Kahn - Real common sense: using our founding values to reclaim our nation and stop theradical right from hijacking America

Copyright 2011 by Brian Kahn

A Seven Stories Press First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kahn, Brian.
Real common sense : using Americas founding values to reclaim our nation and stop the radical right from hijacking America / Brian Kahn. 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60980-367-4
1. United StatesPolitics and government2009- 2. Tea Party movement. 3. Social valuesUnited States. 4. ValuesPolitical aspectsUnited States. I. Title.
JK275.K34 2011
320.5130973dc22

2010048513

v3.1

T om Paines pamphlet, Common Sense, was published in January 1776. Americas free population was 2 million. Within three months, 100,000 copies were sold. Paine was a fierce champion of the political, social, and economic rights of the common man, and the book ridiculed the idea central to the rule of kingsthat some men, because of bloodlines, or inherited position, had the God-given right to rule. The book galvanized the Continental Congress and the nation in support of the cause of national independence. On July 4, our nations Founders signed a document that changed the course of history.

In 1792, Paine wrote The Rights of Man, Part II, in which he blamed the European monarchies for poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and war. He called for basic reformsrepresentative government, public education, relief for the poor, pensions for the aged, public works for the unemployed, and a progressive income tax to pay the costs. The British government banned the book, jailed its publisher, and indicted Paine for treason.

Today, Americas extreme Right is trying to re-write our nations history, and deny our Founders commitment to social justice. As part of that effort, pundit Glenn Beck has gone so far as to steal the legacy of Tom Paine, using Common Sense as the title for a bookand praising Paine. But the book itself attacks the very ideas in which Paine believed, and if the great patriot were alive today, Glenn Beck would label him a radical socialist or revolutionary Marxist.

This book is dedicated to Tom Painepatriot, visionary, and American Founder.

W e face unprecedented challenges, as a people, a nation, and a world. Can we humansamazingly inventive, psychologically complex, personally flawed, and not yet very wisepull together and do what needs to be done?

Yes, we can.

But doing that will require important changes in our personal and national priorities, in the structure of our economy, in the integrity of our government, and in how we invest our nations resources to achieve our goals. Achieving these changes in turn depends on a basic shift in values. This book argues that the values we need are the very same ones on which our nation was foundedthe ones that led to the best in our past; the ones that will light the way to a worthy future for our children and theirs.

In 2005, when I began to develop the outline of Real Common Sense, the state of our nation looked fine to Americas economic, political, and media elitesthe economy and stock market were strong, and our countrys global dominance seemed uncontested. But I saw something else: Forty-five years of the Cold War combined with a decades-long credit binge had taken our nation far off course. We were adrift in a sea of consumer goods, our priorities increasingly set by a globalized economy and soulless media promoting instant gratification and quick money as the dominant purposes of life. Politicians, pundits, and well-financed think tanks championed The Ownership Society, where private wealth and material possessions were more important than shared community values and the public good. Internationally, in the aftermath of 9/11, we accepted the dangerous illusion that our security could be assured by ourselves alonethrough overwhelming military power, unquestioned belief in our moral superiority, and inexhaustible wealth.

I first outlined the concepts in this book in a speech in Miles City, Montana, a part of the country where the word neighbor is still used as a verb: We neighbor. The truth is that we humans all neighborwe give and receive mutual support to and from each other. But modern life camouflages that truth, and as a result we suffer the dangerous illusion that we are independent of each other. People around Miles City still say we neighbor because their lives remain tied to the production of food from the earth, visible interdependence, and a living sense of community. As they struggle to cope with economic globalization and hard times, they will need that awareness, and will need to act on the basic American values of human equality, personal responsibility, and common purpose that underlie our still young national experiment. If they do, they have a fighting chance to reshape and revitalize their town, their region, their human community.

We, the people of the United States, also have a fighting chance.

It will not be easy. Almost all of us are tied to the consumer economy. Every day, through all kinds of media, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as consumers instead of as citizens. The consumer frame of reference is private, individual, and reinforces the illusion of independence from each other and from our community. In doing that, it undermines our commitment to the unique legacy and challenge left to us by our nations Founders: our democratic Republic committed to liberty and justice for all.

Each of us sees what life has taught us. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s among rural people, in the family of a writer who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. I was taught that all people have intrinsic worth and basic rights; that a central part of the human story is the struggle to see that value honored, those rights achievednot just in words, but in the living world.