Jeffersonian democracy

1. A movement for more democracy in American government in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The movement was led by President Thomas Jefferson. Jeffersonian democracy was less radical than the later Jacksonian democracy. For example, where Jacksonian democracy held that the common citizen was the best judge of measures, Jeffersonian democracy stressed the need for leadership by those of greatest ability, who would be chosen by the people.

Example Sentences

This latest, with its sanctimony about it being done for the good of the Palestinians and to bring peace to the region brought back some very unpleasant memories of the days when the Republicans sold the Iraq war as a crusade to create a Jeffersonian Democracy in the Middle East.

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“That is a very Jeffersonian democracy approach on siting and permitting,” said Silverman, a former top official at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

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“You cannot build a Jeffersonian democracy overnight,” he said in an interview.

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The idea that we were going to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into mini-mes of Jeffersonian democracy was always an arrogant miscalculation, driven by macho hubris, not national security.

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The larger lesson should have been learned in Vietnam when so many of our political leaders, foreign policy experts and military commanders let a limited mission expand into an attempt to build a Jeffersonian Democracy in a foreign land caught up in civil war.

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