THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, September 11, 2019 |A
The Man
Who Lit the Fuse
Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for
American Independence
By Harlow Giles Unger
(Da Capo, 315 pages, $28)BOOKSHELF|ByAdamRowe
A
merican colonists began fighting George III long before
they resolved to rid themselves of him. Thomas Paine
transformed their resistance into a revolution with
“Common Sense,” published in January 1776. Unlike other
writers of the time, Paine didn’t adopt the gentlemanly style
of a statesman. He appealed to his readers’ rawest passions
without insulting even the most rarified intelligence.
Nothing could be more absurd, he wrote, than supposing “a
continent to be perpetually governed by an island.” If
monarchy were truly a divine institution, surely God
wouldn’t have so often given mankind “an ass for a lion.”
Any American who favored reconciliation, he insisted, has
“the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.”
“Common Sense” did more than anything else to push the
colonies toward a complete separation from the British
Empire, and yet, as Harlow Giles Unger laments in “Thomas
Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence”—a
brisk and spirited biography—
Paine has never been admitted
into the Founders’ pantheon.
Mr. Unger, a prolific historian
of the early Republic, offers a
passionate brief for Paine’s
legacy as the “Father of all
Founding Fathers” but also,
unwittingly, an argument for
Paine’s status as a wrecking ball
rather than an architect.
Bornin1737inThetford,a
town in eastern England, Paine
became well acquainted with the
grim ways of the Old World before
embarking, in middle age, for the New.
Thetford in Paine’s youth was known for its
festival of public hangings during Lent, and Paine’s primary
school was only yards away from the gallows. Despite
obvious talents, Paine would not or could not learn Latin,
the prerequisite for a professional career, and he spent his
early years drifting from one failure to another.
He arrived in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774, penniless
and unknown but with an introduction from Benjamin
Franklin, whom Paine had impressed in London when
Franklin was an agent there for the colonies. He found
modest success as an editor for Pennsylvania Magazine,
more than doubling its circulation in less than a year. Then
came “Common Sense” and instant fame.
Having “inspired tens of thousands of Americans to take up
arms,” Mr. Ungerwrites, Paine also kept “them from throwing
down their arms” in despair. He served in George Washington’s
army during its retreat across New Jersey in the winter of 1776.
Along the way he wrote his greatest essay, the one beginning
“These are the times that try men’s souls.” Washington had
these stirring words read aloud to his troops just hours before
they crossed the Delaware for Trenton—and victory.
After independence, Paine’s views fit squarely within the
Federalist tradition of Washington and Hamilton. He defended
the rights of property against the caprices of legislatures and
supported a national bank. By the late 1780s, he had diverted
his talents from advancing revolutionary politics to designing
bridges. It was to promote a bridge design that he returned to
Europe in 1787, stumbling again into world-historical events.
“A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose,” Paine
soon wrote happily to Washington.“Rights of Man,” Paine’s defense of the French Revolution,
was an even greater success than his American pamphlet.
More elaborate than “Common Sense,” “Rights of Man” was
a brilliant attack on heredity privilege, though vague and
blithely utopian about the challenges of building stable
institutions on democratic foundations.
Paine had been hurt at not being chosen as a delegate to
America’s Constitutional Convention, but the French elected him
to the National Assembly in 1792, despite his incomprehension
of their language. It was a high point of Paine’s public career.
The fall was dizzyingly swift. Within a year he was imprisoned
as an enemy of the revolution, and only blind luck—Robespierre
fell from power just before his orders condemning Paine were
carried out—kept him from the guillotine.
Mr. Unger’s ardent admiration for his subject enlivens his
narrative, but his sympathy is so total that it gradually
becomes indistinguishable from Paine’s own overweening
vanity. He overstates Paine’s influence on everything from
the Bill of Rights to Robert Fulton’s steamboat. The many
reports of Paine’s drinking and slovenly habits Mr. Unger
acknowledges only as malicious or jealous lies. By contrast,
he describes Thomas Jefferson, clumsily and tastelessly, as
“out of touch with the French people...withateenaged
Virginia slave-girl to feed his erotic needs and her older
brother, a chef, to feed the rest of his body.” At least
Jefferson, who served as minister to France at the outbreak
of the Revolution, spoke French.
Embittered from his imprisonment during the Terror, Paine
remained committed to the cause that had nearly killed him.
His literary powers, more venomous than ever, focused
instead on two unlikely targets: George Washington and
organized Christianity. Were he trying to alienate the
lingering affections of his adopted countrymen in America,
he couldn’t have chosen his targets more wisely. Paine began
writing “The Age of Reason,” his attack on Christianity, as
mobs desecrated French cathedrals. And he somehow
convinced himself that Washington could have freed him
from jail in an instant, if he had only lifted a finger to do so.
