[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

Book 1: The Singapore Story

Lee Kuan Yew1 was the Prime minister of Singapore, rationalist folk hero, and one of the few world leaders to successfully become a household name despite not being primarily associated with a major war2. He was also, as it turns out, a surprisingly compelling writer. Aside from being interesting for his own sake, he also ended up implicitly producing the closest thing we have to a firsthand account of the fall of the British Empire and rise of the new world order.

His memoirs are split into two books, each covering roughly half his life. The Singapore Story covers his childhood, World War 2 and the Japanese occupation, law school, his legal career and rise in Singaporean politics and Singapore’s independence from the British Empire, joining Malaya to form Malaysia, then leaving Malaysia to finally become Prime Minister of a truly independent country. Third World to First covers his 25 years running Singapore after independence.

These books are part autobiography, part political memoir, part rationalist power fantasy. Every good rationalist, from time to time, can’t help but think Hey, if we just put me in charge of the government I would simply pass the good policies and not the bad ones, and the country would thrive. I’d just have to be clear and direct and explain to everyone why these were obviously good and reasonable ideas, they’d understand and go along with them, and our government would be popular and successful forever. All of us3 know this isn’t actually that easy, that real-life policy is hard and messy and often unreasonable and our clear bright ideas would struggle when faced with Reality. This couldn’t possibly work in real life.

Except that Lee goes ahead and does exactly that. He passes reasonable, economically-optimal policies and they work out so well that the economy booms and his party keeps winning massive supermajority elections for decades. When a race riot almost breaks out over malay recruits getting turned out of the army during high unemployment, he calmly shows up, picks up a megaphone and explains to everyone that this is all a misunderstanding, there’s no policy against employing malays in the army and they’ll all be processed and get jobs when they come back tomorrow. Everyone understands how reasonable he’s being, calm down, and sort things out the next day.

At another point he handles chinese-malay tensions by writing an epic Scott-length blog post giving an epic speech to the Malaysian parliament about how the new Malaysia needs to be less obsessed with zero-sum culture wars and focus on pragmatic economic policy and even the die-hard Malays stand up and clap4.

All of which raises the question: How did he actually do all this? Each book covers a seemingly-impossible task (the first, going from middle-class teenager with no connections to Prime Minister of your own country; the second, taking a third-world island nation with no natural resources into one of the richest countries in the world) that we might do well to learn from. The book implicitly offers one explanation - just be consistently brilliant, charismatic5, incredibly detail-oriented, honest, hardworking,and pragmatic continuously for decades while also having your share of good luck. Still, let’s take a look at the details.

Early Life

Before we get to the rationalist power fantasy story, we take a tour through a few different genres. We start with a peaceful coming of age story.

Lee was born in 1923 in what seems like a typical middle class family for colonial-era Singapore, which is an odd mix of imperial British and a mashup of local cultures. He mostly goes by Harry Lee in his earlier years (He dropped the Harry in the late 1950s, except with his British contacts6).

Some parts of it (like the school system) feel surprisingly normal. Other parts are, well, this:

“My mother was the eldest child of this union, and when she was married in 1922 at the age of 15, the fortunes of both families were still healthy. She even brought with her, as part of her dowry, a little slave girl whose duty, among other things, was to help bathe her, wash her feet and put on and take off her shoes.”

Lee doesn’t especially respect his dad, who he considers weak, lazy and unreliable7 and learns his principles from his mother and (maternal) grandfather. He goes to British-run schools, keeps getting top marks and filtering upwards through the system, and ends up at Raffles college, the college for British-educated local elites in colonial Malaya8.

The story then takes a turn to become a school drama. First, Lee needs to get top grades in college for his dream of getting the Queen’s Scholarship to go to Oxbridge, a prestigious opportunity that only one or two students a year can get. But, frustratingly, there’s this girl a year above him who keeps outcompeting him with slightly better grades.

This is specifically the type of school drama with an absurdly powerful student council. There’s some drama between the Malay and Chinese students and, as an epic debater and naturally take-charge kind of guy, Lee ends up representing the Chinese students on their side of the argument. Everyone involved in this college dispute shows up again twenty years later as some kind of senior government official or public intellectual negotiating the fate of Southeast Asia.

World War 2

Then the war breaks out, and we get a wartime story.

