Contributing fundamentally to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles of British workers in the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was the greatest radical of a truly radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774 at the age of thirty-seven. Even then he had never expected such things to happen.
However, struck by America’s startling contradictions and magnificent possibilities, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he dedicated himself to the American cause and through his pamphlets of 1776—Common Sense and the ensuing American Crisis Papers—he emboldened Americans to transform their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.
As Paine saw it: Americans could show the world that humanity had no need for kings and overlords, indeed, that common people, working people, could govern themselves!
Is it any wonder then that we have reached back and recruited Paine to the cause of rescuing America’s revolutionary promise from royal wannabee Donald Trump and his MAGA and GOP (Tory) subjects who seem set upon destroying it?
Vote Democratic top to bottom on November 5th… so we can start acting anew on Citizen Paine’s radical-democratic challenge: “We have it in our power to begin the world again.”
Words That Turned a Rebellion Into Revolution
