Back in 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, when the ground was shifting beneath our feet in ways that, today, might barely register on our wearied internal seismographs, political analyst David Smith volunteered an explanation for the rise of MAGA. John McCain, he said, in choosing Sarah Palin for his running mate during the 2008 United States presidential election, had opened a Pandora’s box of right-wing populism; and while Palin was the first figure to spring from that box, Donald Trump lay hiding at the bottom.
Smith’s account is attractive in all the ways that analogies involving Pandora’s box tend to be. It portrays historical change as sudden, violent, irreversible, and marked by a profound disproportion between what we thought we knew and what our actions have wrought. It also has the usual drawbacks of such box-based thinking. For our demons do not escape once and for all; they keep coming back to the only home they know, be it ever so cramped, and we keep letting them out again, forgetful of what happened last time.
With the populist box that Smith describes, there is an added complication. It’s not just that the box had been opened before—by Andrew Jackson, for example, in 1828, when he successfully ran for president against the buttoned-down, reform-minded John Quincy Adams. It’s that the United States itself came out of that box, in 1776, with the publication of a political pamphlet titled Common Sense that defined the terms of American independence for anyone willing and able to read them.
The man with his hand on the lid that time was a failed-businessman-turned-propagandist named Thomas Paine, a political outsider who was in some ways a colonial Trump and in others about as far from him as it is possible to be. And just as the best myths of Pandora’s box often direct our gaze toward Pandora herself, so it seems worthwhile to consider the life and writings of this truly unusual man, the better to understand what exactly he set free.
Paine dared to cast the American colonists’ messy, perpetual squabble with the British as the single most significant conflict that humankind had ever known.
Thomas was born a Pain (he added the ‘e’ in middle age, while starting his life over) in Thetford, England, on January 29, 1737. His father was a Quaker who made corsets, his mother an Anglican from a good family. When Thomas was not running away to sea, he was learning and sometimes practicing the family trade, getting a modest education (no Latin allowed), and possibly preaching a little. He married Mary Lambert in 1759 and lost her in childbirth the following year. He married Elizabeth Ollive 1771, but the marriage failed, as did his fledgling business career. Awarded 400 pounds in the settlement, he made his way to London, seeking some sort of direction for his rudderless life.
What he found in London was something better: an audience with Benjamin Franklin, whom he somehow impressed. For a man lacking in prospects and acquainted with failure, meeting the patron saint of self-fashioning must have felt like divine revelation. Not long after, with nothing particular to keep him in Europe, he set sail for Philadelphia. Although an adoring 1819 biography of Paine claims that he traveled with several personalized letters of recommendation signed by Franklin, what he had was closer to an all-purpose blurb: “The bearer Mr. Thomas Paine is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man.”
That was more than enough. Having befriended the printer and bookseller Benjamin Rush, Paine soon tried his hand at writing. The result was Common Sense. Claiming to offer only “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” but also providing remarkably vivid images and endlessly quotable turns of phrase, Paine’s pamphlet made an argument about history that changed history itself. With what seems impossible self-assurance, he dared to cast the American colonists’ messy, perpetual squabble with the British as the single most significant conflict that humankind had ever known. He issued a rallying cry to all American colonists on behalf of all freedom-loving people who had ever been and all those to come. He invented the American Revolution.
Common Sense was the most widely read pamphlet of its time, and it was made to be. Just as significant as the pamphlet’s argument was its sense of an audience. As Jill Lepore put it: “Paine wrote like no one else: he wrote for everyone.” Writing for everyone, the way Paine does it, means a lot more than favoring short sentences and firework-like imagery; it means treating his readers as equals partners in the making of the future. Underlying every syllable of Paine’s polemic is a deeply rooted belief that you, Reader, whoever you are, whatever you do, matter enormously to the fate of the colonies and the world, that what you choose to think will in large measure decide what becomes of life as we know it.
A mere cynic would use this language to get people drunk on power; but Paine believed every word, and he saw himself sobering people up to the reality they faced. That included people with less education than himself. He must have known the writings of political theorists like Hobbes and Locke, but he was singularly unconcerned with whether his readers knew them, or knew that he knew. Paine wrote for common audiences to build a common cause. For him, the word “common” was never pejorative.
How are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty.
At its core, Common Sense makes a truly revolutionary argument about every generation’s relationship to time, tradition, and history. With examples drawn from Scripture and across the length of history, Paine commits rhetorical regicide. His target is not one king, but all of them. When we trace any royal line back to its progenitor, he argues, that first king always turns out to be a swaggering thug, a bully whom no one in their right mind would follow. Resigning oneself to life under such a person’s authority would be bad enough, but hereditary monarchy makes things infinitely worse: the generation that crowns him also sacrifices their descendants to his, trading away the freedoms of numberless future generations long before they are even born. For people who would do such a thing, Paine’s contempt has no bottom.
But how are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty. Paine, reversing centuries’ worth of regard for age and experience, argued that freedom is not a privilege that the old may confer, but a right that the young must demand. Every rising generation should hold its predecessors accountable, boldly taking its rights from them and leaving the rest of their property—superstitions, prejudices, structures of power—to decay with them in the grave.
It’s hard to overstate the rift between Paine and his fellow founding fathers. John Adams could not stand him. Jefferson only sometimes could. More than a clash of personalities, this was a fundamental difference of political philosophy. Historian Terry Bouton has argued compellingly that most of the framers, landholding elites, deeply mistrusted the mass of American countrymen, and saw democracy as a wild, unruly stallion that needed to be tamed. Paine was different. In his mind, a tame stallion was no stallion at all; it might as well be cattle. He much preferred to give the animal the spurs.
And he did—repeatedly. Which might explain why he got thrown off—repeatedly. Traveling to England, he was incarcerated by a government fearful of seeing their monarchy overthrown at home as abroad. Moving next to France, where he had been invited by the radical Jacobins, Paine alienated them by arguing that Louis XVI should receive clemency: “Kill the king, but save the man.” He could not cease to be himself, to the point where even revolutionaries found him revolting. Returning to the United States once Jefferson had secured his release (something Washington had not cared to do), he lived to see the nation of his dreams deride and finally forget him. He died in 1809, senile and destitute, in a farmhouse on the outskirts of New York.
Watching an American president act like a king, as we are now doing, Paine would turn over in his grave—except that he doesn’t have one. The remains have proved almost as restless as the man. A political writer named William Cobbett, who had despised Paine in life, had a kind of conversion experience and became his most ardent disciple. Cobbett travelled to New Rochelle, New York to collect Paine’s bones, then brought them to England in the hope of establishing a monument in his honor, at which proposal the powers-that-be more or less died laughing. The bones, far from gaining a memorial, were lost to history.
Since then, Paine has mostly been treated as a lesser founder, his skill with language more than offset by his erratic nature and political ineptitude. What is his common sense, after all, next to the cosmopolitan genius of Jefferson, or the martial courage of Washington?
Margaret Thatcher said that Europe was created by history and America by philosophy. We too talk about the United States as a nation built on ideas—of liberty, justice, self-determination. Paine, the first man to make us think that, secretly knew something deeper, and he left that secret pressed between the pages of his pamphlets. He knew that rhetoric has world-shaping power that even the most impeccable theory cannot access. He knew that stories give us life at least as much as we do them. For a nation obsessed with hearing its own story told and retold, there is perhaps something uncomfortable about looking too long at the original teller. He knows too much.
