Thomas Paine returns from the dead, film at 11

This year I am taking US History, and it really is amazing to me just how many parallels there are between the 18th century and the 20th and 21st centuries. The adage 'those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it' seems to be the overarching theme this year in history.

What specifically caught my eye today was this passage in my book, The American Pageant:

Because political power no longer rested with the central, all-powerful king, individuals in a republic needed to sacrifice their personal self-interest to the public good. The collective goals of 'the people' mattered more than the private rights and interests of individuals.

This passage is from a section that talks about the main ideas of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a pamphlet published in 1776. Strangely, or perhaps not-so-strangely, Common Sense seems to apply almost as well, if not better, to the political situation today than it did to the political situation in 1776, 200-some-odd years ago.

In Common Sense, Paine was advocating for a new idea called 'republicanism.' This idea was very radical, because before this time, the political system in America could easily be described as 'do whatever Parliament and the King tell you what to do.' Britain was approaching a constitutional monarchy at this time, but they really hadn't got over the idea of an all-powerful monarch telling everyone what to do.

Common Sense, if we put it in a more modern context, seems to be saying 'provide for everyone, because the government gets it power from the people, so you better take care of those people...people.' Irregular plurals aside, this seems to me to be advocating that most feared of political ideologies, the black sheep of democratic systems: socialism.

Oh, crap guys! Call the Civil Defense corps! Socialism's afoot!

Now, I must confess, in the interest of full disclosure and fairness (hahahaha, hohohohoho, full disclosure, fairness, blogosphere, ahahahaha....), I am a socialist (not a communist; that's a completely different animal). Yes, that's right, I believe that the government has a duty to take care of all of its people, not just those who happen to strike it rich. But that's another story.

The story here is that, 200 years before the Cold War, Thomas Paine was arguing that the United States should have, as at least a part of its underlying ideology, socialism. Doesn't that just blow your mind? That the good of the people as a whole outweighs the good of the self or the good of the individual is an idea that has been immortalized in stories since the beginning of history. Self-sacrifice and all that rot. In Common Sense this ideal took shape in the unifying idea of an American 'republic.' In more modern times, this ideal was fundamental to the political system called socialism.

What I'm trying to get at here is that from the beginning of this country, the government has been designed to serve 'the people.' In the singular sense. The government was not designed to serve individuals, it was designed for a singular and revolutionary new body - the American People. Lately, however, whether through innocent misinterpretation or malign meddling, this concept has become warped to mean that the country now serves the 'people' (plural, now).

This may seem quite nitpicky and not at all relevant to any kind of modern, constructive political discussion, but Supreme Court cases have been decided on as little as the placement of a comma (another bad idea which I'll write on later). I think that, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, the mindset in this country has definitely changed in the past 230 years from brotherhood and society to greed and exclusivity. And that's just not common sense.