" (p. 355).

Bad news for you, Ellis. We Jeffersonians are still out there.

If you read this book, rush to the nearest bookstore or library and read Ron Paul's "The Revolution: A Manifesto." Make sure to get one for Joseph Ellis, too.



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