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Published 250 Years Ago Today, Thomas Paine's Common Sense Must Inspire Us Again
With a document that speaks powerfully to our current crisis, Paine emboldened his fellow citizens-to-be to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war for independence and inspired them to establish a democratic republic.
Jan 10, 2026
Common Sense by Thomas Paine is the most influential work of political literature in American history.
Self-published on January 10, 1776, Common Sense instantly became a sensation, spreading like wildfire across the colonies. Within a few weeks, it had sold more copies than any book in the history of the colonies.
Paine’s arguments persuaded thousands-upon-thousands of people throughout the 13 colonies to demand more than reform, to support complete independence from England and join the revolutionary cause.
Less than six months after Common Sense was first published in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence was signed in the same city, establishing a new country defined, in contrast to its European predecessors, by its commitment to equality, liberty and the consent of the governed—just as Paine advocated in Common Sense (and, unlike the founding fathers, Paine did not hesitate to advocate for democracy).
Paine showed Americans... that they could govern themselves without kings and overlords, and that they could set an example to the world of what a nation of citizens, not subjects, could accomplish. The relevance of these passages for our troubled times cannot be overstated.
Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia from England in late 1774. Paine quickly fell in love with America and its people. Struck by the country’s startling contradictions, magnificent possibilities, and wonderful energies, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he committed himself to the American cause. In the Spring of 1775, he called for the abolition of slavery, a position he saw as consistent with—and central to—the rebellion.
Paine published Common Sense on January 10, 1776, a pamphlet of fewer than 50 pages, that changed the course of world history. In its pages, he harnessed Americans’ shared but as-of-yet unstated thoughts, expressing them in words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth” and “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine emboldened his fellow citizens-to-be to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war for independence, and inspired them to establish a democratic republic. Paine defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.
In Common Sense, Paine showed Americans that they were in fact Americans, not British colonists, that they could govern themselves without kings and overlords, and that they could set an example to the world of what a nation of citizens, not subjects, could accomplish. The relevance of these passages for our troubled times cannot be overstated.
Paine appreciated the ethnic and religious diversity that already prevailed and projected the nation-to-be as a refuge for those seeking freedom. (Indeed, many passages in Common Sense speak directly to the crises enveloping America today.)
Crucially, Paine portrayed America not as thirteen separate entities, but as a singular nation-state: “Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honour… Our strength is continental not provincial.” And he proposed a charter—a constitution encompassing a Bill of Rights—both to bind the prospective states into a union and to guarantee that liberty, equality, and democracy would prevail. Most emphatically, he argued for “freedom of conscience” and, to assure it, the separation of Church and State: “As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith….”
In the spring of that year, 120,000 copies of Common Sense were sold. 500,000 by the end of the Revolutionary War. (Throughout Paine took no royalties, using the funds to buy mittens for General Washington’s troops). Plus, newspapers throughout the colonies excerpted it and working people read it aloud in taverns, cafes, and farm fields. Soon, town councils north and south were petitioning the Second Continental Congress to declare INDEPENDENCE! America turned Paine into a radical, and he turned Americans into democratic revolutionaries.
Today, we honor Common Sense on the 250th Anniversary of its publication, and we honor its author, Tom Paine, one of the authors of our country
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Renee Good Died From the Kind of State Violence Our Founders Warned Against
When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
Jan 09, 2026
When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons on Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.
As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood”—as in “Do Good”—to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.
When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.
Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough.
Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.
Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.
In "Essay No. 6", in 1722, Dogood wrote:
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.
Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.
And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.
For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.
James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system—splitting the government into three co-equal parts—that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).
Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that Wednesday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.
To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital… [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she-Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Donald Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.
This isn’t an uniquely American problem: It’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz noted Wednesday, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.
Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.
Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.
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The Coup Matures: the Destruction of the Legislative Process
By undermining core constitutional legislative processes, authoritarianism supplants democracy, thereby clearing a path to fascism.
Dec 18, 2025
After nearly five years of the Trump reign, the siege on democracy intensifies. Citizens have learned much about the intentions and the trajectory of the rebellion. This is not an unconstitutional assault, it is an anti-constitutional assault.
The perpetrators of the coup have also learned a great deal about organizing and escalating their crusade against democracy.
Who would have thought we would be facing the democratic struggle of our lifetime? Well, actually large sectors of our society are all to familiar with this battle; the historically marginalized have always fought to win the fruits of democracy. The Constitution never explicitly mandated economic or political rights for all. Throughout history people achieved their basic rights by relentless effort and at times mortal conflict.