Lee sees the invincible British empire get stomped. The Japanese cut through Malaya in two months, crushing a British force with twice their numbers and capturing 130,000 British soldiers. The mighty white men of the British empire are helpless, hapless and cowardly, making bad decision after bad decision while completely failing to coordinate or organize a panicked retreat. By the time the Japanese get to Singapore, it falls almost without a fight.

We will get back to this momentarily, but I want to take a moment to sit and point this out. The British just lost. They were seen to lose, in a way that made them look selfish and cowardly and weak. Lee does not forget this.

Japanese occupation is a classic wartime story. The Japanese occupiers are cruel in an oddly banal, pragmatic but unfocused kind of way, occasionally kicking the locals down and occasionally ignoring them. Two interesting stories come up during this period.

First, Lee (along with most of the young Chinese men in Singapore) gets picked up by Japanese soldiers and led to a stadium. He stays there for three days, after which he’s told to leave through one gate. He gets a bad feeling about it, says something about forgetting his coat, and is allowed to leave to go back to it, managing to lose himself in the crowd again. The next day he just walks out through a different gate, and nobody bothers to stop him.

Lee was right to have a bad feeling about the first gate. The people who went through it were taken to the beach, then lined up and shot. This was the Sook Ching massacre, in which the Japanese shot tens of thousands9 of young Chinese men in cold blood across Singapore and Malaya to “suppress anti-Japanese resistance”.

Lee ended up doing a lot of business with the Japanese later as Prime Minister, asking them to come build factories in Singapore and help support the economy. He speaks highly of their organization and intelligence in the second book. That he does this after living through this story tells us something about him.

The second story Lee notes is that the Japanese set up a brothel full of their (Japanese and Korean, not local) camp followers within days of arriving. “As a result, rapes were infrequent”, he tells us. He’s impressed with their pragmatism compared to the British attitude towards the men’s needs.

Lee, meanwhile, is living a classic civilian in wartime story. Times are hard and he scrambles around doing various odd jobs to survive. At one point he starts a glue making business with the brother of Choo, the woman who kept outcompeting his grades in school. You can probably guess how that story ends.

There wasn’t any more real fighting in Singapore after the first invasion, though. The Japanese surrendered after the atomic bombs and withdrew from their empire, and the British swept back in unchallenged, coming back to rule Singapore like before. But still, things weren’t the same after that.

This is a good point to take a break and talk about the other story in this book. Both Lee’s personal rise and the later rise of Singapore happen on the backdrop (and, to some degree, as a consequence of) the fall of the British empire and its replacement with the new world order.

There’s an irony in that while Japan lost World War 2 pretty badly on the field, their actual stated goals in the war were to free Asia from western colonialism, and those goals they achieved amazingly well. They may have lost by direct force, but Lee and others like him didn’t forget how weak and disorganized and cowardly the British ruled in defeat. Western empires ruled Asia more through their aura of invincibility than through their technological advantage, and once that was lost their days were numbered and they knew it. The fall of Singapore was the single greatest military defeat the British ever had in terms of soldiers lost; it was also the battle that struck the deathblow to their Empire.

The end of the Empire was replaced with a new globalized world order that was both weaker and stronger than British rule. When the British ruled the world they cracked down on local customs we now find barbaric, like slavery or burning widows. This was rule from above and they never achieved perfect compliance (as Lee mentioned, even in 1920s Singapore there were still some forms of local slavery going on in common practice), although they did ingrain it more over time. But local cultures didn’t just revert to their old forms once the British left. Despite British rule being a distant memory, Singapore’s culture today is a lot more similar to London’s than it was in 1940 (and for that matter, so is Shanghai’s). Slavery is no longer banned with soldiers, but it has become unimaginable to practice it. We may have lost the force of the Empire, but cultural coercion lingers on in much of it10.

Law school and politics

Lee travels to England after the war to go to law school11, which immediately leads him to despise the English and develop a burning desire to overthrow them12.

He starts off at the LSE, where many of the professors are some form of marxist or communist. He notes at this point that quite a few of his fellow students also ended up running their own third world states; the ones who tried to run their countries based on what they thought the marxists taught inevitably ran their economies to the ground13. He notes that the communist students’ main recruitment strategy is to send beautiful girls to recruit men to their clubs (this tactic comes up again later, when it’s used by the communists in Singapore14). Eventually he transfers to Cambridge, aces his exams, and heads back to Singapore ready to start a successful law career with some clear plans to get into politics15.

