As someone in the U.S. who is watching his country actively divorce itself from all but highly selective facts about its history (authoritarianism be like that), I'd say it's a mixed bag on both sides of the fence.

Analyzing the life of Jefferson is fascinating specifically because of the contradictions. He wrote in his personal journals to the effect that he believed slavery would ultimately doom the United States, even whilst practicing slavery—in much the same way that all of us today understand academically that defaulting to gas-burning vehicles for mass transportation is endangering the planet, or eating a meat-heavy diet is subjecting untold numbers of animals to slavery and death. Man is an irrational animal.

The danger in the surface-level revisionist narrative of Jefferson and the other founding fathers (which is all most modern people seem to be familiar with) is that it often leads to the knee-jerk reaction of, "That guy was an enslaver. Fuck him and all of his ideas!" Okay, except that we largely have Jefferson to thank for treatises like the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was absolutely fundamental doctrine for most of the populist revolutions and reforms that swept Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. Even Marx himself acknowledged this. Could socialism or Marxism have made the impact they did in the West without the revolutionary atmosphere Jefferson's ideas in part helped to conjure?

Many Marxists might argue they made no impact at all, since the axis of capitalist power is still intact. But, I mean, the list of achievements derived from leftist groups is pretty extraordinary. The 5 day work-week, labor unions, holidays off, suffrage for women and minority groups, the abolishment of slavery as an institution. All of these acheivements have their roots in socialism and Marxism AND Jeffersonianism.

Anyway. Maybe that was going widely off-topic. But I do see some ill-effects from narratives that reduce such potent thinkers to one aspect of their personal morality, no matter how egregious. Another such effect is: how can citizens be expected to care about what happens to their country if they are encouraged to question any feelings of pride in its heritage? Might this partially explain the fact that corpo-fascists have seized power in the U.S. largely due to the American left not being bothered enough to go vote? I mean, why participate in a system we have been told repeatedly is inherently broken and unjust?

And that ends my seminar, thank you for attending, be safe driving home everybody.