Palin's Unlikely Hero

Getty Images; AP Photo Thomas Paine gets a nod in Going Rogue, and Sarah Palin's not the only conservative who loves this American revolutionary. But the right has him—and their American history—all wrong, writes historian Harvey Kaye.

In Sarah Palin’s blockbuster new memoir, Going Rogue, the former Alaska governor quotes from Thomas Paine, but she’s not the first conservative to embrace one of America’s original radicals.

For 200 years, conservatives despised Paine and scorned his memory. And we can understand why. Through his revolutionary pamphlets Common Sense and The Crisis—and words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he turned Americans into radicals.

[T]he right-wingers’ “Paine” just doesn’t make historical sense. Paine was a freedom-loving radical and social democrat whose writings clearly attest to his progressive commitments and aspirations.

And yet, ever since liberal-turned-conservative Ronald Reagan quoted Paine’s “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” at the 1980 Republican National Convention, conservatives have become Paine’s greatest champions. Just this year came Bob Basso’s YouTube videos “The Second American Revolution” and “We the People,” Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, Newt Gingrich’s novel of the American Revolution, To Try Men’s Souls, and now Palin’s Going Rogue.

Eager to appeal not just to reactionaries but also to anxious middle-class Americans, today’s conservatives enthusiastically harness Paine’s scathing assaults on royal and aristocratic tyranny and privilege and his grand projections of America’s prospects and possibilities if liberated from the British state’s imposts and controls. Conservatives committed to cutting taxes, limiting regulation, and blocking new public initiatives like national health care and the Employee Free Choice Act, if not actually reversing the progressive advances of the 1930s and 1960s, especially love to recite his attack on existing governments: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.”

Of course Basso, Beck, Gingrich, and Palin do differ in their efforts. Purporting to channel Paine’s patriotism and anti-British revolutionary rage, Basso rails against the past generation’s celebration of American diversity, arguing for, among other things, English-only laws and immigration controls. Claiming Paine’s anti-statist inspiration, Beck vehemently warns against the new cadres of progressives who would raise taxes, grow government, and redistribute wealth. And in his—admittedly successful—retelling of the “miracle” at the Christmas night 1776 Battle of Trenton, Gingrich essentially puts into story form the poetic line of Continental Army chaplain Joel Barlow: “Without the pen of Paine, Washington’s sword would have been wielded in vain.”

Conservatives seem to adore Paine, but have they really embraced him? Hardly. Basso, Beck, Gingrich, and Palin do no more than their hero Reagan did. Instead of trying to bury Paine’s life and labors, they now are trying to appropriate and render a version of them that they can use to counter his persistent radical-democratic memory and legacy, a task made all the more urgent by the 2008 elections. Conservatives have changed their tune about Paine, but their ambitions remain what they have always been—to constrain or control, and ultimately discharge, the democratic impulse that Paine inscribed in American life in 1776, an impulse that, contrary to the best efforts of powerful and propertied conservatives and reactionaries, has propelled generations of progressive movements and campaigns to extend and deepen American freedom, equality, and democracy.