It’s noteworthy that Lee’s political drive starts in anticolonialism, which ties him to the Labour party, despite his eventual turn to more conservative/Thatcherite economic policy. For Americans, it’s worth noting here that traditionally the British right is more based on classist conservatism than the Reaganite free-markets-plus-church approach.

Meanwhile the British Empire is bankrupt, anticolonialism is on the rise and it’s increasingly clear to everyone that long-term colonial rule is on its way out. Lee believes (as young people often do16) that the older generations are too passive and whipped by the British and his generation needs to take a leadership role in achieving self rule, and comes back to Singapore intent on making it happen.

There’s a needle to thread here: The left is a broad alliance of everything anticolonialist from English-speaking moderates to labour unions and communist high schoolers (there’s also an actively illegal communist guerilla group in Singapore and Malaya, which the fringes of the legitimate communist political groups are connected to). Lee makes his name as a firebrand lawyer for all these causes (including fighting for unions and student groups), which leads to him successfully founding the PAP as an alliance of all the disparate anticolonial groups and eventually winning an election as their head. Once they’re in power, the communists (who hold most of the grassroots support) break off, and Lee has to make desperate efforts for the remaining moderate wing of the PAP to survive and hold onto a bare majority17.

This is probably the most important part of Lee’s personal rise and the most historically critical part, and it takes up a big chunk of the first book. It’s also boring, because it turns out Lee is really good at the boring hard work of politics and happy to talk about his craft. And I cannot emphasise this enough, the hard work of politics is dull. Lee spends pages talking about every specific person and deal he has to make to put the party together and keep its appeal, about finding good candidates for every district and negotiating with individual ministers and candidates to keep them on board. He talks about spending untold hours learning Chinese18 and going around giving speeches on his megaphone four times a night. He lists a million names of important people that I personally can’t hope to keep track of. When he gets like this (it gets even worse when he talks about geopolitical negotiations, especially because he had way more notes to work off of for those) it’s like reading an engineering documentary by a guy who insists on telling you the exact version of Kafka they used for every messaging layer when building google cloud19.

Seriously, don’t go into politics. It’s not worth it.

But it was for Lee, whose talent for remembering details and managing people and public opinion leads him to survive the crisis and keep a bare PAP majority of sensible moderates after the communists break off. Meanwhile there’s plenty of communist-tinged civil unrest of various kinds, between the labour unions and the Chinese high schoolers, but Lee (unlike his predecessors) manages to crack down on it hard enough to calm things down without just provoking more rioting and unrest20. Lee’s other political project is to push for the merger with Malaya to create Malaysia, since he believes that Singapore is just too small to have true independence on its own.

The rest of the first book is often fun, often boring, but not too illuminating. Lee spends years pushing for the merger with Malaysia, gets it passed, then spends the rest of the book trying to get Singapore fairly treated in Malaysia21. The majority Malay-first sectarian parties remain unconvinced and, seeing the PAP winning seats even in majority-malay parts of Singapore, a little nervous. Lee tries to explicitly make the case for a non-sectarian “Malaysian Malaysia”, and while his speech is applauded by all present22, the Malaysian government eventually decides this is all moving too fast and they need to break up. The Tunku (the Malaysian ruler) ends up sending Lee a signed copy of his book with the dedication

“To the friend who had worked so hard to found Malaysia and even harder to break it up”.

And so the first book ends with Singapore breaking off from both the British and Malaysia, and Lee suddenly in charge of an independent city-state country he’s not sure can be sustainable. The second book, like the second act of Hamilton, has to deal with the question of how do you actually handle independence, once it has been achieved?

Book 2: Third World to First

“Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.”

This one’s organized by topic rather than chronologically, which is probably easier for a book review, and I’m going to pick and choose which topics I dig into here.

Military, Economy and legibility

We now suddenly have a small independent city-state surrounded by big, powerful, not-necessarily peaceful countries23. The British were pulling out from everywhere east of the Suez and leaving a potential power vacuum. Lee, acutely aware of all this, does the obvious thing and asks for advice from another tiny former British colony composed of a majority group of middleman-minority exiles surrounded by massive hostile muslim nations that successfully survived repeated crises24 to help train up Singapore armed forces. Despite the limited budget and economic crunch, they desperately built up the Singapore military, seeing this as existential.

