The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible by David Sehat (review)

Historian David Sehat has a penchant for upsetting conventional wisdom. In his first book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York, 2011), he revealed how Protestant Christians attempted to force their own beliefs on Roman Catholics, Mormons, and other groups in defiance of First Amendment protections of religious liberty. Now, in his most recent work, The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible, Sehat has turned to another American myth: the belief that the Founding Fathers created a unified political philosophy that might be readily applied to current social controversies. Sehat rejects this idea and shows how “Founders talk” has degraded political debate by converting policy disputes into ideological contests over first principles (p. 2).

Starting with the Founders themselves, Sehat points out that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and the American Revolution’s other key leaders were distinct individuals who often disagreed on matters of “policy, governance, and constitutional theory” (p. 15). Skipping over more nuanced arguments against constitutional originalism offered by scholars like Jack N. Rakove, Sehat highlights the political disputes that occurred in the early republic. Here, his analysis might be compared with Joseph J. Ellis’s book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000). Where Ellis finds two competing political traditions emerging from the individualistic “Spirit of ’76” and the collectivistic Constitutional Convention of 1787, Sehat sees another story altogether. Placing Jefferson at the center of his narrative, Sehat portrays the Sage of Monticello as a Janus-faced political operator who labeled his Federalist opponents as heretics, only to adopt many of their ideas when he served as president. To justify his actions, Jefferson adopted the “mantle of restoration” and turned “the founding era into one of political purity that he himself had channeled.” Thereafter, as Sehat writes, “American politics would be fought by seeking a connection to Jefferson and, through him, to the Founders” (p. 37).

Turning to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sehat provides a series of engrossing chapters that are reminiscent of Merrill D. Peterson’s work in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960). Sehat shows, for example, how Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster invoked the Founders in a series of internecine conflicts that ultimately failed to address the crucial issue of slavery. This failure led, in turn, to a war of words between Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and Jefferson Davis, which Sehat examines to illustrate both the futility of “Founders talk” and the “new birth of freedom” brought about by the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Following that climactic struggle, the American people turned away from the Founders, only to see them reappear when President Franklin D. Roosevelt confronted the American Liberty League and the U.S. Supreme Court in a constitutional crisis during the Great Depression. In an analysis inspired by Bruce A. Ackerman’s We the People series (3 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1991–2014), Sehat writes that both sides in the battle over the New Deal invoked the Founders, but that Roosevelt eventually won a costly “constitutional revolution” (p. 153). Roosevelt’s victory proved to be short-lived, however, because conservative activists soon adopted the American Liberty League’s strict construction of the Constitution in order to roll back the experimentation of the New Deal. Drawing from Sean Wilentz’s book The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York, 2008), Sehat shows how Ronald Reagan called for a return to limited government, states’ rights, tax cuts, balanced budgets, and the Christian values of the Founders. Yet Reagan’s efforts to return America to an earlier era proved economically disastrous and culturally shortsighted.

In recent times, the Tea Party and other groups have continued to invoke the Founders in debates over gun control, income inequality, religious liberty, and a...