The answer depends on how high an estimation you have of Jefferson’s intellect.

CR calls our attention to the fact that Josiah Nott (1804-73), a scientific racist from Alabama, who posited separate and unequal origins for the races in a very un-Enlightenment manner, liked to invoke the authority of Jefferson’s Notes From Virginia to give legitimacy to his racist theories. The unstated implication is that Nott’s primary inspiration came from Jefferson (who died when Nott was 22) and that perhaps Jefferson was responsible for Nott’s spurious “Science of Man “.

The hoped-for “Science of Man” of the Enlightenment did assume a perverted shape when it emerged during the nineteenth century (mostly after the end of the US Civil War). Why it did and why those ethnographers who spoke up for equality and human rights were marginalized or silenced are very interesting questions but probably don’t have too much to do with Jefferson.

As @233 notes finding intellectual relationships from phrasing is not necessarily a productive exercise.

What makes sense is to connect Jefferson not fascism but to apartheid, e.g. South Africa, the post Civil War south, and to some extent Israel. Those nations face the issue of running a democracy with a large class of non-citizens considered inferior for racial reasons. And I don’t think there is any equation of apartheid with fascism. Apartheid states are oppressive but not fascist, they often pride themselves on democracy, respect for judicial rights of the dominant group, etc. The difference is real and has consequences. South Africa pulled off a peaceful transition to majority rule that is in many ways historically unprecedented. Anyone want to guess how that would have gone if Hitler and his cronies had been in charge? And Israel is, again, oppressive but not eliminationist. The democratic and rights-respecting elements have an influence and create pressures for change that are real even when nations have adopted racist ideologies and stipped persons under their sovereignty of rights. You can see this same tension in Jefferson’s thought even though he was quite racist.

Also, Bruce Wilder’s comment @137 deserves rereading as a statement of the basic difference between a politician and a theorist. It means something that Jefferson as a politician made some progressive moves on the emancipation issue, which was the actual pressing political issue, while the issue of co-existence post-empancipation was much more distant (except, as Corey points out, in the case of freedmen).

… that is the typical evolution that is present from Egypt to China, when writing emerges: it appears to favor the exploitation of men, before their enlightenment. [...] If my hypothesis were correct, then it is necessary to admit that the primary function of written communication is that of facilitating slavery. The employing of writing for disinterested ends, with the view of extracting from it intellectual and aesthetic satisfactions is a secondary result, if it is not reduced, in the majority of cases, as a means of reinforcing, justifying, or dissimulating the other function.

I think the system is called capitalism. And it is indeed shiny.

Right, Jerry Vinokurov, and Popper considered Rousseau a Platonist and therefore a totalitarian — in spirit, of course.

My only point is that the practice of tracing the origins of some modern trend to historical antecedents isn’t exactly revolutionary. Obviously Plato wasn’t literally a fascist, and neither was Thomas Jefferson. It doesn’t mean that there’s no merit in working out the threads of influence stretching from one place to the next, which is what I take Corey (and Popper) to be doing.

See also: The endless attacks on FDR’s legacy during the first time (if you have a pro-banker president liberals love, you have to tear down the President most associated with anti-banker sentiment).

I suspect that this will become a common theme.

Of course, the fascists were influenced by previous generations of theorists even if they refused to admit this to themselves and others. But because of fascism’s anti-intellectual bent, this influence was largely indirect, and took place via crude popularizations. For instance, Hitler claimed American Manifest Destiny as an inspiration for his attempted conquest of eastern Europe, but his knowledge of the American Old West did not come from any actual historian or theorist – instead it came from the works of novelist Karl May. There is no evidence that Hitler or any other leading Nazis were even aware of Jefferson’s racist writings; they might have been inspired by more prominent theorists of “scientific racism” such as Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Grant, but even these would usually only have been known second-hand, through knock-off racist and anti-Semitic pamphlets that have been long forgotten to history.

So Jefferson’s direct influence on 20th-century European fascists is probably near nil, but the herrenvolk democracy he helped to create in the American South clearly did have an influential effect on Hitler, not to mention countless other bigots both at home and abroad up to the present day.

All that struck me as perfectly obvious in the original post. As for a provocative title: isn’t that something of an internet tradition? Anyway, I was really struck by how (over)sensitive people evidently are on the subject of Jefferson’s reputation. There are considerable elements of Jefferson’s political thought I find quite attractive, but that, if anything, makes me more interested in the kind of project Corey’s engaged in here: I’m unlikely to take the kind of angle he does because of my own pro-Jefferson tendencies.