We are not legion, especially outside the United States, who admire Jefferson, whom many would only frame as the third president of the United States - in the best of cases, given what historical revisionism recently attempted with his figure -.
To dwell only on his role as president is to overlook one of the most talented minds in political thought and, surely, in American history. His figure, thought, and contribution to liberal democracy are so capital that, surely blinded by our filia for the thinker from Virginia, it surprises us that his role is not highlighted now that we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States.
We have seen the spectacle that the celebration deserves, the fireworks, the rhetoric of freedom, and the great festivities organized by a government and, above all, a Nation proud of its origin that many of us observe with deep envy.
But from the admiration for those who shaped it, and in particular for the figure of Thomas Jefferson, it is surprising that these do not occupy a greater prominence and, above all, that the anniversary is not used to show the rest of the world the greatness of the men who, gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, gave origin to the United States. And, with it, the way of articulating the rupture with the British - inevitable once from Westminster they confused vassalage loyalty - based on a text and a language that consecrated principles, and, in doing so, wrote, in our judgment, the foundational text of liberal constitutionalism with a clarity and depth that no other has surpassed, nor improved, to this day.
The delegates from the colonies, gathered at the Pennsylvania State House – the current Independence Hall – were not revolutionaries in the traditional sense, and therefore they did not meet to destroy the order, paradoxically they did so to defend it against a metropolis that had subverted it. It was not a rebellion against authority per se, it was against authority without respect for the individual, without guidance by the principle of representation, without checks, and without respect for the rights that the colonists considered theirs by inheritance. The appeal to "no taxation without representation" in response to the Stamp Act of 1765 and other British regulations that imposed taxes without having representatives in the British Parliament, was not demagoguery, it was already constitutional doctrine and thus became the ideological engine of the American Revolution.
Jefferson was one of them. He was thirty-three years old when he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Highly educated, legally he was indebted to the common law of Virginia, he was knowledgeable about Locke and Montesquieu, and he had already defended the rights of the colonists two years earlier in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
One of the most notable aspects is that the starting point of his thought, and it is seen in this text, is not the community, nor the nation, but the individual. A concrete individual, subject to rights and responsibilities, whose sovereignty resides not in any institution but in himself, and who delegates it to his rulers, being able to withdraw it when they betray it. Hence also the importance he gave to education: without well-formed individuals, there is no well-organized society or government worthy of the name.
This conviction led him to defend the limitation of power, not only the functional division between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but also the territorial one. He always defended the autonomy of the states against the federal government, convinced that the administration closest to the citizen is the one that can best serve him. Centralization, on the other hand, is historically a threat to freedom. Which, it should be noted, put him at odds with Hamilton.
It is also interesting to highlight his position on economic freedom, and therefore on public spending. For Jefferson, economic freedom was inseparable from political freedom. And the containment of public spending was a material condition for the independence of the citizen. A State that excessively taxes labor or accumulates debt turns its citizens into tributaries of power, not free subjects.
In the Western world, and Spain very particularly, where for years we have been witnessing the systematic erosion of institutional checks and balances – from the attack on the judiciary, or the questioning of equality before the law in the name of genders or plurinationalities – the reading of Jefferson and the celebration of the Declaration of Independence is not nostalgia, it is necessity.
The centralization of power that he fought, the confusion between legality and legitimacy that he denounced, the subordination of individual rights to circumstantial majorities is what the founding fathers tried to conjure more than 200 years ago.
Jefferson is uncomfortable today: he is individualistic, distrusts the State, and is convinced that freedom is not a concession of power but a limit against it. His ideas on individual rights, the limitation of power, and the role of the State are so contemporary that when rereading them we oscillate between admiration and dismay. Admiration for the clarity with which he formulated them. Dismay at realizing that we are still debating exactly the same thing.
Perhaps that is why July 4th is not just an American holiday. It is a reminder that freedom is not inherited: it is chosen, it is defended, and, if necessary, it is reconquered.