They also start Singapore’s public housing program, which sells people heavily government-subsidised apartments. The point here isn’t to solve the housing crisis (Lee understands this is economically suboptimal); it’s to give people without a history of a strong national identity something to fight for if they get invaded.

This desperate feeling of precariousness and seeing Singapore as constantly at risk of collapse is a key theme through the book. I’ve heard people say that Singapore is cool and futuristic and experimental, and that it’s probably the best place in the world for e.g. wacky biotech experiments. This is fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of Singapore’s weirdness. They’re not high-openness, they’re just willing to go to extremes to avoid instability25. Complicated housing experiments to reduce sectarianism by forcing every neighborhood to be racially mixed? Absolutely. Crazy off-label biohacking labs? Absolutely not26.

The other crisis caused by British withdrawal is economic. A huge part of Singapore’s economy was based on serving as a British naval base, and those jobs are going away. So emergency economic measures are in order.

Lee got some lucky breaks here. The Vietnam war helped for a while as the Americans needed Singapore as a logistics hub to Southeast Asia27. The classic economic advice for developing countries at the time was to start with import substitution, but since Singapore was far too small a market for real domestic import substitution they jumped to working on export support; current economic conventional wisdom is that this is a better path for developing economies and the other developing economies got it wrong.

But mostly it’s just hard work and determination to get results. Unlike the more ideological postcolonial countries, Singapore actively sought out western investment wherever possible, working to make it regulatorily easy and convenient (including Lee himself going around to talk to various foreign CEOs). They kept the association to Raffles as the founder of Singapore instead of cancelling him. They created ports and industrial zones for companies to work at instead of passing datacenter bans. A large part of growing the economy is just wanting to grow the economy (along with the belief that it can be done if you try), and they had that in spades.

This is also probably the place to mention the famous quote Lee’s economic advisor gave him about unions

“… as an economist, I’m not interested in what you do with them. You can throw them in jail, you can throw them out of the country, you can even kill them. As an economist it does not interest me, but I have to tell you, if you don’t eliminate them in government, in unions, in the streets, forget about economic development.”

Lee didn’t literally kill all the unions. But he did manage to weaken them where they would have impeded economic growth.

The third component here is legibility. James Scott may have written seeing like a state as a warning, but Lee took it as an instruction manual. He pushed to tear down winding roads and build an orderly street grid. He pushed everyone to speak one of the four official languages of English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil (if four official languages sound like a lot, just think how many they were replacing; every Chinese subgroup had their own dialect, just for a start) and pushed for all education to be in English. The massive government housing projects weren’t just to support willingness to bear arms and to force mixed neighborhoods to attack sectarianism, they also forced people out of their messy disorganized homes with farm animals in the backyard into organized clean ones. He couldn’t just eliminate street food salesmen going all over the place, so they built up Singapore’s famous hawker centers to channel them into legible addresses.

Similarly, anticorruption was a whole campaign. It’s not enough for the PAP ministers to run on anti corruption (and, somewhat surprisingly, mostly actually follow through with it), they have to crack down on it throughout the system. You can’t do this overnight (if everyone’s doing it you can’t throw the entire bureaucracy in jail), but they did successfully frog boil it over time. It also involved just reducing the needs for permits and regulations wherever possible, which provide opportunities for corruption you can just not have. Sometimes straightforward libertarian arguments just work.

There’s also the massive parks/greening projects. Unlike some anime power fantasy protagonists Lee didn’t have the ability to control the weather - the constant heat and humidity make Singapore’s parks painful to actually hike through - but they are beautiful, and this was a result of a lot of hard work and introducing plants from all over the world.

Listing every world leader he ever talked to

Something like half the book is Lee listing every world leader he ever talked to as PM. This is another part that mostly gets kind of dull (especially if you don’t follow the details, although this case is much easier to track than the internal politics chapters since you’ll probably recognize the characters’ names, or at least their countries). They’re all described as “tough” and “vigorous”, occasionally as “warm”, and usually with some other positive descriptors. This is probably a mix of sincere respect and diplomatic language for most of them.

