“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” wrote the great English radical Thomas Paine in his hugely influential pamphlet Common Sense, calling for American independence from British rule under a republican government which guaranteed individual rights and liberties.
The pamphlet, which sold upwards of half a million copies before the end of the American War of Independence, was published exactly 250 years ago today, on 10 January, 1776. By the grimmest of ironies, its anniversary comes at the very moment when the cause of America and global liberty is fast foundering as the fundamental principles of 1776 are discarded by the equally radical American counter-revolution of 2026.
Donald Trump and his administration openly despise democratic and legal restraints, transforming America into the antithesis of Paine’s expectations. In the space of a few days, the US has kidnapped the president of an independent state, taken control of that country’s oil wealth, asserted its right to seize any vessel on the high seas, and reiterated its plans to annex the vast Arctic island of Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous part of Denmark.
Paine’s vision has been subverted
Even before the thirteen colonies had declared independence, Paine believed they had already established a better society than in the old world. He pointed to America as “the asylum for the lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither they have fled, not from the tender embrace of the mother [country], but from the cruelty of the monster.”
Fast forward to the present day and few fleeing cruelty and monstrous autocracies will automatically take refuge in the United States. What would Paine have made of the masked paramilitaries of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terrorising immigrant communities routinely demonised as criminal and alien by Trumpers? What would Paine say were he to watch videos showing the merciless killing of Renee Nicole Good, 37, in Minneapolis?
An amateur poet and mother of three, she is seen trying to manoeuvre her car to avoid burly ICE agents, none of them in any danger, when one of them opens fire at point-blank range. Disgracefully, Trump and his ghastly crew of fanatics and crackpots pretend that this presumably terrified woman was some sort of terrorist using her car as a deadly weapon to run down an ICE agent. In a more than usually revolting rant, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Good was committing an “act of domestic terrorism”. Local law enforcement in Minneapolis will not be allowed by the Trump-controlled FBI to investigate what really happened.
Unrestrained violence is deployed against anybody identified as an enemy of Trumpian power at home and abroad. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller explained that “you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”. He said that the US is a superpower and would conduct itself as a superpower.
Ordinary Americans are in danger too
Since despotic governments tend to act the same way at home and abroad, it come as no surprise that the White House is treating anti-Trump Democrat-held cities in Minnesota and Oregon in the same might-is-right spirit as Venezuela and Greenland. Venezuelan seamen clinging to a wrecked boat in the Caribbean are viewed as a potential terrorist threat and killed – and the same applies to an American mother in her car surrounded by armed ICE paramilitaries in Minneapolis.
Paine was not blind to the threat posed by home-grown demagogues in post-independence America, but he believed the danger could be averted by a rules-based representative government. He warned that without this safeguard, “some desperate adventurer” may “arise, laying hold of popular disquietude, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the power of government, may sweep away the liberties of the [American] continent like a deluge”.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the deluge feared by Paine has arrived and is sweeping through the US, the height and destructiveness of its waves rising to higher peaks every few days. Resistance has been caught by surprise again and again by the sheer radicalism and destructiveness of this Trumpian counter-revolution. Back in 1776, the transformative nature of the American revolution had astonished the world – as well as many of the revolutionaries themselves.
Having arrived in Philadelphia from England 18 months before the publication of Common Sense, Paine, who wrote with great simplicity and force, helped crystalise and popularise a political agenda, at the heart of which was national independence. A practical man with no utopian visions, he nevertheless believed that what was happening in America was nothing less than “the regeneration of man”.
In the following years, such hopes for America have been much mocked as hypocritical, critics pointing to slavery, racial discrimination and social inequality. But the idea that the US was a society that the rest of the world should emulate never quite died away. It survived the trauma of a ferocious civil war in 1861-65, largely thanks to Abraham Lincoln, and the near collapse of American capitalism after the crash of 1929 thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Trump’s America is entering a new dark age
Trump’s second term has ended all that. People now look to the US as a model to be avoided. It has become the monster from which exiles once fled. The demise of this ideal has come with astonishing speed. Trump makes clear that he relies on naked power alone. There was nothing inevitable about his success. It required a dysfunctional Democratic Party at home and European powers, preoccupied by the Ukraine war, seeking to appease him as a sort of imperial emperor – a humiliating and ineffective exercise given his contempt for weakness.
