On stepping down from the US presidency in 1809, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to his republican supporters that a primary lesson he learned as head of state was how “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” Somewhere along the road from then to now, a politics that spreads guns, blocks health care, and defunds schools seems to have forgotten Jefferson’s basic principle. Behind these agendas are core assumptions that the happiness of a select few persons takes precedence over the care of a great many others.