Except Jimmy Carter. Lee spends an entire chapter making fun of Jimmy Carter for being shallow, undermined, weak-willed and inauthentic. And then takes an aside in the next chapter, when he’s complimenting Reagan, to mention how smart it was of the American people to replace Jimmy Carter with this guy. If you ever want to see someone who’s not a giant swimming rabbit attacking Jimmy Carter, this is the book for you28.

The other memorable one is Deng Xiaoping. You know how sometimes you ship characters from different franchises, or people from different parts of your life, as friends? I always had this for those two, they just seemed so compatible. I didn’t realize until I read this that they actually were friends in real life. Or, well, as close to genuine friends as world leaders ever get. Lee’s compliments about Deng are genuine in a way they aren’t about anyone else. He notes that when he pointed out to Deng that one of his policies was a mistake, Deng actually listened and changed course despite being over seventy at the time.

This makes sense. If you look at the history of economic policy, Deng might be the only guy in history who was even more brutally pragmatic in the face of all odds than Lee was. Of course he would admire him29.

The theme of the background decline of the British Empire shows up again here. If Lee got his political start under the British, his last major geopolitical relationship was with Deng, leading the new rising power displacing the British. He spends some time talking about how foolish the British were to try to impose conditions on the surrender of Hong Kong; they just weren’t enough of a world power to make those kinds of demands anymore.

The HBD chapter

Lee seems to have been decades ahead of the curve on both DEI and HBD30.

On DEI, he realized early on that the Malay minority were underperforming in school compared to the Chinese kids. This is a crisis (remember, sectarianism is one of the two things that kills developing countries), and he launches a range of DEI programs to try to support Malay and Indian students (and also reserve them some government posts).

This helps somewhat, but doesn’t fully close the gap. Lee shrugged, figured that this is just hard-to-fully-overcome subgroup IQ differences, and did what he could to ameliorate it. A decade later Charles Murray released The Bell Curve, and Lee mentions feeling vindicated on reading it. He’s generally pretty harsh on people trying to pretend there are no cultural or intelligence gaps between groups, believing that this kind of self-imposed refusal to face facts is futile and counterproductive31.

Lee comes back to this theme quite a bit. If he’s pragmatic enough to work with the Japanese after surviving Sook Ching, he definitely doesn’t have the patience for starry-eyed academics who refuse to face facts. He talks later about finding Harvard disappointing, and about learning to rely on people who actually made things that worked in the real world and to ignore academic theorists, who are too likely to be motivated by blinding idealism.

He also worried about the fertility crisis several decades before anyone else, both in that people weren’t having enough kids and specifically that Singaporean Chinese men didn’t want to marry women who were as smart or smarter than them, preferring to marry down to a woman who would look up to them. This is the one area where he ends up admitting total failure - despite Singapore’s heavy child subsidizing policies and his intense PR push, he couldn’t seem to get any real traction32.

The “Am I a dictator” chapter

“I stressed that freedom could only exist in an orderly state, not when there was continuous contention or anarchy. In Eastern societies, the main objective is to have a well-ordered society so that everyone can enjoy their freedom to the maximum. Parts of contemporary American society were totally unacceptable to Asians because they represented a breakdown of civil society with guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy and vulgar public behavior”

Many people over the years have accused Lee of being a dictator and Singapore being an authoritarian dictatorship. Some men might try to avoid the issue; Lee explicitly brings it up, spends a whole chapter going through every time he’s been accused of acting dictatorial, and explains why actually he was just doing the right thing. Seriously, this guy loves to argue33.

The first thing he argues about is suing journalists for libel. Journalists would argue that anyone who ever tries to limit them in any way is acting dictatorial. Lee argues that he’s only suing them for falsehoods, and legitimate criticism should be defended in courts.

There’s a few points to note here. First, you might question whether courts are going to be entirely fair when Lee’s in charge of the government that appointed them in the first place. Surprisingly, I don’t think that’s necessarily the biggest issue - for one thing, for most of this period people could appeal Singapore cases to a judicial committee in London, which didn’t answer to the Singapore government and limited the impact here. For another, Lee clearly relishes the confrontation; he comes off as a guy who wants to win a fair fight because he’s good at it, not someone beating up a weak opponent. It’s possible this too is a cover, but if he was going to cover muddying the issue and pulling attention away would probably have worked better.

The other thing to worry about here is process as punishment and indirect coercion - even if reporters who could defend their criticism would eventually win their libel suits, journalists would hold that it makes their lives unpleasant and deters legitimate criticism, and that politicians should just sit down and take bad press, arguing before the public when they believe it’s false.

