An Independence Day Without Common Sense

This 250th year of American independence has seen no shortage of paeans to Thomas Paine, the high priest of the American Revolution. Organs of liberal-left politics from the Atlantic to the New York Times to the Nation have implored a return to Paine and his 1776 tract, Common Sense, in our moment of democratic peril. Meanwhile, a widely reviewed new book places Paine at the ideological taproot of the revolutionary politics that ushered in modern democracy, pointing to him as a source for democracy's renewal today.

However, there is reason to question this copy-and-paste of Paine to contemporary conditions. A revolutionary rallying cry for popular rule in 1776, today common sense is a counterrevolutionary euphemism unable to capture what is most compelling about liberal democracy. As we celebrate Independence Day, we'd also do well to rethink this storied American manifesto.

In Common Sense, Paine issues a withering critique of monarchical rule, calling forth the wisdom of commoners as the commonsensical alternative to the arbitrary power of kingship. "In the following pages, I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense," Paine intoned, while urging revolt against the British Crown. With the rhetorical gifts of a radical pamphleteer, Paine cast the revolutionary politics of popular sovereignty as an incontrovertible truth — no more contestable than the color of the sky or the contemptibility of kings. Independence birthed a new nation but also a dominant political idiom, cementing common sense as our collective creed.

Long before political scientists employed the term populism, Paine laid out its foundational rhetorical lexicon, offering populist politics the epistemological justification of common sense. For this reason, Paine's formulation remains a central ingredient of democratic societies premised on popular rule and governed through participatory institutions. For Paine, though, common sense wasn't merely a static epistemological concept. Rather, it sanctioned a political process, serving to legitimate mass political mobilization: common sense was to be achieved through the realization of modern democracy.

But over the past two-and-a-half centuries, common sense has drifted from revolutionary to mainstream discourse, becoming every politician's professed catechism. Naturally, political elites copiously genuflect to common sense: the American people are a plainspoken, wholesome lot; their wisdom is intuitive and instinctive; and politics is a homey enterprise best steered by the everyday experiences of ordinary people. While these homages to common sense perform affiliation with the people, they don't follow Paine's usage in calling forth radical action or challenging conventional reasoning.

Following the 2024 election, the Democratic Party commandeered Paine's catchphrase. Polling at historic lows in the wake of Donald Trump's reelection nudged Democrats to adopt common sense as a means of reconnecting with alienated voters. Because Democratic positions across a variety of issues — immigration and border security, transgender rights, race and DEI, the economy and inflation — were perceived as out of step with much of the American public, repackaging the party as a vehicle of common sense promised to cultivate the folksy image and everyman kitsch that Democrats have surrendered in the Trump era.

This newfangled appeal to common sense cuts across internal divisions, emanating from moderate and left caucuses. The centrist Joe Manchin writes to former Democratic colleagues in a book subtitled "In Defense of Common Sense." But the progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains that so-called radical policies are simply common sense.

Party leadership is on board, too. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries summons common sense as a Democratic governing ethos, employing it to explain the party's position on last year's government shutdown, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoes Jeffries, encasing even the most arcane elements of Democratic pushback to Trump, like defending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in the language of common sense. And likely 2028 presidential hopefuls such as Andy Beshear, Gavin Newsom, and Josh Shapiro all highlight their commonsense credentials.

It is tempting to celebrate the Democrats' post-2024 turn to common sense. After all, Trump has framed his politics as common sense since 2016, and his 2025 inaugural address promised a "revolution of common sense." Why not contest Trump's favored rhetorical terrain?

A dilemma arises because common sense is not an empty signifier or a neutral discourse into which a Democratic agenda may be poured. A Janus-faced idea in the American imagination, common sense originated as a clarion call for American independence in Paine's revolutionary period. But in our era, it serves as a key plank of reactionary politics and a trope of Trumpian autocracy as often as it indicates progressive bona fides.

If common sense can be invoked by everyone from AOC to Donald Trump, it's fair to ask: Is it an appropriate vector for mobilizing democracy's defense today? Can common sense still call forth the revolutionary democratic politics Paine fashioned it for?

