How to use this Page

Welcome back to the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond. Read the first post here.

Kaye is the author of the award-winning book, Thomas Paine: Firebrand of Revolution, as well as Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change & Development and Director, Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.

Elvin – Thanks for challenging me…. You ask the right question.

While it is true that Burkeans – that is, traditionalists – have long been a minority in American conservatism, they can trace themselves back to the likes of folks like John Adams, who, while welcoming Paine’s call for independence, despised Paine himself for encouraging ordinary working people to believe not only in popular sovereignty, but also, in their capacity to “begin the world over again.”

Not for nothing did Adams write in 1805:

“I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity, as you do; and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Fury, Brutality, Demons, Bonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the burning Brand from the bottomless Pit; or anything but the Age of Reason. 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 pigs 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.”

And regarding the divisions in conservative politics, I can’t help but note here how impressive it remains that William F. Buckley Jr. as publisher of the National Review, followed by Ronald Reagan as presidential candidate of the Republican party, brought together traditionalists, evangelicals, libertarians, and neo-conservatives under one big right-wing roof.

Nevertheless, while Reagan himself broke with the 200-year-long conservative practice of trying to bury Paine’s memory and legacy and joyfully quoted Paine’s “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” when accepting the Republican nomination in 1980 and many times after, he did not really turn conservatives into Painites. Reagan and his gang latched onto only one aspect of Paine’s argument – in fact, it often seems they latched onto merely one line of his work: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil…” No joke, they not only took out of context (that is, Paine’s attack on England’s King, Constitution, and Parliament), they also essentially ignored – and continue

Earlier this month, Harvey Kaye led a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It got me thinking: what is the influence of Paine on Americans today? Who among us are the devotees? Are we over-quoting, over-citing, over-appropriating his politics?

So, I decided to introduce Harvey Kaye to Elvin Lim, and ask if they wouldn’t mind corresponding about this matter. They readily agreed. Below is the first of four installments of this conversation; the second of which will appear tomorrow.

Kaye is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, and Professor of History, Sociology and Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University,  and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.

Hi Harvey,

I’m almost done reading your book, and I read it, in part, as a call to return Paine as much to the American Left or Center as he has been appropriated on the Right in recent decades.

To get things started, I’d start with a contrarian volley. If Paine was the major harbinger of the democratic impulse in American society, I do wonder if he nevertheless has a natural affinity to the American Right. I say American, because Burkean conservatives / traditionalists, American Tories of the Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver variety, have always been a minority within the American conservative movement. The conservatism that has had any salience in America has been of the Barry Goldwater / Reagan kind. This mainstream conservatism has always been trenchantly populist.

A reason why, I propose, is that the conservatism that emerged in the 60s was anti-New Deal and anti-establishment. And that was a natural fit with the ideas of the revolutionary generation. Paine et al were not (yet) concerned with building “a more perfect union” – that would be left to the Founding generation. In the 1770s, the concern was one of NEGATIVE liberty, freedom from tyranny (and this was sometimes operationalized as freedom from government – hence the high correlation with natural rights talk).

It is perhaps no surprise then, that the Federalists who took over the reigns of government in the 1790s were in fact highly anti-democratic and anti-Jacobin. (The electoral college, the Senate, and the Supreme Court were institutional instantiations of their anti-democratic bias.) The Federalists had seen the dangers of too much anti-governmentalism and now saw the virtues of POSITIVE liberty, which could only be delivered by good government.

I wonder what you thought of my “affinity” arg