John Adams had little good to say about Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no Severer Satyr on the Age. For Such a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Bitch Wolf, never before in any Age of the World was Suffered by the Poltroonery of mankind, to run through Such a Career of Mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.
Adams described Common Sense as “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted Crapulous Mass.” He feared the egalitarian and populist dimension of Paine’s support of democratic republicanism. Though he and Paine would agree that the colonies should declare independence from England, Adams thought Paine’s ideas about government were just too radical. Adams represented the thinking of many of our so-called “Founding Fathers.” They distrusted the masses. Even great defenders of the common farmer such as Thomas Jefferson believed that the country should be run by a natural aristocracy–men with education and wealth who could make virtuous and disinterested decisions for the good of the country rather than for the good of themselves. Paine’s version of “Common Sense” was too close to the notorious (at least by 18th century standards) “D word”–democracy. Are people who are permitted to participate in the political process based solely on their “common sense” really capable of making wise decisions for the republic?
Damon Linker is not as graphic as John Adams, but his recent article in The New Republic, “Against Common Sense,” sounds a lot like Adams’s thoughts on Paine. I doubt Linker would say that Glenn Beck was “a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Bitch Wolf.” After all, we are supposedly much more civil in today’s day and age. But he certainly has little patience for those who manipulate common sense for political purposes.
Linker offers a quick history of “common sense” in American politics, from Paine to Princeton Seminary (impressive) to William Jennings Bryan to Protestant fundamentalism to Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. Move over Richard Hofstadter, Damon Linker is in town and he has his own jeremiad on the “paranoid style.”
While I agree with Linker’s disgust over the way in which Beck, O’Rielly, and Limbaugh use the airwaves to promote their “common sense” agenda, and I admit that it is hard to defend the racism of Wallace, the paranoia of McCarthy, or the corruption of Nixon (neither do I have any desire to do so), I do think he misses some of the virtues inherent within this kind of common sense populism. Paine may not have liked big government, but workers found solidarity in his name well into the nineteenth century. William Jennings Bryan appealed to the ordinary farmers who possessed a local knowledge of the land, cultivated a sense of place, and promoted a religious critique of corporate capitalism that is often under appreciated today. (As Michael Lind has recently argued in Salon, there is the potential of an old-fashioned populism that is not tied to savage capitalism and consumerism). And whatever one says about Reagan, Bush, and Palin, they did (and do, in Palin’s case) seem to get more Americans involved in the political process, even if they happen to be the kinds of Americans that Linker does not like.
I want to give Linker the benefit of the doubt. It seems that his gripe is more with folks like Beck, O’Reilly, and Limbaugh than it is with the hard-working producer classes who own small businesses, work with their hands, and tend to the field. I do wonder, however, if these radio and television pundits are leading these ordinary folks astray with their pompous rhetoric, or if they are simply representing or channeling a populism that is alive and well on Main Street. If the later is true, Linker sounds a lot like some of those old Federalists who wanted no part of the masses.
In the end, I think Linker is right when he concludes that conservative pundits do not have a corner on the “common sense” market. We all have common sense and as a result it should not be manipulated as a political tool. Yet I can’t help but think that Linker, like many of our Founding Fathers, believes that some have more of it than others.
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