“The world will be puzzled to decide,” Paine wrote in an open
letter to Washington, “... whether you have abandoned good
principles or whether you ever had any.” When Napoleon
proclaimed himself emperor, by contrast, Paine warmly praised
him from the safety of America (having returned, after a 15-year
absence, in 1802). Mr. Unger scrupulously relates these facts
without realizing how much they undermine his subject’s
claim to be an Olympian champion of liberal democracy.
Still, with books as with men, genuine virtues are too rare
to be overshadowed by common shortcomings. Passionate,
occasionally careless and often eloquent, Mr. Unger’s
biography has the strengths and weaknesses of its subject.
It truly soars in recounting that bleak winter of 1776, when
the polemicist who only knew how to attack inspired an
army that had only known how to retreat.Mr. Rowe is a teaching fellow at the University of Chicago.His words famously kindled American rebellion
and raised the fighting spirit of nearly defeated
soldiers. He would soon have even more to say.Sanders Praises Communist Capitalism
S
en. Bernie Sanders’s
praise for the govern-
ment of China should
raise eyebrows, and not only
for the obvious reasons. His
assessment of the Chinese
economy knocks the pins out
from under his political and
economic philosophy.
In an interview last month
with the Hill, Mr. Sanders con-
ceded that China “is moving
unfortunately in a more au-
thoritarian way in a number of
directions.” He then asserted
that “what we have to say
about China, in fairness to
China and its leadership, is...
they have made more progress
in addressing extreme poverty
than any country in the history
of civilization.”
Unlike most of Mr. Sand-
ers’s past words of praise for
communist regimes—for
Cuba’s health-care and educa-
tion systems, the Soviet
Union’s “youth programs” and
“cultural programs,” and Nica-
ragua’s empowerment of “the
poor people”—Mr. Sanders’s
comment about China has a
basis in fact. According to the
World Bank, 88% of Chinese
lived on less than $1.90 a day
in 1981. Today less than 1% do.
(These figures are in 2011 dol-
lars, adjusted for purchasing
power parity.)Yet that success didn’t
come from socialism. It’s a
product of China’s move away
from socialism. And it came at
the cost—at least by Mr. Sand-
ers’s usual lights—of height-
ened inequality. A 2018 Inter-
national Monetary Fund
working paper reports that
“China has moved from being
a moderately unequal country
in 1990 to being one of the
most unequal countries.” TheIMF dates that trend to 1980,
shortly after Beijing began its
capitalist experiment.
At home, Mr. Sanders urges
a “political revolution” and a
“wholesale transformation of
our society” from capitalism to
socialism—the reverse of what
China did 40 years ago. He
burns with hostility for capital-
ists. We must “no longer toler-
ate the greed of Wall Street,
corporate America and the bil-
lionaire class,” he rails.
Yet Mr. Sanders’s accurate
observation about China’s re-
cord in ending poverty ought
to give him pause. Mao Ze-
dong’s China was the apotheo-
sis of class warfare and of for-
mal equality. Millions were
slaughtered as “class ene-
mies,” and, everyone wore
drab tunics and shared pov-
erty (except Mao himself, who
lived like royalty with a few of
his cohorts). With Mao gone,
Deng Xiaoping called an end to
the class war.
“To get rich is glorious” be-
came the watchword. Accord-
ing to Forbes, China has morebillionaires (in U.S. dollar
terms) than any other country
except the U.S., and is minting
new ones far faster. At the be-
ginning of this century, Forbes
found only one in China. Today
it counts more than 300.
No doubt Mr. Sanders
would decry that, but is it too
high a price to pay for a pro-
cess that lifted hundreds of
millions out of poverty? This
question points to the core dif-
ference between socialism,
which focuses on how to dis-
tribute wealth, and capitalism,
which is concerned primarily
with how to produce it.
China’s experience teaches
anew that the latter is more
important than the former, for
the poor as well as the rich.
Mr. Sanders admires China for
bringing its population the
material benefits of capital-
ism. Why would he want to
saddle his own countrymen
with socialism?Mr. Muravchik is author of
“Heaven on Earth: The Rise,
Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism.”By Joshua Muravchik
Yes, China lifted
millions out of
poverty—by moving
away from socialism.OPINION
Populist in-
surgencies in
the world’s
two oldest
English-
speaking de-
mocracies
have exposed
deep flaws in
their consti-
tutional sys-
tems. Attend-
ing to these defects should be
an urgent order of business in
both nations.
The U.K. is torn between
two competing accounts of
political legitimacy. According
to longstanding law and tradi-
tion, ultimate sovereignty lies
in Parliament, which may leg-
islate on any matters it
chooses but cannot bind fu-
ture parliaments.
