Welcome

Hey, I'm Paine. Unlike the Founders chosen by my co-bloggers, Thomas Paine never held public office in the United States. He neither wrote nor signed the Declaration of Independence. He wasn't a member of the Constitutional Convention, nor was he consulted in the construction of either the Articles or the Constitution. He wrote several marvelously influential treatises, and, in America at least, that was mostly the extent of his contributions. But to my mind, Thomas Paine was one of the most important people in Revolutionary America. Politicking is ultimately about ideas and those who can use them to best effect, and Paine's ideas and his execution of those ideas in his writings were extremely important. His Common Sense and The Crisis convinced many and were inspirational to those who were already believers, and Washington even had his troops read The Crisis prior to their famous crossing of the Delaware. Just for those reasons, I think "Paine" is a pretty sweet pseudonym. But there are a couple other reasons, too.

For one, the philosophies he espoused and helped lay the groundwork for have been very influential on me. I am a progressive; like Paine, I like the minimum wage, I like social security, I like certain subsidies, and I like free education. I am also a leftist-flavored libertarian; I want, as he wrote, a government that "governs least," and I want as little of it in my life as possible. And lately, mostly in response to the Bush administration, I have come to consider myself a constitutionalist. It might sound strange for someone of my political orientation to align himself with constitutionalism, but to me the boundaries of constitutionalism have changed. I am for habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights; I want a chief executive that is restricted by law just like any other; I want the regime to matter, not the government that controls it; and, like Paine, I am utterly opposed to monarchy and any of its variations. I am a also a democrat, although not necessarily with a capital D.

The other reason is that modern American politics have no figure like Paine, and although I can hardly claim to fill that role, we desperately need one. Philosophies and ideologies have taken back seats to pragmatism and realism on the left, and that, to me, is shameful. In contrast, the right has at least two important and influential philosophies, those of radical Christian "family values" and that hideous melange of idealism and realism known as neoconservatism; each has its own versions of Paine, including preachers like Pat Robertson and collective political think tanks like the Project for the New American Century, but neither approaches Paine's lasting significance or flavor of politics. That neoconservatism seems to be failing is a cause for celebration by the left, but that victory is hollow in that we have little of our own to replace it with. The Democrats' actions so far in this Congress have hinted at certain philosophies that need to be brought back as soon as possible, notably constitutionalism and progressivism, but the Dems have so far refused to explicitly identify themselves with either. The left needs a new version of Tom Paine, and so far we don't have him.

Anyway, hello to everyone.