The following is a rush transcript:

David Swenson: 00:00 Good day listeners and welcome to this week's podcast edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. I am pleased to say that this week we are joined by president, Thomas Jefferson. It's been a few weeks. We've been talking about books and so many things and live performances and things like that. So this week we finally got Jefferson to come back.

Clay S. Jenkinson: 00:20 Back into the barn.

DS: 00:21 Yeah, we had great questions. We had questions from Mr Jeff Woods, he's the one who, he ended his letter with a Jefferson, slavery, fossil fuels thing

CSJ: 00:30 Tried to cheer Jefferson up a little.

DS: 00:30 And we also had one from Tim Bryant.

CSJ: 00:36 The Texan.

DS: 00:36 Mr Jefferson, and you, were a bit hard on him, but you did answer his question very well. And then we also talked about a letter from Joe Mello, which was really fun. That was the letters,

CSJ: 00:48 Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, that classic book of agrarianism that was written in Jefferson's time. You know, it's so interesting. I got started, you know, people always ask me, how'd you get into this? How'd you get into this? As if it were my life's dream to dress up in tights.

DS: 01:02 Yeah, it was, wasn't it?

CSJ: 01:02 It was not. No, I was talked into it and the first thing that I learned about Jefferson and I knew nothing except that he was on Mount Rushmore and that he was a great man. The first thing I learned about him, David, was this statement from Notes on Virginia, Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

DS: 01:19 Really?

CSJ: 01:19 I thought, wow, what does that, I mean, look, that's weird. I mean, why are farmers the chosen people of God? What? Why farmers? Now, I get it intuitively. I come from an agrarian background sort of, but I thought, that's a big deal. Jefferson's not saying painters. He's not saying philosophers.

DS: 01:37 That's way different than my first exposure.

CSJ: 01:40 What was yours?

DS: 01:42 Well, do you remember when the Ken Burns Lewis and Clark documentary came out?

CSJ: 01:44 Of course. Yes, yes.

DS: 01:46 You and I both were in Charlottesville at the same time. Now, we didn't know each other.

CSJ: 01:50 The big signature event that launched the Lewis and Clark bicentennial.

DS: 01:53 We didn't know each other. I knew of you and I know you were there and both of us were there and that was, you know, it was a big deal, but because I was there it was like, I've never seen Monticello, I got to go. So that was my first trip. And you know, you drive in and there's that museum sort of in the parking lot area.

CSJ: 02:11 Right, right.

DS: 02:11 Well, that's where I started. So my first exposure to Jefferson was, what a gadget guy!

CSJ: 02:17 He was a gear head.

DS: 02:18 You know, I mean, everything from all of this surveying equipment of his to his sunglasses. And so that was my first thing.

CSJ: 02:26 His little PDA. The ivory tablets.

DS: 02:28 You know, you think back and you have this sort of common grade school taught impression of Jefferson, which is not really.

CSJ: 02:37 Pretty shallow.

DS: 02:37 And then you start to see artifacts and things that he touched and.

CSJ: 02:42 Imagine if he had had a 3D printer.

DS: 02:44 I wish I would've known then what I know now. It would've been interesting.

CSJ: 02:48 Well, you're still young. You can go back to Monticello, you've never been to Poplar Forest.

DS: 02:53 It's a great show this week because Jefferson's back and he's answering questions.

CSJ: 02:57 These letters are great. One of them was a letter from someone we've talked to before, the Texas school teacher. We've never, I don't think, in the whole course of this program, talked about Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer. That's a book now I bet you will be reading.

DS: 03:12 And let's go to the show, except there are two things we have to do. You can go first.

CSJ: 03:17 First, the cultural tours are filling up, but there's still room in each of the three. Number one, Water and the West. This is a humanities book retreat out at Lochsa Lodge on the 13th through the 18th.

DS: 03:31 Are you sure that that isn't filled?

CSJ: 03:31 I am sure. And that's 13th through 18th, January, west of Missoula. It's not a kind of blizzardy, wintery thing. It's a winter wonderland. It's like a greeting card of the ideal winter encampment.

