Thomas Paine’s Challenge to a Complacent America

Paine warned that complacency endangers liberty, and that only when freedom is threatened do people discover whether they are willing to defend it.

A bronze of Thomas Paine in Morristown, N.J., in a file photo. George Wirt/Shutterstock

Commentary

According to a late 2025 Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports poll, “58 percent of likely voters aged 18 to 39 support government-run grocery stores in every town in America.” Fifty-one percent of younger likely voters “say they would like to see a democratic socialist win the White House in 2028.”

It’s easy to see such numbers and fall into despair about America’s prospects.

If you have ever been tempted to withdraw from public concerns and simply enjoy your own life, who could blame you?

Tom Paine would.

Paine and the Problem of Complacency

When we think of Paine, we think of his 1776 “Common Sense,” a book that made the case for independence. An incredible twenty percent of Americans at that time owned a copy.

Today, the challenge is not winning independence but preserving liberty. For that latter challenge, Paine’s “The American Crisis” offers valuable practical guidance.

“The American Crisis” is not a single book but a wartime serial of sixteen pamphlets, thirteen of which are numbered. Pamphlet 1, written in December 1776 when the Revolutionary War was going badly, opens with perhaps the most famous Paine line: “THESE are the times that try men’s souls.”

The opening paragraph of Pamphlet 1 is packed with poetic wisdom, including: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

Is this the source of the threat specific to America’s 250th birthday? Are we like the proverbial fish, asking what water is? Our liberty can seem less like an achievement to be defended than an inheritance too easily taken for granted. What is unknown and unvalued goes unguarded.

Not knowing our precious heritage and the conditions under which humanity thrives may lead to apathy and leave liberty defenseless. Other people’s apathy toward the crisis facing us is no excuse for our own withdrawal from civic life. Paine wrote, “‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

Panics as Moral Touchstones

“All nations and ages” are subject to panics. To Paine and others, a panic was a contagious, collective fear that swept through a population faster than reason could overcome it.

Economic downturns were called panics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I fear we are one severe economic panic away from an American crisis that will widen partisan gulfs beyond repair and make the preferences expressed in the Heartland poll a dystopian reality.

Panics, Paine observed, “produce as much good as hurt,” adding that “their peculiar advantage is that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.”

A touchstone was an instrument of a jeweler or merchant, a tablet of dark stone against which you rubbed a piece of gold or silver. If you merely judged the metal by its surface, you might be defrauded. So when Paine calls panic a touchstone, he means that a crisis is the “stone” people rub against, and the streak shows what they are actually made of, whatever they had appeared to be.

In good times, those truly committed to the principles of liberty and those who merely profess them can sound alike, because no crisis has yet arisen to separate them.

What Crises Reveal

Crucially, the crisis does not manufacture hypocrisy; it exposes what beliefs are already there but hidden. As Paine put it, panics “sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.”

Untested virtue is unverified virtue. We cannot know whether our attachment to liberty is true metal or cheap alloy until it is tested against the stone, because until then, the two appear identical.

And I’m not merely referring to those on the “other side” of our own beliefs.

The COVID-19 panic revealed erstwhile champions of liberty clamoring for extraordinary government interventions they purport to oppose. Their professed principles should have made them more wary of concentrated power and emergency policymaking. When the cause of liberty needed their voice, they were in retreat. They were a modern-day version of Paine’s “summer soldier,” shrinking from the service of liberty.

Most people experience a crisis as pure loss. Paine sees something else in it. It exposes hypocrisy, reveals one’s true allies, and strengthens those who hold fast to their principles. Paine wrote, “The mind soon grows through them [panics], and acquires a firmer habit than before.” The summer soldiers reveal themselves.

Today, constitutional limits do not command much public reverence. We routinely elect candidates who promise policies that stretch or violate constitutional limits. The oath they swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” is treated less as a binding principle than as ceremonial language.

Meanwhile, the public drifts back to its favorite distractions as liberty continues to erode. In “Common Sense,” Paine identified this complacency as a grave threat to liberty: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

The republic is endangered wherever arbitrary power becomes normalized.

Another form of acquiescence to arbitrary power is the habit of helpless complaint—asking why things must be this way while forgetting that much of history is the struggle against precisely such conditions.

Virtue Under Pressure

In “On Providence,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca explains, much as Paine does, that what we label as bad things can be a gift of providence.

Seneca urges us to think of adversity as training. What moral man, he asks, “is not hungry for honest work and ready to undertake duties at great risk?”

Demetrius, a philosopher exiled by Nero, is quoted by Seneca as saying, “Nothing seems to me more unhappy than someone to whom nothing adverse has ever happened.” These adverse events, Seneca argues, allow people to test themselves.

Seneca’s untested man is the philosophical twin of Paine’s “summer soldier.” Both thinkers understood that a life entirely shielded from friction produces a character lacking resilience. Adversity tests personal virtue and, on a societal level, reveals whether we truly value liberty.

Paine railed against the selfish, short-term thinking of a man who stood at a tavern with his child and said, “Well! give me peace in my day.” Paine argued the mindset of a “generous parent” must be forward-looking: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” Preserving liberty requires accepting present friction so that future generations inherit a free society, rather than pushing the burden of conflict down the road.

Paine wrote, “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.”

Liberty and the Long View

This is a mindset of liberty: the recognition that external conditions (the “crisis”) do not dictate one’s internal resolve. It is the conscious choice to meet centralized power or societal panic with calm, reasoned fortitude rather than despair.

People who inherit liberty cannot know whether they still deserve it until liberty is put in jeopardy. Each of us answers, rubbed against the touchstone.

The summer soldier still has time to become something else. That, and not despair, is Paine’s message for America at 250.

Reprinted from The Daily Economy, a publication of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.