Yet since the 1970s, British
politicians have also employed
popular referenda, which have
introduced a new basis for le-
gitimacy into their system.
Put simply, parliamentary
sovereignty establishes a rep-
resentative democracy, while
the referendum creates a ver-
sion of direct democracy.
These two accounts are a
volatile mixture inside the
core of British governance.
They can interact stably, but
only if one of two conditions
is met. The first is when the
two expressions of the public
will coincide. That’s what hap-
pened in 1975: After the La-
bour Party government negoti-
ated changes to the terms by
which the U.K. had joined the
European Union, the question
of continued membership in
the EU was submitted to a ref-
erendum (Britain’s only na-
Trans-Atlantic Democracy Is Torn in Two
tionwide plebiscite in the 20th
century), which resulted in a
strong affirmative vote.
Alternatively, the dual sys-
tem works if one expression of
the public will is understood to
be subordinate to the other. In
principle, this is the case with
Brexit. In November 2016,
more than four months after
British voters chose to with-
draw from the EU, the British
High Court ruled that it is the
responsibility of all of Parlia-
ment—not merely the ruling
government—to determine
whether, when and how to
amend the U.K.’s membership
in the EU. The court held that
the result of the referendum
was “advisory” for the lawmak-
ers in Parliament, who retained
ultimate sovereignty.
Here’s the rub: The current
government led by Boris
Johnson is tacitly challenging
the court’s ruling. Like popu-
lists everywhere, those who
back Mr. Johnson insist that
the voice of the people ex-
pressed directly through ref-
erenda is more authentic than
its indirect expression
through elected representa-
tives. The people have spoken,
they say, and Parliament is
obligated to comply. A major-
ity of parliamentarians dis-
agree, insisting that they have
the right to determine the
conditions under which the
U.K. leaves the EU.
Unable to get its way, the
government is threatening to
ignore a law that Parliament
recently passed to constrain
the timing and terms of
Brexit. Senior aides to Mr.
Johnson have said that his
government intends to “sabo-tage” this law and “take a
chainsaw” to obstacles in the
way of a departure from the
EU. If Mr. Johnson makes
good on that threat, a latent
constitutional crisis will turn
into the real thing.
Unlike Britain’s unwritten
constitution, which did not
prevent Parliament from au-
thorizing referenda, America’s
articulated constitution makes
no provision for a direct pop-
ular vote, and would have to
be amended to accommodatethe practice (as many state
constitutions have been). Con-
sequently, populism in the
U.S. is expressed through an-
other of its defining fea-
tures—its preference for char-
ismatic leaders with strong
executive powers.
During his presidential
campaign, Donald Trump in-
sisted that his was the au-
thentic voice of the people
and that he alone could fix
the country’s problems. As
president, he has pressed the
powers of his office to the
hilt, if not beyond. The people
elected him to build a wall on
the southern border, he says.
If Congress refuses to appro-
priate funds for this purpose,
he will “reprogram” the
money from accounts estab-
lished for other purposes. No
one knows what will happen ifthe courts rule that he does
not have the authority to do
this.
To be fair, this is not hap-
pening in a vacuum. For de-
cades, Congress has been
transferring wide discretion-
ary powers—over military ac-
tion, trade, immigration and
regulation, among other
things—to the executive. It has
done this in part for Hamilto-
nian reasons: As the founder
pointed out, only the executive
can act with “dispatch” when
rapid, decisive action is re-
quired. But less honorable con-
siderations have played a part
as well; the people’s represen-
tatives are all too willing to
duck accountability for tough
decisions.
Despite the differences be-
tween their constitutional sys-
tems, both the U.K. and the
U.S. are learning the same les-
son: The formal features of
governmental power cannot
fully define its exercise. We
assume that those who hold
power will wield it within cer-
tain uncodified normative lim-
its. Yes, the British govern-
ment has the power, with the
queen’s assent, to adjourn Par-
liament. But no one imagined
that a prime minister would
do so for five weeks at the cli-
max of a wrenching national
debate, just as no one in the
U.S. imagined that a president
would declare steel imported
from Canada a threat to na-
tional security.
Assuming these crises re-
solve with democracy intact,
both countries have will have
some hard thinking to do
about the fundamentals of
their governance.Political crises in the
U.S. and U.K. show
how populism clashes
with constitutions.POLITICS
& IDEAS
By William
A. Galston
It was the
biggest and
most contro-
versial
merger of- It con-
sumed a
massive
amount of
media atten-
tion and re-
sulted in,
among other things, an igno-
minious defeat for the Trump
Justice Department, which
sued to block the deal.
