Make 2026 the Year of Thomas Paine

Rule of Law

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, remember the founder who rallied the people against British and American oligarchs.

The 250th anniversary of the American experiment, which is being celebrated this year, is sure to witness a struggle over the story—and future—of the United States.

On one side will stand advocates for capitalism without constraint, Christian nationalism, and colonial conquest. They will make ahistorical apologies for the bedraggled presidency of Donald Trump and for a subservient Republican Congress that is increasingly likely to be disempowered by the enraged electorate in November. These retro royalists will fail to recognize any irony in the fact that the America Revolution—in its best and most inspired form—rejected the monarchical abuses of a liege lord who arranged the affairs of state to steal from the poor and fill his own treasuries, presided over an empire that enforced its dominance with military might, and imagined that he ruled by “divine right” as the “supreme governor” of an established state church.

On the other side from the contemporary Tories will stand Americans who have actually read the Declaration of Independence, which opens with what in its day represented a radical embrace of democracy:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Today’s anti-royalists recognize that the promise of the Declaration—beginning with the premise that all human beings are created equal—has never been fully realized. They know that, across 25 decades, powerful elites have frequently maintained only the façade of representative democracy while permitting first human bondage and then economic oppression, savage inequality, and the corruption of governance warped by money, gerrymandering, and an Electoral College. The most cynical of this century’s oligarchs and authoritarians may swear allegiance to the Constitution. But their self-dealing mission has always been to manipulate the levers of government, economics, and religion to empower and enrich themselves.

In 2026, the oligarchs and their apologists will seek to use the celebration of America’s anniversary to strengthen their grip on the economy and government. They will insist that the United States was established as an über-capitalist state where billionaires can grift an AI bubble sufficiently to make themselves trillionaires. But as author and frequent commentator on US history Thom Hartmann has noted, “The word ‘capitalism’ appears nowhere in our founding documents, nowhere in our Constitution.” More significantly, the Constitutional Accountability Center reminds us, “The Constitution guarantees rights for ‘people’ and ‘citizens,’ never once referring to protections for ‘corporations.’” And constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz has explained that “the Framers understood that [corporations] were not to be treated as people under our Constitution. James Madison said corporations are ‘a necessary evil’ subject to ‘proper limitations and guards.’ Thomas Jefferson hoped to ‘crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.’”

The Christian nationalists and their political allies will tell us that the United States is a “Christian nation” and should be governed as such, even though the founders recognized religious diversity and disdained the notion of an established church. As Jefferson explained in a letter to the Danbury Baptists:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

The war hawks and their allies in the military-industrial complex will excuse the imperial ambitions of a president who has rejected international treaties, altered maps to rename the Gulf of Mexico, bombed Venezuelan boats without congressional authorization, and outlined his illicit claim on Greenland with a brutish declaration that “we have to have it.”

For years, Trump and his associates have been trying to prevent accurate teaching of US history. It does not serve their purposes to have people reminded that this country was founded with a popular rebellion that embraced the “No Kings!” message of Thomas Paine. The pamphleteer showed no respect for king, kaiser, or tsar, and decried every pretender who formally crowned his authoritarianism as “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”

Paine, the founder who best understood the point of the revolution, wrote, “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

That democratic impulse has always been a part of the American story, even as it has been suppressed by the oligarchs who would have us believe that a president—as the anti-constitutional majority on the current Supreme Court imagines—is a king for four years who cannot be held to account for “official acts.”

Trump and his apologists serve at least one purpose as the United States enters its semiquincentennial year. Their antidemocratic, anti-egalitarian extremism, cynicism, and hypocrisy expose them as fraudulent claimants to the most vital legacies of the American Revolution. While there have always been elites—including a good many of the founders—who choose to rewrite history in their own favor, there have also always been champions of liberty who know that Paine spoke the true language of American independence when he wrote 250 years ago: “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”

If ever there was a time to stand forth, it is now, in this anniversary year of America’s founding. This is the moment to use the rights outlined in the First Amendment—to speak, to write, to assemble, and to petition for the redress of grievances—to raise a Paine-inspired objection to imperialism, colonialism, and clericalism and to make an honest demand for liberty and for economic, social, and racial justice for all. This year we must seek to secure the next 250 years against the demands of the monarchical elites and for the needs of the great multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious mass of Americans.