Lee Cheek, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), has co-authored an article at The Imaginative Conservative on the Jeffersonian tradition. Dr. Cheek, a political scientist, recently retired from East Georgia State College, teaches online for Liberty University. His co-author, Dr. Carey Roberts, is a dean at Liberty University and a professor of history there.

Cheek and Roberts examine the Jeffersonian tradition as understood by the eminent historian Clyde Wilson, now in his eighties and editor, most notably, of the multi-volume Papers of John C. Calhoun. Having read Wilson’s “The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition” long ago as junior scholars, Cheek and Roberts continue to be “inspired by its enduring lessons” and its cogent treatment of what the Jeffersonian tradition best represents: “friendship, loyalty, stewardship, joy and laughter, forgiveness, a love for place and home, and most of all, an appreciation for an inherited land and the generations of traditions that make that land worth defending and its future worth living.” Wilson’s essay, published more than fifty years ago, remains significant in historiography.

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Cheek and Roberts praise Wilson for dismissing what they call “the pretentiousness of mainstream conservatism—then and now—with its anti-democratic and often unreflective nationalistic tendencies.”
Their article discusses, too, the transition to a more ideologized—and thus a less civil—kind of politics that America was beginning to experience when Wilson authored his essay.

Cheek and Roberts also eloquently praise America’s traditional common people. Today’s Jeffersonians, they write, “want to live free from a self-appointed and near comatose elite trampling them into the ground. They want to prove, as Thomas Jefferson once wrote, that humanity was not born with saddles on their backs.”