Government as your daddy, your benevolent pal.

Come to think of it, Jefferson would not recognize England as the home of the Whigs in whose writings colonial Americans were steeped -- John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon, and others.

The essence of this "pattern of ideas and attitudes," almost completely lost today, explains David N. Mayer in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

"The Declaration No Longer Expresses 'The American Mind'." By Ilana Mercer, American Thinker, 7/6/17.