Venezuela and Common Sense

In the style of Thomas Paine

Two hundred and fifty years ago this Saturday, the writer, philosopher, and rabble-rouser Thomas Paine published Common Sense in Philadelphia, only 13 months after his arrival in America from London. His was the first essay to argue that Americans should seize independence from the Crown. In its first year, historians estimate, it sold between 120,000 and 150,000 copies among a colonial population of about 2 million free people — equivalent to selling millions today. Each copy would have been read or heard by many others, including those enslaved. Common Sense was the best-selling political pamphlet of the 18^th century and is broadly recognized as the spark that lit the fuse of the American Revolution. Everybody knew its argument. Common Sense became common knowledge.

Written in Paine’s plain, vigorous style, Common Sense laid out the case against monarchical government and hereditary succession, emphasizing natural rights and the inherent flaws of both the British system and King George III himself. In explicitly arguing against monarchy, it went further than any previous treatise. Paine charged the King with tyranny, calling him a Pharaoh and “Royal Brute.” He highlighted the economic and political disadvantages of British rule and inspired ordinary colonists to envision a self-governed republic based on egalitarian principles. The pamphlet was widely debated and, for many Americans, decisively persuasive. When John Adams returned to Congress a month later after the winter recess, his personal to-do list included “Declaration of Independency.”

In honor of Paine, I’ll do my best to offer some Common Sense about Venezuela. These 21^st century words are, like Paine’s, addressed to “the Inhabitants of America,” and, in his style, take up “the following Interesting Subjects, viz.”:

I. Of the Origin and Design of Government in General; with Concise Remarks on the United States Constitution.

II. Of the Donroe Doctrine.

III. Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs.

IV. Of the Present Ability of America; with some Miscellaneous Reflections.

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I. Of the Origin and Design of Government in General; with Concise Remarks on the United States Constitution

In 1776, America had an extraordinary opportunity. It had no stable legal system, given its distance from Britain, and had the chance “to begin government at the right end” — from the People, not a conqueror. The People could form a charter for themselves and then delegate authority to officials, instead of receiving law at the tip of a sword.

Most of history tells a tale of governments formed through conquest. First arrived a King — some ruffian, as Paine put it — and then came law. Law belonged to the King, and no one’s property or freedom was secure, since law hung on the arbitrary will of one person.

Against this history, the American story gave birth to self-determination. A People forms itself, sets boundaries, pools resources, and structures law to govern how its deputies deploy those resources. As Paine put it, “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

America opened a pathway to government grounded not in conquest but in choice and law. This is what America stands for.

The framers worked to make the ideal real. Article I formed Congress, placing direction-setting authority in the People’s representatives. Article II delegated execution to the President. We pooled our resources — most importantly by forming a military — and gave Congress authority to direct them, with the President charged to execute Congress’s will.

Over two centuries, this balance has tipped. Our government has moved from beginning at the right end — with the People — to emanating from the Executive. As Jack Goldsmith writes, “our country has — through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence — given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion. … That is our system: One person decides.”

With the invasion of Venezuela comes a coup de grâce: The Trump administration uses an illusion of lawfulness to mask the collapse of congressional authority over the military.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has insisted that the military was dispatched to Venezuela to enforce an arrest warrant, claiming legality under U.S. law. The precedents relied upon authorize the Department of Justice to request military force — but they are executive decisions, not legislative ones. In effect, executive will has become law. The King is the law.

Congressional law also governs this action. The invasion violated the U.N. Charter, a treaty signed by Congress. Regime change and oil seizure are illegal under that treaty. Yet the Executive has created a new source of law through Justice Department interpretations, wresting law-making power from Congress.

The President said he did not consult Congress because “Congress leaks.” Yet Politico reports oil businesses were given a week’s notice to prepare reconstruction commitments.

If Congress cannot control the military, Congress is dead. If business leaders know of military operations before Congress does, the military belongs to them, not the People. Our tax dollars, our young men and women in uniform — the treasure of our society — have been captured. This is common sense.

