Some people can never rest easy. Consider Poor Tom Paine. During the latter years of his life he was hounded, even on his deathbed, by what passed at the time as the American right-both secular and religious. His name was mud from the early nineteenth century until the mid twentieth, despite all he had done to bring about and sustain the American Revolution. Why? Because he wrote The Age of Reason, a frontal assault on faith based mental processing (we can’t call it thinking).
But far worse has been his treatment since 1980 when the American Right, starting with Ronald Reagan, tried to adopt him as their own. As with so much of their fact free cogitating, there is no evidence that Paine would be at all sympathetic to their creed. He was, after all, not sympathetic to any creed.
Apparently, Glenn Beck is now trying to wrap himself in Paine’s mantle, encouraging folks to follow where, he asserts, Paine would surely lead in the struggle against creeping socialism.
Some of us actually believe that it might not be such a bad thing if there were some truth to Beck’s fears about socialism, but let’s put that aside for the moment.
Paine as a free market, Ayn Rand acolyte? Has Beck read any Paine lately? (answer, no.) Well, I’ve read it all and I agree with this Kos diarist that Paine was a socialist in all but name. This diary is well worth a read for those not familiar with Paine’s thinking. It discusses Paine’s Agrarian Justice. I remember thinking, when I first read that pamphlet, that Paine was something of a proto-Marx.
In Agrarian Justice Paine develops a theoretical justification and a practical program for a system akin to social security. The theoretical basis is interesting. Paine argues that we own the earth in common, and those that have secured large portions for their own use owe the rest a “rent”. It’s socialist thinking from first to last. The practical program may or may not have been all that practical, but he was clearly not a fan of social security privatization. It’s government run and government funded from first to last, and let’s not even get into the class warfare aspect of it.
We on the left can’t let the right confiscate Tom Paine. He’s ours, from his socialist ravings, to his most effective promoters (e.g., Howard Fast, who wrote Citizen Tom Paine, a book I’ve owned since I was eight, and Moncure Conway, slave-holder turned abolitionist and free thinker) to his religious principles. They can have Alexander Hamilton. He’d probably turn in his grave to be in their company, but who cares?
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