01/13/2026
Common Sense 2026: Who Rules in America Now?
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Paine pulled off what now feels nearly impossible: he changed what Americans believed was possible.
On January 10, 1776, Paine published Common Sense—not a book, not a manifesto, not a policy memo. A short pamphlet. Plainspoken. Radical. Cheap enough to pass hand-to-hand across taverns, churches, kitchens, and campfires.
100,000 copies distributed in three months—America’s first viral moment. It didn’t merely persuade. It broke a spell.
Ken Burns’s new documentary The American Revolution captures exactly why it landed. The film reminds us that Common Sense worked because, as one observer put it, “the country was ripe for independence and only needed somebody to tell the people so.”
Paine did not invent colonial anger. He gave it a name. He took what Americans already carried—humiliation, exhaustion, fear—and forged it into moral clarity. He made the unthinkable thinkable: monarchy was not just a bad arrangement. It was an illegitimate one.
Once people saw that, history moved. Six months later, the founders signed the Declaration of Independence and dared to say something revolutionary out loud:
We are one people. And sovereignty belongs to us.
As America approaches its 250th birthday, I believe we are ripe again for a revolution. Not a revolution of muskets, but a revolution of legitimacy. Our moment must confront the modern equivalent of the very crown we once threw off. (Read the rest below)
250 years later, it is time to reclaim our sovereignty from the private monarchs.