II. Of the Donroe Doctrine

President Donald Trump said Saturday that the invasion of Venezuela reflects what he called his “Donroe Doctrine.” He described this as like but also superseding the Monroe Doctrine, which staked a claim to hemispheric dominance.

The Donroe Doctrine is real. We all need to understand its content.

“Sovereignty” is the most important word in the arsenal of Trump administration policymakers. The mission of America First is to protect and exercise the sovereignty of the United States.

By sovereignty, the administration appears to mean unconstrained executive control over the United States, with no external relationships limiting its freedom of action. America First thus signifies intact control over the destiny of the nation. What seemed at first like isolationism reveals itself, under the Donroe Doctrine, as a bid for maximal control over external forces in order to dominate what occurs within U.S. borders.

The doctrine has a few key elements:

All multilateral arrangements are understood to undermine the sovereignty of the United States. The value of tariffs as a tool was not to establish alternative rules for the global economic order. As Trump uses them, they ensure that the U.S. is never in a relationship where it is not dictating the terms of the relationship. Some economists have been surprised that the tariffs are not playing out as expected economically. They think and analyze in a rules-based way, but Trump is not using tariffs in a rules-based way. He makes constant exceptions and adjustments, and no single stable regime of tariffs is available to analyze. This is not a temporary state of affairs. Trump’s vision of sovereignty entails always controlling every relationship — with tariffs as a tool of extraction and coercion. From the point of view of the Donroe Doctrine, to be subject to rules or to accept multilateral agreements is a relinquishment of sovereignty.

Controlling the border is necessary to maintaining the sovereignty of the United States. Under the Donroe Doctrine, the problem with out-of-control immigration is not fundamentally about either economics or lawfulness. It’s rather that external forces are reshaping the American population and thereby undermining the country’s control of its own destiny. Regardless of whether migration is sparked by climate change, flight from oppression or, as many in the Trump administration would argue, active efforts by adversaries to send unsavory people into the U.S., what matters is that the U.S. is experiencing externally driven demographic change. The Donroe Doctrine seeks to control the demographic future of the U.S.

Great power spheres of influence return. Under the Donroe Doctrine, every multilateral rule, every trade relationship, and every impact on the demographics of the U.S. is a violation of U.S. sovereignty, so actions undertaken all over the globe are relevant to whether the U.S. can maintain its sovereignty. America First applies to everything everywhere for how it affects the ability of the Executive to control what happens at home. Such a vision of sovereignty can be realized only via control of the whole globe. Other countries are already registering the stance. One example: according to the New York Times, the former Greek foreign minister has said about the U.S. ambassador to Greece that she gives “the impression that the United States is co-governing the country.”

Pursuit of full control of the globe would obviously cause such a cataclysm of violence that it is off the table. As a substitute, the Donroe Doctrine accepts spheres of influence: Europe and Russia have to vie for control of the Euro-Russian zone; China gets its sphere of influence; the U.S. gets the Americas. Africa presumably get carved up by the first three. We should all consider as deadly serious — and 40 people including civilians were killed in Venezuela — the goal of the Trump administration to achieve hegemony over Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia.

Enforcement rests on fully transitioning national security lawmaking from Congress to the Department of Justice. The Donroe Doctrine clothes itself in the dress of law, but law deriving from Congress and treaties is disregarded. In its place, Justice Department interpretations of police power become law. The same logic underwrites troop deployment in American cities.

Conquest is substituted for self-determination as the basis for government and in so doing undermines the history, meaning, and power of the United States. The founding of the United States created a remarkable vision of sovereignty: The People are sovereign, not an individual person. We the People bind ourselves to one another through our shared commitment to the rule of law. Our respect for natural rights makes us also respecters of the law. We cultivate a culture of lawfulness to bring ourselves order, security, fairness, freedom from domination, and prosperity. We can and do bind our own will through our representatives in Congress when they make treaties with other nations. This does not diminish our sovereignty. It enhances it. With treaties, we extend the rules-based order that brings security, fairness, freedom from domination, and prosperity to a greater portion of the globe. This increases our own security and happiness. The more we can live by shared standards of fairness, the more we can live freely in our private lives.

