I knew this was going to be a difficult semiquincentennial—a word as hard to say as the past few years have been to live through. There hasn’t been a lot to celebrate lately, so this Fourth of July I decided to celebrate our aspirations rather than our realities. Which is how I found myself, the next day, on a hot, crowded train full of people bound for a jazz festival, heading to Lewes—the Sussex town where Thomas Paine found his political voice—to tell Democrats Abroad UK, who organise tirelessly to get out the American vote overseas, what Paine would say about where we find ourselves.
First, a walking tour of radical Lewes with people who know every cobble: the White Hart, where Paine kept winning “most obstinate haranguer” at the Headstrong Club upstairs, and Bull House, where he lived, recently reopened as a museum thanks to the remarkable Leanne O’Boyle, who’s leading its restoration and gives us a terrific tour. In 1774, Paine sold up and sailed for Philadelphia with no more than a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Fourteen months later, he published the pamphlet Common Sense and argued America into existence. Lewes is where the fuse was lit; America is where the detonation went off.
The panel is me and my old friend Bonnie Greer—the Chicago mafia descending on East Sussex, I joke, Bonnie from the south side, me from the north suburbs. They’ve asked me how Paine speaks to our moment, and let’s just say I have thoughts. Common Sense argued Americans into independence, but its more profound work was to give the world a radically new way of thinking about government.
Paine opens with a distinction we keep getting wrong: society and government are not the same. “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.” Society is what we create because we need and like each other—the local school, the fire brigade. Government is what we create because not everyone can be trusted—it’s there to restrain the worst of us. The government is just machinery. Inspecting the machinery of government is our job as citizens, and we’re meant to say if it’s out of order.
Then Paine does something bolder. He tells the colonists they are, in effect, already self-governing—that the king and parliament, an ocean away, do not actually rule them. He isn’t proposing a principle so much as stating a fact and daring them to live up to it—in shouty all caps. “In America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” It’s the heart of the argument, and it gives us a test. Who is above the law? If the answer is “no one,” congratulations, you’re free. If the answer is “someone”—you have a king, whatever you call him.
Paine’s deepest contempt was reserved not for kings but for the circus that enables them: the courtiers, the flatterers, the people paid to confuse one man’s ego with the public good. So he wanted the crown not removed but smashed, “and scattered among the people whose right it is.” Power must be broken up, its sovereignty distributed to everyone.
The founders were not naive. The American system assumes bad-faith actors will come for it—hence the locks on the doors of the machinery: checks and balances, courts, elections, a free press. But locks can be picked. The founders’ bet was never that everyone would be virtuous, only that enough people would be, and that they’d stay vigilant. Those people still outnumber the looters. The official who won’t falsify the numbers, the election worker counting ballots under threat, the campaigners getting out the vote, they are the load-bearing wall of the republic.
A government preying on its citizens has forfeited the name of government. It’s the situation Paine wrote ‘Common Sense’ for
So what would Paine say about a president who treats court orders as jokes, pardons as patronage, public office as a private revenue stream? He already said it: “when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.” When government inflicts the harms it was hired to prevent—and our taxes fund the salaries and the planes of the people doing it—the protector has become the predator, and it makes the calamity worse. That is more than failure: a government preying on its citizens has forfeited the name of government. It’s the situation he wrote Common Sense for. What would Paine say? Resist.
In December 1776, the war Common Sense had started was nearly lost—Washington in retreat, his ragtag army disintegrating. Paine, marching with the troops, wrote another pamphlet, The American Crisis, to be read aloud to freezing soldiers in the dark: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” I used to hear “try” simply as “strain”—times that wear us down. But Paine meant it as a trial: these are the times that test our spirit. The American Crisis speaks to the 250th as much as Common Sense, maybe more. The idea of America is not on trial: we are.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine said. “The birthday of a new world is at hand.” Our 250th birthday is not a party, I’ve realised, it’s a renewal of vows. Republics are begun—and defended, and begun again—by the people who show up. There is no other mechanism; there never was. Paine sold Common Sense for pennies and waived his royalties so everyone could read it—the original get-out-the-vote campaign. The smashed crown, its sovereignty redistributed across the people, comes to us in the form of a ballot.
Paine should get the last word (he usually did). “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
