Old Fashioned Radical Liberalism: Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense'

Sorry about your democratic Confusion, Mr. Adams, but some things have only to be said (or written up in a pamphlet and passed around to be read by free and responsible people--or if, shall we say, it goes viral on the Internet) to be acknowledged as true, binding and necessary:  Such things as Thom. Paine's "inarguable pamphlet" (as George Washington called it) Common Sense, and Thom. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and several opusculi of Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, including Reflections on Negro Slavery, The Rights of Man, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, and De l'Admission des Femmes aux Droits de la Cité.

Even going on two and a half centuries into the metastasis of the devolution of our Constitutional Republic into a prison-state/fascist plutocracy, we can still extrapolate from Paine's division of government from society, that the Internet, under an enlightened and democratic Rule of Law, might  serve as the instrument of the reintegration of society and government:  That every citizen, according to his competence (to be determined by his academic performance, his life/work experience, and the Mother of all Civil Service Examinations) might, for example, be required to spend an hour or two a week online doing the work of governance.

Or suppose, thinking of Condorcet's reflections on the injustice of one portion of humanity's holding another portion of mankind in thrall, abused, fettered and incarcerated, that we were to abolish the savage and abhorrent practice of judicial punishment for non-violent offenses, and to eliminate detention or incarceration for all but the violently criminally insane.  

Just these two innocent, entirely workable proposals would put democracy where it ought to be, within reach of the average citizen.  And if it did let loose the bloody jacquerie that Sam. Adams seems to fear that it might--would the garroting of the Supreme Court as presently constituted, or the disemboweling, dismembering, flaying and torturing to death of the ghouls and thugs who fill our so-called Security Agencies, our military and police forces, and the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, be so unjust or unnecessary?  Or even unbearably unpleasant? After what they've done in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan?  After the Patriot Act?  After the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012? Not to mention South and Central America (Operation Condor)...or Operazione Gladio in Italy... or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...or the abomination of the invention of the fictive "Cold War" and the imprisonment of whole decent, innocent countries, full of decent, innocent people, like  Czechoslovakia and Hungary behind the Iron Curtain.   A little Reign of Terror, a salutary Massacre of the Guilty, might be just the Thing--as in the movie Assault on Wall Street.


This is the man, Maximilien Robespierre, who had perhaps the clearest grasp of these principles.