DS: 03:45 There's pictures on the website. Go to JeffersonHour.Com and get all the details.

CSJ: 03:49 Second one is the 19th through 23rd on Shakespeare without Tears, back by popular demand. And then on March, 2nd through 12th, Steinbeck's California, headquartered in Monterrey. So those cultural tours are filling, but I want them to be available to anybody who wants to come to them. So go to the website.

DS: 04:09 Great food, great wine. You don't want any leftovers.

CSJ: 04:11 All comfort, no rigor.

DS: 04:13 I can be way quicker than you.

CSJ: 04:14 I'll bet you can.

DS: 04:15 We want to thank those of you who have decided to support the Thomas Jefferson Hour. We need your help. We need your support, mostly we really appreciate it. And if you go to JeffersonHour.com, you can donate.

CSJ: 04:27 It's like 113, more than 101, we did a lot of them.

DS: 04:30 Or you can become a monthly member of the 1776 Club and get access to a bunch of extra stuff, Clay's essays, unlimited access to all of the past shows, years and years of shows. And I know that right now we're in the process of finalizing the Jefferson 101 series as well. So it was like 113 more than 101. We did a lot of them. And then, we shall go to the show, but I do want to alert listeners that we had a visitor here from.

CSJ: 05:01 Oh, Beau.

DS: 05:02 Yes, we did from Virginia.

CSJ: 05:04 Beau Wright.

DS: 05:06 Beau Wright, who we kind of ran into a few years ago and he was, for a while, was our man in the White House. He was in the administration and we had several calls in.

CSJ: 05:14 He turned up.

DS: 05:15 He decided to take a vacation in the west and, well, we just couldn't help but sit down with microphones and talk to him. So that's coming up in the future. Let's go to the show.

CSJ: 05:25 Alright.

DS: 05:25 And thanks for listening.

DS: 05:29 Good day, citizens. And welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with President Thomas Jefferson. Mr Jefferson is portrayed by the award winning humanity scholar, author Clay Jenkinson. I'm your host, David Swenson. Seated across for me now is President Thomas Jefferson. And so good to see you today, sir.

CSJ as TJ: 05:51 Good day to you, my dear citizen.

DS: 05:54 You know, it's been several weeks since we've had the joy of conversation and I so appreciate you coming in to speak with us today, sir.

CSJ as TJ: 06:02 My pleasure, sir.

DS: 06:04 I have a number of questions for you, sir, on varying topics from, from your many listeners.

CSJ as TJ: 06:10 Thank you. Let's hear from the people who matter most, the citizens of the United States.

DS: 06:15 First one comes from Mr Jeff Woods. He begins his question by saying, 'I don't believe that the question before us is can Thomas Jefferson still be a guide for our troubled times.' He goes on to say that your world, actually, Mr Madison's, the checks and balances can still work. Those principles will not fail us and they have not.

CSJ as TJ: 06:36 Well, I think that's right, that a republic is an experimental system in which the people are sovereign and the people then govern themselves, but through representatives that they choose freely and that government is meant to do exactly what the people have in mind and any government that veers from the purposes and the ideals of the people is discredited at the next election and we don't put any significant amount of power in the hands of any single person or any single entity. We diffuse it so that the Senate is not the house and Congress is not the courts and the courts are not the executive and the nation is not the states that make it up, and the 10th amendment of course says that those powers not delegated to the national government belong instead to the states and to the people, so we have taken the sovereign, the people with a capital P and we have given them a mechanism of enacting their will and taxing themselves and defending their coasts and harbors and distributing the goods of life and they are in charge of their own destiny, but we have divided and subdivided the focal points of their decision making into a range of different entities that meet at slightly different times and have slightly different protocols, different terms of service, et cetera. And that means that an idea must be debated and distilled until it's refined into something that really does reflect the will of all the people by majority rule. That's our system. It was devised not from our own brains. It came out of ancient Roman principles as described by the philosopher and historian Polybius. We looked at models that found their greatest expression in England, and the French philosopher and political theorist Montesquieu in his famous book, the Spirit of the Laws really laid out that set of balance principles, checks, balances, separation of powers, etc, for the modern world. So we weren't operating in a vacuum. In fact, we were going back to the time of the Roman republic in 509 BC. But those principals served us well, and I don't think that they are particularly time bound. However, I will say that we lived in a three mile per hour world. That governed everything. The pace of life was sluggish, to put it lightly, by comparison with the pace of life in your time. And our technologies were primitive. Our weaponry was rudimentary by comparison with yours. Our communications systems were either nonexistent or exceedingly crude. So the stakes were the same in my world and in yours. But the technologies of delivery and the pace of life have changed dramatically. And as you know, my favorite principal, essentially, is that the earth belongs to the living, not the dead. The question that this listener raises, of whether our principals from my time are still useful in your time, is a very good one for the people of your culture to debate.

