Because common sense is the key to understanding America’s original design at every level, America was long known as “The Common Sense Nation.” Now, President Trump and his “common sense revolution” might succeed in making America the common sense nation once again.
Unalienable rights and self-evident truths are the core ideas of the American founding. Those ideas are also the core ideas of a philosophical school known as “common sense realism,” inspired by Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and other representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the words of Arthur Herman, “Common Sense Realism was virtually the official creed of the American Republic…” As historian Allen Guelzo explained in “The American Mind,” his indispensable college lecture series, “before the Civil War, every major collegiate intellectual was a disciple of Scottish common sense realism.”
The Founders were guided by the ideas and the thinking of the common sense realists. Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, especially, were thoroughly trained in common sense realism by their teachers who brought those ideas and that manner of thinking from Scotland to America.
Today, the centrality of Scottish common sense realism to the Founding of our nation and to its ongoing sense of purpose is all but unknown. The Founders would be astonished by our ignorance of the men who inspired their work. Admittedly, it has been a struggle—for more than a century, American academia has labored to obliterate the memory of what was once known by virtually every American.
Of course, academia has also been working hard to destroy “common sense” in its ordinary usage, too, insisting that men and women are arbitrarily designated categories, and that the imperative of every English professor is to support violent insurgency. As a witty friend of mine likes to say, “Say what you want about the liberal arts, but they’ve found a cure for common sense.”
Thomas Paine was the great champion of ordinary common sense at the time of the founding. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Paine’s short book Common Sense. This pamphlet was and remains the best-selling American book in publishing history, and it was read aloud in taverns and village squares. It had a decisive influence on American public sentiment in favor of the Revolution. Paine turned the spotlight of common sense upon monarchial rule to devastating effect.
“One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it to ridicule, by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.”
The Founders’ wild and crazy idea was that the people are sovereign. At the time, this construction was a contradiction in terms. The monarch was the sovereign. To say that the American people are sovereign was to say that the American people would rule, and that government in America would be the agent of the people. Talk about turning the world upside down!
The Founders were true revolutionaries, believing that the people were capable of self-rule by virtue of their common sense. Today, the Progressives—whose purpose from their beginning has been to dismantle the America of the founders—often justify their claim to power by claiming that Americans do not have enough common sense to be able to rule themselves. That is a back-handed reference to the fundamental role of common sense in the Founders’ America.
It certainly feels as if we are now engaged in a titanic struggle to determine America’s future. Perhaps the best way to understand the meaning of that struggle is to see it as an effort to restore rule by the common sense of the American people. President Trump and his common sense revolution may be precisely what patriotic Americans have longed for, and what America has long needed.
Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World. Both are from Encounter Books [https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/reclaiming-common-sense/]. His articles and reviews have appeared in American Greatness, the American Thinker, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Federalist.