To replace recognition of self-determination with governance by conquest — as the President and Secretary of State embraced this weekend — is to call into question the moral foundations of American freedom. Since the President and Secretary of State have declared themselves comfortable with rule through conquest — rule from the wrong end — they have revealed the founding doctrine of the United States to have no moral purchase over them.

One might argue that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was an illegitimate ruler legitimately removed, and this would be so if the action had been approached with support from Congress and in alignment with treaty obligations. Preservation of the founding principles of the U.S. would also require a clear plan to achieve the transition of Venezuela to self-determination. None of these facts obtain.

The Donroe Doctrine has no respect for the principle of self-determination and therefore no moral or philosophical basis for protecting free institutions within the United States. The doctrine has no respect for the sovereignty of a free people. If the purpose of sovereignty is no longer the freedom and happiness of the People, what is it?

The purpose of sovereignty is demographic management, wealth creation, and “the ability to protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to national security,” as Trump said this weekend. Foreign relations have always been about America’s security and prosperity. Now Trump is deploying the nation’s military for wealth-building, and not on behalf of the American people generally but for the business elite.

The Donroe Doctrine seeks control over resources to fuel an economy of crony capitalism, where wealth-building depends on the decisions of the Executive, and where the Executive himself profits immensely. Since the 2024 election, the Trump family has gained some $4 billion in wealth, the Wall Street Journal reports. When sovereignty of the law is replaced by the sovereignty of one man, government of the People is no longer government by the People. Consequently, it is also not government for the People.

Under the Donroe Doctrine, government of the conquered is by the Executive for business elites who embrace crony capitalism.

By this doctrine, the American President, like the King of England long ago, “hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which, in plain terms, is to empoverish the nation and set it together by the ears.”

III. Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs.

I can scarcely meet with a person — in any state in the country — who has not confessed to holding the view that Congress is now pointless, and that our economy is now corrupt crony capitalism. This is our new common sense.

If we agree on these two points, then a question necessarily follows. If Congress has allowed itself to become pointless, do we still have the institutions of a free society? If government is by the Executive for business elites willing to accept crony capitalism, do we have free and fair markets?

Goldsmith’s diagnosis remains: “One person decides.” Do we want that system?

Some might say that growth of the Executive is a necessary feature of a modern economy and global interconnection, and that we should no longer expect 21st century democracy to achieve true popular self-rule, through a popularly elected legislature.

Yet this is refuted by the different directions that the United States and the United Kingdom have traveled since 1776. The United States chose to declare independence, fight a revolution, and establish a new charter of government, with the Legislature as the first branch and the Executive as the second. After two centuries, the second branch has overwhelmed the first. In the UK, British radicals — the friends of Thomas Paine — spent 50 years hammering away at the Crown’s corruption and the subservience and nonrepresentative nature of Parliament. Eventually, they reined in the monarch and achieved universal suffrage, establishing the constitutional monarchy of the present day. The executive agencies in Britain are operated by cabinet secretaries who are typically members of Parliament. The King is dramatically constrained. We know that legislative supremacy continues to be a possibility in the 21^st century world because Britain has it. The U.S., after two and a half centuries, does not.

Others might say that the challenge to popular self-rule in the U.S. in the 21^st century is not modernity itself but features of the United States and our size and scale. As the wealthiest country on the planet with the most powerful military, perhaps we have a degree of capacity that can no longer be controlled by a legislative assembly. On this argument, we weaken ourselves if we diffuse our decision-making through long deliberations over the conflicting interests of regions and sectors. We can’t find and act on the national interest. Letting power shift to the Executive is necessary and good as the only way to achieve a clear course of action.

Here the refutation comes from the original design. The expectation was always that the Executive would have the job of bringing a unitary and unifying intelligence to the project of foreign affairs. Yet the decision to convert intelligence into action was to reside with the People themselves, through their Legislature. The Legislature would decide to make war, or decide to sign a treaty, or determine tariffs, or the use of the Treasury. The Executive would in this sense — except in cases of time-sensitive emergency — function first as the People’s best advisor. But the People would decide, and only then would the Executive act as executor on their behalf.