We’re speaking, of course,
about the AT&T and Time
Warner merger that officially
closed nearly 15 months ago. It
was also one of the least
crisply explained mergers in
recent memory. Especially con-
fused have been the company’s
signals about how it intends to
repackage its entertainment
assets and sell them alongside
AT&T wireless broadband sub-
scriptions. Presumably such
“bundling” was a central
premise of the deal, though
AT&T leadership was reluctant
to use the out-of-favor word (it
preferred to talk about com-
peting with Google and Face-
book in targeted ads).
Somebody has to crack the
whip over the company’s
messy efforts, and the hedge
fund Elliott Management
raised its hand this week for
the job.
Elliott, led by Republican
donor and Trump-skeptic Paul
Singer, is an “activist” fund fa-
mous for its battles with Ar-
gentina and various companies
over their public securities. In
Should AT&T Be Broken Up?
a letter to AT&T’s board on
Monday, it announced a $3.
billion stake. It asked for a
meeting with management. It
asked for a formal strategy re-
view. Most notably, it lauded
Verizon, which has not fol-
lowed AT&T’s strategy of bulk-
ing up on entertainment as-
sets. And yet though the letter
spoke of encouraging divest-
ments, it mentioned only
smaller odds and ends that
AT&T might sell. It did not call
for the WarnerMedia deal to
be undone.
More confusingly, while
complaining about the $
billion merger’s unclear “stra-
tegic rationale,” Elliott’s vision
for the company’s future
seems to endorse the only ra-
tionale possible: Elliott sees
AT&T both taking the lead in
5G and moving quickly to use
its WarnerMedia assets to cre-
ate a “direct-to-consumer”
(i.e., streaming) business akin
to Netflix’s.
Which sounds a lot like bun-
dling is still in the cards unless
Elliott thinks (and it can’t pos-
sibly) that a free-standing
streaming service is an attrac-
tive proposition amid the on-
slaught coming from Disney,
Apple, Amazon and others.
Justice threw a poorly rea-
soned antitrust case against
the deal and deservedly lost.
Ironically, the deal would be a
lot more attractive to share-
holders if Justice had been
right —if the merger really did
confer on the new AT&T a mo-
nopolist’s power to gouge
video consumers and pillage
its TV rivals.The company ended up with
mostly legacy satellite and ca-
ble TV assets that were being
eaten alive by cord-cutting and
only a vague sense of how this
could be turned into a business
model that can survive the fu-
ture.
Here’s the best case we can
make: Most entertainment in
the future will be delivered
over broadband telecommuni-
cations businesses like thoseoperated by AT&T. At the same
time, those telecom businesses
will be overhauled by the ar-
rival of 5G and, eventually,
ubiquitous fast broadband.
Not only will that blow up
the distinction between mobile
and fixed, which is still a prop
under the existing cable busi-
ness. It marks the beginning of
the end for the “can you hear
me now?” era when mobile
companies could distinguish
themselves competitively in
consumer minds with the qual-
ity of their networks.
For AT&T and its network
competitors like Comcast, Ver-
izon, and others, a long-term
shakeout seems to be hoving
into view. Connectivity ser-
vices will be vital but harder to
get adequately paid for. One
way of commanding consumer
loyalty is to bundle in attrac-tive entertainment content,
then defray the costs with tar-
geted advertising in competi-
tion with Google and Facebook
(believe me, businesses are ea-
ger for somebody to compete
with Google and Facebook).
For some reason AT&T lead-
ership never really explained
the connection between its
wireless business and the giant
entertainment business it was
building, but its unspoken
strategy does not seem silly. It
just seems impossibly hard. Its
fruition is a decade away. A lot
can go wrong. AT&T faces a
gnarly challenge in the mean-
time in orchestrating its online
shift while trying not to canni-
balize revenues needed to ser-
vice its debt. One might also
ask: Are managers steeped in
telecommunications up to the
job of overseeing a fizzy Holly-
wood content factory?
Many saw in Elliott’s praise
of Verizon a barely concealed
wish to break up the Time
Warner merger, but the part
that rang most urgently for me
was its emphasis on execution,
execution, execution. If you be-
lieved the Time Warner deal
was a colossal error, you prob-
ably wouldn’t be a buyer right
now.
What the company needs
most is to move quickly to ra-
tionalize its offerings, cut
costs and defend the revenues
of its embattled entertainment
properties. Whether the deal’s
“strategic rationale” was a
particularly good one is likely
to matter less in the years
ahead than such basic blocking
and tackling.The ‘activist’ Elliott
Management doesn’t
say possibly because
it doesn’t know.BUSINESS
WORLD
By Holman W.
Jenkins, Jr.