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GIVE NOWAdvocates of "strong" or "participatory" democracy invoke Jefferson's letters to Joseph C. Cabell and Samuel Kercheval, usually acknowledging that they refer to local self-government in what Jefferson calls "ward republics," but without grasping the fuller implications of Jeffersonian federalism.
One of our alert former fellows brought Hillary Clinton's quotation of Jefferson during her recent Secretary of State confirmation hearings to my attention. Of course I can't help myself from checking to make sure that famous people quoting TJ have actually gotten their quotes correct.
We get a lot of questions from the public asking us to verify quotations as Jeffersonian or not, but these almost always concern only a single quotation. The other week I got a query from an inquiring person that contained not one, but 10 quotations. The source of the query was a sort of chain-email calling Jefferson a "prophet" - an appellation I suspect he would not in fact like very much - and listing 10 purported Jefferson quotations.
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