Jefferson knew that there was every chance in the world for the Revolution to betray itself; he knew that the American people could go from servitude to King George to servitude to King George Washington. He had seen Patrick Henry go from being a patriot crying "Give me liberty or give me death" to an egotist conspiring to becoming military dictator of Virginia. So much like a Platonic sage, Jefferson would have preferred to stay at home to be the philosopher-king of Monticello, but he could see that if he did nothing, the American Revolution would fail and in the chaos of its ending confirm to every crowned head in the Europe the wisdom of the rule of God's anointed.
With the popular idolization of General Washington, with the ambitions of Patrick Henry, and with the Alien and Sedition Acts of Adams's government, Jefferson had enough experience to see that the tendency of every movement is to progress towards its opposite. With tough-mindedness he knew that all single forces would move, if unchecked, into corruption, and so he fought to set up a system of ritual conflict in a constitution; but he also knew that no constitution could be perfect, and so, much like Mao after him, this American revolutionary affirm the permanence of revolution and believed that the Constitution should be reachieved in every generation so that the world could belong to the living, and not the noble dead, be they kings or revolutionaries.
--from "Evil and World Order," William Irwin Thompson, pg. 102
The Sociobiology of the New World Order - Star Larvae
Iron Law of Oligarchy - The Jimmy Wales Project
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