(Originally published in the book Open Systems, Closed Mind)
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” — Thomas Paine, 1776
The ghost of Thomas Paine would weep to walk through America today. The man who midwifed a revolution with little more than a pamphlet and the clarity of moral purpose would find himself a stranger in the republic he helped conceive. Where he once envisioned an “asylum for mankind,” he would now encounter walls—both literal and symbolic—designed to keep the world’s suffering at bay, and often, to preserve a narrow vision of national identity at the expense of universal ideals.
I. The Betrayal of Universal Welcome
Paine didn’t merely champion American independence; he dreamed of American exceptionalism in its truest, moral sense. In Common Sense, he argued that the new nation could “receive the fugitive and the persecuted of all nations and religions” and become “the asylum for mankind.” This was not rhetorical flourish—it was the cornerstone of a radical proposition: that a nation could define itself not by blood or borders, but by principle.
Modern America, with its immigration raids, detention camps, and travel bans that target entire faiths, would be not just unrecognizable to Paine, but unconscionable. “My country is the world,” he once declared, “and my religion is to do good.” He believed that human rights did not stop at national boundaries. The moment America began to prioritize exclusion over welcome; it ceased to be revolutionary—it became reactionary, yet another citadel guarding privilege rather than liberating people from it.
II. Expanding the Critique:
Economic Barriers to the Asylum
Paine’s vision of an inclusive America extended beyond physical borders to economic opportunity. He advocated for progressive taxation and social safety nets in Agrarian Justice, proposing that wealth derived from common resources should benefit all. Today, skyrocketing wealth inequality—where the top 1% own more than half the nation’s wealth—would horrify him. The asylum he envisioned was not just a refuge from persecution but a place where all could thrive, not merely survive. Policies that favor corporate monopolies, tax loopholes for the ultra-rich, and wage stagnation for workers betray this vision, creating economic walls as exclusionary as any border fence.
III. White Christian Nationalism:
The Return of What We Rejected
Few things would disturb Paine more than the resurgence of White Christian Nationalism disguised as patriotism. He had no patience for the merging of church and state. In The Age of Reason, he denounced institutionalized religion as a tool “to terrify and enslave mankind.” While he respected faith as a private matter and acknowledged divine reason as part of natural law, he reserved his fiercest critique for those who used religion to consolidate power.
Today’s theocratic impulses—laws that impose one religious moral code on a pluralistic society, political rhetoric that casts non-Christians as lesser citizens—represent precisely the kind of authoritarian synthesis that Paine hoped the American experiment would abolish. He would see this fusion not as a deviation from the founding ethos, but as its betrayal. When religion is conscripted into the service of politics, both are corrupted—and the result is neither moral nor democratic, but oligarchic in a clerical costume.
IV. Expanding the Critique:
Education and Cultural Narratives
Paine would also be alarmed by efforts to control education and historical narratives to align with nationalist agendas. Book bans, revisionist curricula that downplay systemic injustices, and attacks on academic freedom echo the dogmatic control he criticized in religious institutions. Paine championed reason and inquiry as tools for liberation, believing that an educated populace was essential to democracy. The suppression of critical thinking in schools, coupled with the elevation of mythologized histories, undermines the rational foundation he saw as vital to a free society.
V. Military Power Turned Inward:
The Contradiction of Force Against Citizens
The sight of militarized police or federal troops detaining protesters in American streets would strike Paine as a nightmare. To him, the legitimacy of any government hinged on the consent of the governed—and that consent must be earned by justice, not enforced by intimidation.
In The Rights of Man, Paine asserted that the role of government is to safeguard natural rights: life, liberty, expression, and dissent. He had himself been hounded, imprisoned, and nearly executed for speaking truth to power. He knew tyranny’s scent well, and he would have recognized it in any government that weaponizes its power against its own citizens for exercising the very rights it purports to protect.
Force used to suppress protest does not preserve order—it desecrates the very principles on which the republic stands. A government that fears dissent more than injustice has already lost its moral compass.
VI. Expanding the Critique: Surveillance and Privacy
Paine would also recoil at the modern surveillance state. Mass data collection, facial recognition technology, and the erosion of privacy rights under the guise of security would strike him as tools of control, not protection. In his era, governments relied on physical force to silence dissent; today, digital surveillance achieves the same ends with chilling efficiency. Paine’s emphasis on individual liberty would lead him to condemn these practices as antithetical to a free society, where citizens must be trusted to think and act without constant monitoring.