DS: 09:59 Let me go back to his question again. He writes, 'the Newtonian world of checks and balances can still work. Those principles will not fail us and they have not.' And he goes on to say, Woodrow Wilson, a President I believe you're aware of, sir.

CSJ as TJ: 10:13 Yes.

DS: 10:14 'Woodrow Wilson and early progressives strategically chose to marginalize the old Newtonian check and balances and replace it with an organic Darwinian constitution. We are not Hamiltonians. We are all progressives. However, we still have the option to employ the old principles that have been designed to protect our individual liberties. Although, it would require going against 100 years of progressive politics and out of control, administrative government, and a political world based on identity politics.'

CSJ as TJ: 10:50 Well, I didn't understand all of that, and certainly I knew nothing of Charles Darwin or his theories. But it does seem to me in looking at your world from my 18th century perspective, that the executive has become exceedingly powerful. I worried about this even in the original constitution. I said, when I had a chance to read it in Paris, that the executive was already powerful enough, and that the tendency over time would be for the executive to gain more and more and more authority and power. And that really greatly concerned me. And the only check on an executive in our constitution is the quadrennial election. That the president must be elected every fourth year and stand for reelection in four years. And the articles of impeachment, which as you know, have not been a useful tool in the course of American constitutional history. And so you need checks against an aggrandizment of executive power. And from my reading of the constitution, plus an examination of your history, I would say that you don't have sufficient checks against an executive. And currently, if I may hazard an observation, the main branch of government, the congress, shows little capacity to check the administration. And that's not simply true of the current presidency, but of several recent presidencies.

DS: 12:21 I think he agrees with you. He writes, 'the only way back to the founding principles is through you, sir, and the founding fathers. Your words in the declaration of independence captured the spirit of America and just government.'

CSJ as TJ: 12:33 Well, things have veered dramatically from our time and the courts have not checked that they could have checked some of that in the course of American history and of course there are mechanisms for the amendment of the constitution and for calling a new constitutional convention or a revising convention and so on. Those tools have not much been used in the course of American history. I would urge the people who are listening, first of all, to study this, to know something more about what's at stake, and then to attempt to push their congressional representatives, their senators and congressmen, to be more assertive in promoting congressional primacy in this culture. And I would urge people to be very much concerned about any executive of any party at any time that gathers too much power onto himself or herself.

DS: 13:27 He ends his letter by thanking you for these conversations and, with a line perhaps directed more towards me, sir. He says, 'please don't come to doubt Jefferson as a guide to life. Mr Jefferson could no more erase slavery, which he predicted would ravish our country, than we can end the use of fossil fuels, which might ruin our world.' Again, that letter's from Mr Jeff Woods.