There was always an irony in Common Sense. For Paine, common sense entailed commitment not only to popular rule but to progressive ideals of the modern era, such as antislavery politics, secularism, and social welfare. Yet, these revolutionary tenets went under-articulated in Common Sense and were not widely held in Paine's America: the modern society Paine intuited as common sense was nothing of the sort.

In practice, the emancipatory politics Paine reached for was the slow grind of a small band of abolitionists and freethinkers in the decades after his death, not the natural upswell of common sense. By deploying common sense anticipatorily, Paine presumed the radical politics he intended to generate but did not fully articulate.

This is where the irony deepens. The progressive democratic achievements associated with Paine's legacy have little to do with some static storehouse of common sense. They became common sense as a result of political struggle and democratic contestation.

Contemporary invocations of common sense often overlook this fact. Too often, they misconstrue causality: politics is understood as a fixed repository of common sense that institutions translate into policy, overlooking politics as an ongoing deliberative process through which common sense is itself created and transformed. In this depoliticized frame, all deployments of common sense appeal to inchoate sentiment, recoiling from full-throated political agitation, preferring to trade in intuitive appeal rather than the kind of democratic deliberation — debate, argument, and evidence — that facilitates collective learning.

This is what makes common sense a fraught signifier for progressive democratic politics. To be sure, common sense has been wielded across the ideological spectrum, as effective for revolutionary purposes as reactionary ones. But reactionary politics benefits more from the subtle circumvention of democratic deliberation that exhortations to common sense point towards.

After all, MAGA is most effective not when presented as a fully articulated antidemocratic ideology, but when it appears as a set of homespun truths, so sensible that no decent American would dare object. Common sense undergirds American authoritarianism not by explicitly opposing constitutional democracy but by casting the political contestation it exists to facilitate as unnecessary. At best, contestation is cast as superfluous in the face of the overwhelming appeal of common sense. At worst, the suppression of disagreement is figured as necessary to defend the common sense of right-minded Americans and restore political order.

Of course, Paine's revolutionary lore is so entwined with the memory of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution that we have conflated common sense with a defense of constitutional democracy. In fact, these represent competing political sensibilities: constitutional democracy protects the space in which citizens can debate what constitutes common sense.

Constitutional democracy is the result of counterintuitive reasoning, the delicate design of cross purposes and limiting principles. By protecting heterodox and unpopular expression, constitutional democracy is suspicious of settling matters by common convention, even where convention is seemingly sensible; by affording elemental civil liberties and civil rights to all persons irrespective of civic status or social caste, constitutional democracy contests the contours of what and who we construe as common to us; by making the rule of law its organizing principle, constitutional democracy insulates an independent civil service against the bully pulpit of common sense.

None of this is to suggest that democracy should be the preserve of enlightened experts or dispense with popular participation. Quite the opposite. Constitutional democracy does not refuse mass politics; it provides the institutional framework through which mass politics can be enacted while ensuring political disagreement remains possible. By institutionalizing political opposition through regular, competitive elections, constitutional democracy unsettles common sense, reminding citizens that no political agenda enjoys universal assent.

A Democratic Party or a democratic left whose lodestar is common sense risks surrendering its transformative capacity, reducing the project of mass persuasion and mobilization in a constitutional democracy to the assertion of ossified dogma presented as self-evident truth.

We need not jettison Paine. But too often Common Sense is read as a revolutionary one-off, ensnared by the mythology of national independence. In fact, the populist project of today's democratic left owes much to the Paine that followed Common Sense.

In the years after independence, Paine joined the ranks of America's first antislavery society in Philadelphia, and he enlisted in the French Revolution, issuing canonical texts challenging a then-nascent counterrevolutionary politics, including Rights of Man (1791), Age of Reason (1794), and Agrarian Justice (1797). All this political agitation earned Paine the scorn of his countrymen and erstwhile American revolutionaries. When Paine died in 1809, only about a dozen people attended his funeral.

Paine understood that politics is a discursive duel: the dominant language constructs our horizon of possibility, making some agendas more intelligible and imperative than others. What makes Paine a revolutionary figure worth revisiting is not merely Common Sense itself, but the sharpness with which he contested the contours of common sense after 1776. Paine went on to subvert his own summons to common sense, rather than bow to a national legacy he could have claimed. To learn this most enduring of Paine's lessons, we will need to tell a different story about Common Sense.