This remains eminently possible. Despite being utterly unleashed, the current Executive still consults, just with the business community, not Congress. The President’s own behavior reveals that the Executive can stay in partnership with another entity. That entity should be the Congress, not business. Congress has the capacity to control its leaks, if that is the problem. Or to pursue other internal reforms for more effective engagement on national security.

Still another set of voices clamors that popular self-rule through institutions is no longer a desirable way for a society to organize itself. Opaque, multilayered governance systems are just too slow to be effective — whether domestically or in our international relations. We can see all kinds of areas where this is true. A host of global problems — including global narco-trafficking — are not being addressed by post-World War II institutions. As my colleague Anne-Marie Slaughter puts it, nations have been wringing their hands and doing very little for too long.

This critique has bite. Democratic hand-wringing must be replaced by energy in the conduct of a democracy’s affairs. In domestic politics, we can see glimmers of transformation in places like Taiwan and Estonia, where the pathologies of late 20^th century democratic institutions — slowness, partiality, too many veto-points — are solved through new institutional designs that tap into the speed, scale, and sophistication made possible through technology.

Assistive technologies can improve all the layers of how representative institutions function — how citizen voice is channeled; how decision-makers process information and decide; how laws and regulations are enforced, services delivered, and courts operated. Declining governance capacity in democracies does not mean popular self-rule has failed but that the time has arrived for another intense period of institutional redesign so that self-rule and effectiveness can cohabit.

A final set of objections to pursuing legislative supremacy comes from those who argue that freedom in our private lives should be enough for us. We should leave broad questions of how the future of the country should unfold to whoever happens to be in power. Provided the President is elected, that is good enough, as long as he leaves us alone to tend to our own gardens.

This view makes a laughingstock of two and a half centuries of experimenting with the idea that legislative and executive power should be separated from, and organized to check, each other — as if that effort has been in pursuit of some illusory phantom, not real freedom. Proponents of this view would have us believe that we never needed anything other than a monarch, albeit an elected one, to take care of big things while we take care of the little things.

To the contrary, our society has invested 250 years of effort in maintaining checks and balances precisely to ensure that the law is king, not the arbitrary will of any one individual. For the law to be king, there must be a distinction between the powers of the Legislature and the Executive. Having the law as king protects us from the kind of whiplash that we are currently experiencing from our President’s arbitrary and changeable will. Such whiplash means no one can plan their course effectively. How much will goods cost as tariffs whipsaw? How much will health care cost as policy whipsaws? Who will lose jobs as government programs are arbitrarily retired despite congressional legislation? The absence of a stable context for planning is a feature of freedom’s diminution. It is a feature of domination. Freedom may not be all gone, but it is in decline. As Paine wrote in Common Sense, “The property of no man is secure in the present unbraced system of things.”

In Paine’s day, the common sense that circulated broadly was that “a separation between the countries would take place one time or other.” The only question was when and how. Paine made the case that the time had come for America to force the question of independence. America listened and chose 1776.

Our situation is different. No natural tendency pulls now toward legislative supremacy. Quite the contrary. Our common sense reports a drift toward the end of freedom. We will need an active effort to bring about a change of direction.

The freedom-loving among us will have to form an opposition. Not a resistance, but a loyal opposition — a coordinated effort to offer the country a governing alternative and to present the case for it at every possible point and in every possible medium. As Paine wrote, “I mean not to exhibit horror for the purpose of provoking revenge, but to awaken us from fatal and unmanly slumbers, that we may pursue determinately some fixed object.”

That alternative must include reforms to Congress that will secure its independence from the Executive — for instance, getting rid of party primaries.

We should increase the size of Congress to make up for deferred maintenance — its growth was capped a century ago. We can combine this with multimember districts and election systems that will deliver proportional results so that we can depolarize Congress.

We should make use of assistive technology to speed up our representative institutions and make them smarter.

Perhaps we might also require that cabinet secretaries be drawn from Congress and continue to serve in the Legislature while running their agencies.

And we should pursue internal reforms to Congress, for instance, those proposed by the House Modernization Committee to improve Congress’ ability to function as a partner.

