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Thomas Paine's Common Sense Message for Us [1]

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Date: 2025-07-04

“...Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for 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.” --Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Today I was privileged to preside at a celebration of the American Revolution and in honor of the occasion, I read excerpts of this influential pamphlet. In the spring of 1775, Paul Revere heralded the shot heard ‘round the world at Lexington and Concord and rounded up the rebels to protect their stores of munitions from the King’s Army. The Revolutionary War was no more than a violent rebellion here and there up to this point, but Thomas Paine, and others like him, had a vision. They saw that the time was ripe to throw of the shackles of the Monarchy once and for all.

Paine’s words, though written in a very different context, have a message for us today. Check this out:

There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the World, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.

Is it just me, or do Paine’s words seem an apt description of a certain golfer who seems to be sequestered from the counsel of dissenting voices? And how about this:

That the crown is this overbearing part in the English constitution needs not be mentioned, and that it derives its whole consequence merely from being the giver of places and pensions is self-evident; wherefore, though we have been wise enough to shut and lock a door against absolute Monarchy, we at the same time have been foolish enough to put the Crown in possession of the key.

So the cause of the key to “absolute Monarchy” in our current context is the radical majority on the Supreme Court, but the effect is no less disastrous now than in Paine’s day. So, what are we to do in such a situation? Paine lays it out clearly:

..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. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.

Paine truly believed that the common sense of his position would win the day. And in fact it did. The British Army won more battles in the Revolutionary War, but over time. the revolutionaries captured the hearts and minds of the majority. Paine saw that as the goal of the revolution:

..instead of gazing at each other with suspicious or doubtful curiosity, let each of us hold out to his neighbor the hearty hand of friendship, and unite in drawing aline, which, like an act of oblivion, shall bury in forgetfulness every former dissension. Let the names of Whig and Tory be extinct; and let none other be heard among us, than those of a good citizen, an open and resolute friend, and a virtuous supporter of the rights of mankind, and of the free and independent States of America.

You may think I am a dreamer, but I believe we can capture the hearts and minds of the American people and once again dwell in the house of Paine.

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