The doctrinal system choreographed by political and economic elites hoodwinked about 30% of adults into believing a willfully ignorant, narcissistic buffoon would protect their interests. Now combine these manufactured perceptions with the barbaric reality that this rich country has never afforded all people access to the power needed for real advancement.
Can a republican government be devised that could withstand the depredations of genuinely despotic leaders?
A toxic storm brews, into the cauldron mix a large economically vulnerable population, an unresponsive and corrupt political system, a carnival barking demagogue and the consequences are obvious.
Malevolent leaders and a malignancy in the system produces an authoritarianism that could metastasize into an American style fascism. In 1919 Irish poet W. B. Yeats, writing about their struggle for democracy against British imperialism, wrote:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
This paper examines today’s struggle to defend democracy by exploring the existential war on the Constitution, in particular the legislative process, the heart and art of representative government.
Madison’s Nightmare
The founders constructed a new form of government, one with appreciable democratic attributes albeit with limited public participation. Just ask the enslaved, women, Natives, and other assailed classes.
These men of “property and standing” curiously were interested in the vagaries of human nature, in particular virtue as it related to a new republican form of government. As such a dialectic was formulated about the role of morality in the public sphere—the government and the private sphere—citizens.
To account for human nature, the founders felt virtuous leaders would be needed to influence and guide citizens thereby ensuring a virtuous society. James Madison said as much in Federalist No.10 and No. 57, “sufficient virtue among men for self government… can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.” He continued, a constitution requires rulers who possess “wisdom and virtue to pursue the common good…”
This brings us to what this writer calls “Madison’s Nightmare”; can a republican government be devised that could withstand the depredations of genuinely despotic leaders? The founders were a nervous but optimistic bunch. They supported Benjamin Franklin’s plea at the end of the convention “to place trust in our own fallibility,” as such they ratified a constitution they believed would promote public and private virtue.
The Constitution Bends to the Coup
The Constitution was a pioneering and bold experiment especially in those dark days of monarchy, it was also plagued by undemocratic characteristics. Any fair appraisal recognizes its reliance on imperialism, slavery, the primacy of private property, sexism, racism, and classism.
Essential features lauded as Enlightenment constructs—the Social Contract, Popular Sovereignty, Separation of Powers, and Checks and Balances—have always been stronger in concept than reality. History has eroded and now with this coup is destroying these foundational principles.
The Social Contract Is in Default: The founder’s theorist, John Locke, devised a deal: The government would provide order and security in exchange for citizen loyalty and compliance. This contract is in default as the government can not or will not provide the security of opportunity for citizen development.
Today the people’s grievances are with a political economy that serves elite interests first and foremost, and with an oligarch masquerading as a champion of the people and democracy.
Sovereignty Isn’t So Popular: Consent of the governed is no longer required. There is a crucial disconnect between what citizens need and what the government is willing to provide. Basic needs go unsatisfied—health, housing, employment, environmental protection, and civil rights.
Powers Are No Longer Separated: The corporate and political state are joined at the wallet by mutual interests. Do not the wealthy elites have a louder political voice to determine polices in each branch and don’t these interlocking interests blunt the independence of each branch?
Checks Don’t Balance: The rule of law is flaunted with galling impunity. Congressional oversight, funding control, advice and consent, and oversight are seriously compromised or outright ignored.
The coup reveals systemic vulnerabilities. Listen to renowned conservative legal lion, retired federal Appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig, decry the “end of the rule of law” and how the Constitution “never contemplated and therefore, didn’t ever provide for a process… to withstand an attack from within” (“Judge Warns… Peril,” Michigan Law School, U of Michigan, 9/28/25)
So Madison’s nightmare haunts us.
The Long Train of Abuses
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson enumerated a “long train of abuses,” 28 specific grievances against King George. Today the people’s grievances are with a political economy that serves elite interests first and foremost, and with an oligarch masquerading as a champion of the people and democracy.
As Noam Chomsky reminds us, Adam Smith in his 1776 study, The Wealth of Nations, warned about the “masters of the universe,” the elite corporate class who naturally align with the political elite to run a country. They hold to a “vile maxim” that states “all for ourselves and nothing for other people.”
Today in our country the vile maxim manifests itself in warped budget priorities that give record tax breaks to the rich while ignoring basic human needs. Since the 1980s there has been a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%(Price and Edwards, ”Trends in Income…,” Rand, 9/12/20).
