It didn’t exactly work out the way Thomas Jefferson expected. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, his vision of America dominated economically and politically by small, scrappy yeoman farmers had been crushed by the capitalist colossus. That is why it is so difficult to say how Jefferson would have responded to today’s unanticipated conditions. Would he have supported increasing the size of government to deal with a world with Facebook and Amazon, or would he have been an honorary Koch brother? We’ll never truly know.
Except that there is one place in America that really resembles Jefferson’s dream: Vermont. Everything is smaller than life by design in Vermont. And so it may well be that Jefferson’s intellectual heir isn’t really Sarah Palin, the city-hating Sage of Wasilla; it is Bernie Sanders.