VII. The Return of Monarchical Instincts
The “No Kings” protest signs dotting American streets would move Paine—first to pride, then to sorrow. Pride, that his insight endures. Sorrow, that it must still be shouted. Paine’s opposition to monarchy was not just a reaction to George III; it was a wholesale rejection of the idea that some are born to rule and others to obey.
He would see the rise of executive overreach, wealth-as-power politics, and dynastic ambition in American leadership as echoes of the aristocracy he once helped overthrow. The idea that government exists to serve citizens—not the other way around—has frayed under the weight of concentrated influence and institutional inertia.
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil,” he warned. But left unchecked, it becomes a perpetuating hierarchy—a crown without a coronation.
VIII. Expanding the Critique:
Corporate Influence and Political Capture
Paine would be appalled by the extent to which corporate interests dominate American governance. The influence of lobbying, campaign finance loopholes, and revolving-door politics between corporations and government would appear to him as a new aristocracy, where wealth buys power. He would likely argue that this system undermines the democratic will, creating a de facto ruling class that prioritizes profit over the public good—a betrayal of the revolutionary principle that power derives from the people, not from privilege.
IX. The International Dimension:
America First vs. Mankind’s Asylum
Paine’s vision was always larger than one nation. His revolutionary fervor led him not only to support American independence, but to risk his life for the French Revolution as well. To him, freedom was indivisible. If it was not universal, it was counterfeit.
Modern cries of “America First,” especially when used to dismiss the plight of refugees, deny asylum-seekers, or abandon allies in pursuit of expedient self-interest, would appall him. He believed that the fate of humanity was intertwined—that America could not flourish in moral isolation.
“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he wrote. But today, that cause is too often diminished into a slogan. If we use our power to build borders rather than bridges, to isolate rather than inspire, we surrender the moral leadership Paine envisioned—and with it, the soul of the American experiment.
X. Expanding the Critique:
Environmental Neglect as Global Betrayal
Paine’s universalism extended to humanity’s shared stake in the natural world. His writings in Agrarian Justice show a deep respect for the earth as a common inheritance. The failure to address climate change—through inaction or denial—would strike him as a profound moral failing. A nation that prioritizes short-term economic gain over the survival of future generations and the global ecosystem betrays the principle of interconnectedness that Paine championed. He would see environmental neglect as a rejection of the asylum ideal, abandoning not just people but the planet itself.
XI. Reclaiming the Revolutionary Spirit
And yet, Paine would not despair. He knew revolutions are never won once, but must be renewed by every generation. The spark that once set a continent ablaze still flickers in Americans who dare to challenge injustice.
The protesters demanding justice, the lawyers at airports defending the rights of the displaced, the teachers refusing to whitewash history, the voters resisting authoritarian drift—these are Paine’s spiritual descendants. He believed not in American perfection, but in American potential. The power to “begin the world over again” was not reserved for 1776—it is the birthright of every generation that dares to believe in equality and acts upon that belief.
The revolution was never intended as an event, but as a process: ongoing, unfinished, often uncomfortable, but always necessary. A nation’s greatness is not in how well it preserves its past, but in how courageously it shapes its future.
XII. Expanding the Call to Action:
Grassroots Empowerment
Paine’s pamphlets were not written for elites but for ordinary people, empowering them to demand change. Today, he would champion grassroots movements—community organizing, mutual aid networks, and local activism—as the heart of the revolutionary spirit. He would urge citizens to reclaim democracy through direct action, whether by voting, running for local office, or building coalitions across divides. Paine’s faith in the common person’s ability to reshape society remains a clarion call to resist apathy and engage actively in civic life.
XIII. Conclusion:
A Challenge to the Conscience
The world is still watching.
Not for American supremacy.
Not for American wealth.
But for American conscience.
The question remains:
Will we give them reason to hope?
Paine’s America was never a finished project but a challenge, a call to align the nation’s actions with its highest ideals. To honor his vision, we must confront the ways we’ve fallen short: in our borders, our schools, our streets, our laws, and our global responsibilities. The dream of an asylum for mankind is deferred, but not dead. It lives in every act of courage, every demand for justice, and every refusal to accept the world as it is.
Let us begin the world over again.