How is this remotely a democratic arrangement?
The Trump-Republican coup is ravaging the abilities of our leaders of virtue to defend the constitutional principles that protect us from anti-democratic impulses. This is abundantly evident in the treacherous ways the coup overseers are deliberately crippling traditional legislative functions. This occurs in two distinct ways: by the short-circuiting or bypassing of traditional lawmaking and by destroying the congressional hearing oversight process.
Short-Circuit Lawmaking
Article II, Sec. I gives the president vague and expansive power to declare an emergency. By doing so some 125 statutory powers are unlocked for the president’s use or misuse. This empowers an autocrat to declare an emergency then sign an executive order that bypasses the will of Congress. President Donald Trump has signed a stunning 440 executive orders, far exceeding his immediate predecessors. These orders, among others, have abolished historic agencies, imposed executive tariffs, and authorized the sacking of thousands of civil servants without due process all the while "saving" Americans from subversive “DEI and woke” policies (See Brennan Center of NYU on “Presidential Emergency Power”).
Other bypass procedures include impoundments, the illegal refusal to spend congressionally authorized funds. Coup kingpins also detour Congress by using “prefab,” canned legislation written by corporate shills like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation. Heritage’s Project 2025 comprises a substantial portion of the Trump agenda. These right-wing entrepreneurs design bills to get national healthcare, public schools, civil and voting rights, and unions off our backs.
The real genius here is the people’s irrepressible desire for justice, not the ability of a government to withstand leaders who lack virtue.
Another innovation in autocracy is the establishing of a shadow government within the government, then hiring a corporate mogul, Elon Musk, to drive it. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is a gleefully cruel scheme to eliminate human service programs, fire thousands of civil servants, and “shrink the size of government so it can drown in a bathtub,” as croaked Grover Norquist, a Republican strategist who first surfaced during the Reagan era.
The despots also circumvent normal legislating by concocting an omnibus bill, a massive stew of taxing and spending initiatives too comprehensive and complex for human digestion. Then fast-tracking a vote with little opportunity for debate. The “Big Ugly” budget bill of 2025 was over 1,000 pages and given to members less than 24 hours before the vote.
The Dismantling of Congressional Oversight
A vital element in the lawmaking process is Congress’ power to conduct oversight, hearings, and investigations. This is where the “loyal opposition” can exert influence on policy. Today the Republican strategy is obvious, throw a monkey wrench at these duties of accountability.
Trump handmaidens Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth, and Health and Human Services director Robert Kennedy, et al.—when called to testify before Congress—arrogantly engage in a circus of noncompliance. These toadies offer nonanswers, ad hominem attacks, and audacious lies.
Congressional oversight powers are so mutilated that even diligent and effective Democratic watchdogs such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), et al. are now reduced to mere eloquent barking. Thus the opposition’s oversight powers are fatally neutralized.
Coercion, decrees, mandates, and shakedowns replace analysis, debate, and compromise, which are the usual ingredients for legislating. As Maureen Dowd of the New York Times observed, Trump “rules he does not govern.” By undermining core constitutional legislative processes, authoritarianism supplants democracy, thereby clearing a path to fascism. (Opinion Section, NY Times, 11/9/25)
Is the Recent Past To Be Prologue?
Historic and contemporary flaws in our political economy, combined with tyrannical leaders, have culminated in the crisis of our lifetime. The structural guardrails are corroded, and leaders of good will struggle to restore what is lost.
This, the wealthiest country in the world, has never adequately addressed the basic security needs of large sectors of our population. Predictably then, our most vulnerable citizens searching for better opportunities become susceptible to the conjurings of a demagogue and to the manipulations of an increasingly unregulated economic and media ecosystem.
Across the nation good people are committed to defending and extending democracy.
While never a vigorous representative democracy, this system has intermittently and begrudgingly responded to citizen initiatives to force the county to live up to its founding ideals. The real genius here is the people’s irrepressible desire for justice, not the ability of a government to withstand leaders who lack virtue. The legacy struggles of our people to win an equal place in society represents the most dynamic and honorable expressions of democracy we have. This country is its most democratic when we fight for it.
Today an impressive percentage of the population is heeding Martin Luther King’s warning: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” Across the nation good people are committed to defending and extending democracy. In these perilous times, the rapid and broadening resistance to the Trump-Republican coup can accelerate the reclaiming and reimagining of democracy in the United States, bringing us to a place where, as Yeats wrote, a “terrible beauty is born.”
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