As Trump seizes power centre after power centre, the very speed of his counter-revolution has disconcerted its opponents. Those who resist him understandably play by the rules they want to preserve, a crippling disadvantage in a fight with those who intend to tear the rules up. Defenders of moderation invariably fight moderately when they fight at all, and have proved easy meat for power-hungry Trumpian loyalists.
Paine would have been appalled by what has happened, but he would have been up for a fight in a way that most of the opponents of Trump are not. He was an uncommon combination, a moderate revolutionary prepared to fight hard for quite limited but fundamental goals, such as establishing personal and national freedom and opposing domestic and foreign oppression. He believed that the age in which he lived would “be called the Age of Reason”, the harbinger of a new and better world.
Until recently this optimistic view made sense. But now, instead, we seem trapped in a Trumpian time machine hurtling back into the past, and a new era of unreason and violence.
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Further Thoughts
Paine’s most famous – and vastly influential – pamphlet, Common Sense, lucidly explains why the thirteen colonies should seek independence under a republican government with limited powers and an egalitarian approach.
Rereading the pamphlet in the age of Trump, Paine’s arguments against monarchy come across as freshly relevant. He says, for instance, that “in England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears… Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived”.
Paine is an attractive figure, a tireless and courageous enemy of the rich and powerful. I discovered his works last year when I was spending a few days in the town of Lewes in east Sussex, where Paine once served as a customs officer and where he wrote his first pamphlet (in defence of customs officers). I stayed in an inn where he used to attend discussions and looked at a tobacconist’s shop in the high street where he lodged.
He was personally energetic, determined and brave. A republican and supporter of the French Revolution, he was a member of the French Convention, where he was almost the sole member to argue against the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 because he opposed capital punishment. This led to his own imprisonment and very nearly to his own execution. “A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose,” he wrote to George Washington. He is well worth reading today, as we appear to be entering a new era of autocracy.
Beneath the Radar
I am not very good at picking titles for my own books. Few authors are, for the simple – though perhaps not very obvious – reason that if you have spent months or years writing a book, you are wholly familiar with its contents. This makes it very difficult to put oneself in the place of a potential reader who knows nothing about it, but needs to be informed and attracted.
In 2020, I published a book with the title War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran. Looking at it again, it holds up quite well, covering the first three years of Trump’s first term in the White House as his policies affected the Middle East.
The period, which today feels like ancient history, was dominated by ferocious wars – largely in Iraq and Syria, mostly against Isis. The period covered in the book began with the start of the nine-month siege of Mosul in northern Iraq in 2016, coinciding precisely with the election of Trump. This was to be the decisive defeat for the Islamist terror group.
The book ends with the assassination in early 2020 on Trump’s orders of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who had orchestrated the pro-Iranian Shia militias across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. His elimination by a surprise US drone attack at Baghdad airport marked the turning point for Iranian influence in the region. It has a strong similarity to the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on 3 January. Trump dislikes full scale wars as they are messy and uncontrollable, but not precisely directed violence against individuals.
When Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election and was further discredited by the Capitol riot, I mistakenly supposed that he was finished politically. I reckoned without the self-destructive powers of the Democratic Party leadership in keeping Joe Biden in the White House. As Trump appeared to be a back number, I persuaded the publisher to change the title of the paperback edition to Behind Enemy Lies, a clever little play on words I hoped – though nobody seemed to notice this but myself.
Cockburn’s Picks
Over Christmas and New Year, I watched a string of movies by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – still, to my mind, the most perceptive and intelligent series of films ever made in the UK. I am not sure which is my favourite, but A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going!, A Canterbury Tale, The Tales of Hoffman and The Red Shoes would certainly be included in my top dozen. All of them are eminently watchable.
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