Beware of Republicans bearing ‘common sense’

Common sense: It’s the folksy, kitchen-table, impossible-to-disagree-with rallying cry of the moment for conservative politicians seeking to undo the health-care law, remake Social Security, reduce taxes and slash government spending.

Just look around. Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal promises “common-sense solutions” for health care. Gov. Tim Pawlenty announces that we can “restore America’s greatness by restoring American common sense,” adding in a recent speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “we need more common sense and less Obama nonsense.” And Sarah Palin touts the values of “common-sense conservatism” when she criticizes Obama’s budget rhetoric.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Even Obama is trying to catch up. “Reducing spending while still investing in the future is just common sense,” he said, a bit awkwardly, in his weekly address on April 9. “That’s what families do in tough times.”

And what political elites do in tough times is . . . invoke common sense. As a slogan, a style of address and an ideal, common sense has long played an outsize role in American politics, typically surging in times of exceptional fractiousness. And for all its homespun appeal, it has often been a vehicle for precisely the opposite of what it suggests: subjectivity, partisanship and demagoguery.

One of history’s most successful pitchmen for common sense was Ronald Reagan. In his farewell address from the Oval Office, the 40th president defined the Reagan revolution as “a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.” From the beginning of his political career, he routinely attributed his success to his faith in the idea that government “could be operated efficiently by using the same common sense practiced in our everyday life, in our homes, in business and private affairs,” as he put it in a 1975 CPAC speech.

But in tapping the populist mood of today, conservatives have been reaching considerably further back than Reagan. They are conjuring the American revolutionary hero Tom Paine, the originator of the myth of a common-sense politics — and a tea party favorite, despite his decidedly less-than-conservative roots.

Paine spent the revolutionary winter of 1776 trying to persuade a hesitant colonial audience to adopt the most radical option before it: not only a complete break with the mother country, but also the introduction of an untested form of government, stripped of both aristocracy and king, that would unite the various North American colonies in independence. His genius was to make this solution seem as self-evident as the proposition that an island had no business ruling a continent. That — and labeling the entire thing “Common Sense.” After all, who could argue with a man who offered “nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense”?

Paine both validated the instincts of his everyday readers over those of distant authorities and turned those instincts into the foundation for a new system of rulership. In this way, an American political tradition was born. Thomas Jefferson insisted in his later years that even the Declaration of Independence, that other great political invention of 1776, was simply “the common sense of the subject.”