Lee argues that it’s wrong for journalists to expect this, and they need to be held accountable for honesty too. I suspect part of this is just that Lee really loves arguing34.

The dictator-ish behavior I personally found most troubling was the story about prioritizing areas that voted for the PAP by larger margins for housing renovations (remember, most of Singapore’s housing is public and managed by the government). This doesn’t technically make him a dictator, but it’s certainly a pile of bad incentives right there.

The question of Singapore being authoritarian more generally is… complicated. Singapore famously banned gum, because the government thought it was net negative for society to have it. They also had an anti-long hair campaign in the seventies, to discourage hippies. This kind of idea - that if something is bad, the government should ban it - is unimaginable in the American context, where we’re more likely to ask the meta question of whether the government should have the power to do something at all. Lee defends the power of administrative detention without trial on similar grounds - the government uses it well, and if it doesn’t, people will vote for the government to lose that power.

This raises the biggest question about authoritarianism: Where, ultimately, does the government rest its claim to legitimacy?

Lee’s PAP very strongly relies on popular support. They may put a thumb on the scales in some ways (like the housing thing), but they care intensely about popular support35 as the ultimate source of their legitimacy. Lee drives the party to cover a broad political consensus and deliver prosperity; he repeatedly claims that if they fail, they won’t last as the country’s leaders (although he doesn’t specify a mechanism by which this might happen, and seems insufficiently worried by the prospect of a collapse that would take Singapore’s economy down with it).

The biggest risk of decline under authoritarian rule is a less-competent successor inheriting a powerful apparatus and then making mistakes with it, once the founder figure is no longer around to help guide it. In mainland China, for example, it’s worth noting that Jian Zemin and Hu Jintao were both handpicked as successors by Deng. Once they were replaced by Xi, the government started trailing in a different direction.

In Singapore, Lee was replaced by his handpicked successor Goh Chok Tong, and then by his son Loong36. Lawrence Wong, who started his term in 2024, is the first leader Singapore’s had who wasn’t directly chosen by Lee. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how he does (things seem to be going okay so far; it makes sense that replacing a rationalist folk hero with LW would be minimally disruptive).

So what did we learn about Lee?

In some ways, the best historical analogs to Lee are people like Elon Musk and Julius Caesar: Men who went ahead with bold plans, ignored the critics where they were wrong or baselessly skeptical, and made impossible-seeming things work because they were smart enough and correct enough to pull it off.

But the most interesting point of comparison is Thomas Jefferson, because they’re just so different.

When you read America’s founding documents, like the Federalist Papers or the Declaration of Independence, the thing that jumps out is how great the writing is. It’s hard to imagine a modern politician writing like that. It’s hard to imagine a modern politician being smart enough to write at that quality level.

Lee, despite being from the 20th century, actually was that level of smart. And he was direct enough to just write what he really feels, and articulate enough to do it well. So how does he compare?

The first obvious thing is the writing style. Jefferson and Hamilton wrote with bold flourish, with grand ideology and conviction. Lee writes clearly but technically, explaining why his ideas are good and will solve problems. An American founding father might have given grand speeches about his dreams of a free Singapore of equals without racism or outsider control; Lee talked about how racism and outsider controls were barriers to freedom and prosperity and sound economic policy. He’s direct and technical, not a dreamer.

He also doesn’t view government the way Jefferson did. Jefferson wrote about the proper role of government and rights of man; Lee thinks about what the government should be doing on an object level, and does it. He trusts that they will be rewarded with power as they deserve.

Jefferson was writing the first declaration of independence from the British Empire; Lee executed one of the last, against the backdrop of its final decline. When Jefferson dreamed of independence, it was an experiment no one had ever done before. By the time Lee came around it had been done many times; he did his best to learn how to achieve it from the best who had already done it, to perfect the execution like he did with economic and housing and transportation policy. The world got smaller over the two centuries between Jefferson and Lee’s independence declarations, between the rise and the fall of the British Empire. It changed modes from Explore to Exploit.

Jefferson is famous for having lofty ideals he couldn’t live up to, and was tarnished by; he owned slaves and famously had some uncomfortable relations with them even as he wrote about Freedom. Lee had more modest ideals, but he successfully lived up to the ones he did.