Jeffery was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1969. As a boy he was shy and bookish and had an active imagination. He loved reading history, fantasy, and tales of space exploration, and his favorite subjects in school were history and the social sciences. Although Jeffery grew up in Milwaukee’s snowy working-class neighborhoods, he also spent summers at his aunt’s home in sunny, suburban Irvine, California.
Jeffery went to a religious grade school but became an atheist at age nineteen, after exposure to different ideas in public high school and university freed him from the bubble of evangelism. In high school history class he read about nineteenth-century proposals to transform capitalist industrial companies into cooperatives, or enterprises run democratically by their workers. He thought this was a brilliant idea to enlarge the American experiment in democracy. He later learned that this was a form of socialism, and has been a democratic socialist ever since.
As a teenager, Jeffery played bass guitar and in his youthful enthusiasm wanted to be a rock star, so he started college as a music major and explored his creative side for several years. He eventually found that he liked the study of politics even better, and was certainly much better at it. He switched majors to political science and flourished intellectually, adopting a humanist ideal of broad personal development and studying a wide range of subjects in a quest to better understand the human condition. He graduated summa cum laude in political science and economics in 1996 from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and then spent a year in South Korea teaching English. In 1998 he enlisted in the Army Reserves, motivated by a sense of public service and a social scientist’s desire to understand how the military functioned within the government. He became a military intelligence analyst.
Jeffery began graduate studies in political theory at Penn State in fall 1998, where he was the first Bruce Miller Graduate Fellow. After earning his Master’s degree with honors in 2000, he moved to Phoenix to work on his doctorate at Arizona State, where he was a University Graduate Fellow. He loved his years in the desert and was able to be close to his family, many of whom had moved to Tucson. Having earned all his degrees at state universities, he understands how crucial public education is for democracy.
Jeffery’s PhD studies were interrupted by a post-9/11 military deployment from 2002-2003, first to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq for the Bush administration’s invasion. During this time he saw from the inside the disinformation, alternative facts, and propaganda used to mobilize the United States into moral and strategic disaster. He was honorably discharged from the Army in 2004. After returning to grad school he completed his doctoral dissertation, The Body Politic: Organic Metaphors in Ancient and Medieval Political Thought, in 2006 and was awarded a PhD with honors.
Although Jeffery aspired to become a professor, like many new PhDs in the tight academic market he was unable to find a full-time position. In 2008 he moved to Washington, DC and has worked as an intelligence analyst and human rights officer for the Defense and State Departments. He is a member of the DC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and has attended numerous marches and rallies in recent years. He is also the lead organizer of the History of Philosophy Book Club, the best philosophy Meetup group in DC. He lives in Alexandria, VA with his long-term girlfriend and their cat. When not reading, writing, or discussing philosophy and politics, he enjoys jazz, modern art, and modern architecture, and travels when he can.