Letter to the editor: Buttigieg & Jefferson

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg recently declared that removing Thomas Jefferson’s name from events such as the Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinners was “the right thing to do.” Before Buttigieg carries his cleansing campaign into public buildings or anywhere else named in Jefferson’s honor, I have a few questions.

If Jefferson’s principal legacy is that of a slaveholder, then why did leading officials in the Confederate government dissociate themselves from him? Jefferson’s egalitarian and libertarian ideas, according to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, “were fundamentally wrong,” for “(t)hey rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” whereas the Confederate government was “founded … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

Would the Democratic Party align itself with a Confederacy founded on slavery? The logic of the American left’s current trajectory suggests that perhaps it would. After all, “slavery,” in the words of antebellum southern intellectual George Fitzhugh, “is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.”

Should they set about cleansing every edifice from which Jefferson’s name now offends them, Buttigieg and other Democrats will confirm that in fact they have rejected Jefferson’s ideas and legacy, in which case they will join a list that includes not only pro-slavery apologists but monarchists, aristocrats, fascists, communists and every form of tyrant that has plagued the earth since 1776.

Michael Schwarz

Monroeville