Politics & Power Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker’s line is a small provocation with a big strategic payload: it reframes anarchism not as bomb-throwing nihilism but as America’s own liberal origin story taken to its unsedated conclusion. “Unterrified” is the tell. It implies that most self-styled Jeffersonians flinch when their principles collide with the realities of state power, property, and capital. Tucker’s anarchists, by contrast, don’t blink.

The phrase “Jeffersonian Democrats” is bait and bridge at once. In the late 19th century, Jefferson stood for decentralization, suspicion of centralized finance, and the moral romance of local self-rule. Tucker, an individualist anarchist, grabs that respectable lineage to smuggle in a more radical claim: if you truly believe government is a necessary evil, why stop at modest government? Why tolerate monopolies propped up by law, or “free markets” curated by courts, charters, and police?

The subtext is less about Jefferson’s actual record (messier: slavery, statecraft, coercion) and more about Jefferson as civic myth. Tucker weaponizes that myth to expose the timidity of mainstream democracy. Calling anarchists “simply” Jeffersonians is both disarming and accusatory: disarming, because it domesticates anarchism; accusatory, because it suggests the Democratic tradition has become a costume party for people frightened of their own slogans.

Context matters. Tucker was writing in an era of industrial consolidation, violent labor conflict, and expanding federal authority. His quip reads like an ideological pressure test: if you want liberty, how much are you willing to lose your appetite for the state’s protective services?