CSJ as TJ: 13:50 Well, let me say another word about this if I might, because the heart of my philosophy, and this man says that mine is the right one for this country. The heart of it is, I'm sorry to say, somewhat mystical, and here's what I mean by that. I believe that our tripartite system of government and checks and balances and so on can work, but it only works where several conditions are met. Number one, there needs to be a very, very high level of civility and mutual respect, that the minority on any question needs to respect majority rule, which is sacred under our constitution, and the majority must not be pompous or righteous or vain or hubristic, but must reach out to the minority and assure them that they are a part of the American equation and that their rights and interests are important to all of us, not just to their own faction. Secondly, there needs to be an attempt always to find the common ground. You know, we share more than we disagree about. We never have unanimity, that's impossible in any population. Certainly a population spread across distinct geographic and economic regions as our country is. But our goal should always be to seek common ground, to find compromise, to see if we can craft legislation that brings in another 15 percent on one side and another 20 percent on the other side. To find the great center of, not unanimity, but of consensus that I believe will always exist in a free society. And third, the third condition under which our system can flourish and without which it cannot, is public education and civics. The people are the only guardians of their rights. They must be very jealous of those rights, but they must also understand their rights and understand the mechanisms that they can use to protect them. If you have an ignorant population or a population that turns away from civics into mere getting and spending, if it's merely a hedonistic population that that mostly just wants to consume and entertain itself, then your government will inevitably veer from right principles and the people then will not have the civic understanding or engagement to bring it back, and so you need a belief in majority rule as sacred but not a righteous majority. You need civility and forbearance and respect and mutuality, and you need to try to carve out lively compromises that include as much of the 100 percent of the spectrum as you possibly can. If you don't do those things, if you don't educate yourselves and live by way of civility, Mr Madison can't help you. Polybius can't help you. Montesquieu can't help you, because the system is as mystical as it is mechanical.

DS: 16:50 I don't think I've ever heard you refer to the system as being mystical, Mr President.

CSJ as TJ: 16:55 It's a term I don't particularly like because I'm a rationalist, but I, what I mean is that the mechanism alone does not guarantee success. Success comes from an understanding that we are an unusual nation with a unique destiny and that we have a common understanding of the love of liberty, of our search for equality, of our commitment to justice and due process, an iron commitment to the bill of rights and all that they stand for, and an understanding that we're blessed in a way that no other country in the history of the world has been blessed. And if we jeopardize that for factional purposes, we will have squandered a birthright that no country has ever had and perhaps no country will ever have again.

DS: 17:46 Thank you very much Mr Jefferson. We're going to take a short break and refresh ourselves, but we'll be back in just a moment. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

DS: 17:56 Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with President Thomas Jefferson. This week, President Jefferson has been good enough to answer listener questions. Welcome back, Mr Jefferson.

CSJ as TJ: 18:14 You too, sir.

DS: 18:14 Our next question comes from a Mr. Joe Mello and it's about a series of articles written titled Letters from an American Farmer. Are you familiar with that, sir?

CSJ as TJ: 18:26 Crèvecœur's Letters of an American Farmer. Yes, I think published in 1782.

DS: 18:31 What do you recall about it sir?

CSJ as TJ: 18:33 He was a Frenchman. He was a physiocrat, and by physiocrat I mean someone who believes that all wealth comes from the soil. This is a French school of economics and social thinking that I subscribed to, at least in part, that says that wealth comes from the soil, so you put one seed in the ground, 50 or 100 spring up. You pair a bull and a cow and they produce calves. That this is the fecundity of the world being manipulated carefully by ingenious humans. We've domesticated cattle and sheep and goats and dogs and horses, and we have taken the medley of grains that one might find in a field in the Middle East, and we have culled out the oats and culled out the barley and culled out the wheat, and from South America have gathered the potato and the maize, corn, and we've concentrated the seeds until they produce a common culture, what in your time you like to call a monoculture, and that by doing this, one person is not only able to feed himself, but he can feed a hundred or a thousand, and this ability for humans to carefully manipulate their environment, their natural resources, has led to all of the wealth of the world. If you contrast that with a banker or a stock speculator, they do no actual work. They don't grow a single bit of protein. They produce nothing that the world wants. They simply manipulate wealth already having been produced by humans cooperating with the earth. So that's physiocracy or the school of the physiocrats. And I do subscribe to that notion and Crèvecœur was one of them. And he was here as many Frenchmen were here during the course of our revolution,