Congress must reassert its authority over tariffs and war.

This alternative agenda must include a stable, rules-based approach to governing the nation’s economic life and a foreign policy that treats trade as a tool of peace, not economic war.

It must include secure borders: if the People is to be sovereign, the People must know who it is. That we owe allegiance to one another — and to whom we owe allegiance — should never be in question. Secure borders do not mean the People cannot evolve over time; nor do they mean we make visitors unwelcome. Sound immigration policy should include reform to our immigration system and a path to earned legalization for long-term but undocumented residents. Visitors are easy to embrace against the backdrop of orderly process.

The agenda of the opposition must include respect for self-determination, both our own and that of other peoples; a willingness to take defensive military action, including pre-emptive strikes where necessary; but a refusal to engage in conquest.

The agenda must include strength through alliances with nations committed to freedom and with nations respectful of our freedom.

Common sense would have it that anyone who loves the now-ancient liberties of these United States should support a loyal opposition whose foremost purpose is to secure those liberties from those who would strip the American people of them.

Every member of Congress who can support these goals should declare their support. Every resident of a statehouse or state legislature who can support these goals should declare it. Every activist group that has embraced resistance should pivot to opposition — forward movement on a positive agenda for this alternative vision of governance.

Let a clearly defined opposition take the field. Let its common sense become common knowledge.

IV. Of the Present Ability of America, with some Miscellaneous Reflections.

As the politics of the last two decades has unfolded, a few notable features have shown themselves. Many Americans are engaged in a “Resistance” to the Trump administration. For most, this seems largely to involve attending public demonstrations and participating in boycotts of companies. During the past year, some people have more actively engaged in resisting the immigration enforcements of ICE.

Others have been extensively involved in bridge-building activities — working at the cultural level to find opportunities to knit America’s many ideological communities back together.

Then there is the MAGA movement, which has defined this past decade. It is splintering — as high-profile defections like that of Marjorie Taylor Greene make clear. Whether the movement will stand behind the Donroe Doctrine remains to be seen. Even Steve Bannon has raised questions about it.

Across all these communities, a spiritual yearning is powerfully evident — a hunger for meaning beyond materialism; for an ethos of respect for human dignity; for an escape from our culture of violence; for peace. Charlie Kirk’s movement was as much religious as political — a Great Awakening. That appetite for spiritual nourishment exists outside of Christianity as well as within it. Our worst problems right now are not actually material but spiritual — not affordability but fear, anger, and stress. The problem of affordability is bad; toxicity and domination are worse.

As reported in the New York Times, Greene describes her break from Trump as defined by a moment in Charlie Kirk’s funeral when the spiritual and the political pulled plainly apart. Erika Kirk movingly told the packed stadium that she forgave the man who had killed her husband. Then Trump followed and said about Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” This clarified for Greene who Trump is. She told the Times, “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her [Erika] having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

The entanglement on the right of a culture of Christian love with a man who represents a doctrine of violence and power shows the depth of the hunger for spiritual awakening, and how easily that hunger can be abused.

Recognizing this, we need to find our path to true and good ways of fulfilling people’s spiritual yearnings and rekindle the warmth of human connection. Can we become people of welcome — who can communicate true love and warmth to others? Regardless of whether what governs our own souls is love of God, country, community, or human dignity, how can that love flow outward to connect us to one another?

All over the country people are awakening to civic connection and association. The Healthy Democracy map provides one picture of this regrowth, but there are many pieces of evidence. When we connect with one another in civic life, we discover the love of humankind, not just of mine and my own family, but love of others who are not in my family.

From love of humankind comes love of freedom — for freedom shared is what protects us all, not just me but you, too. We may drift into believing that we can satisfactorily protect ourselves by building up our own power. But we can only protect all of us at the same time through freedom. When we want to protect all of us — when we care about other people, not just ourselves — we need freedom, not power. Recovery of freedom begins, then, from recovery of love of humankind.

A powerful loyal opposition will have an agenda. That agenda will have a simple name. It is the pursuit of government of the People that is also by the People and, because it is by the People, also for the People. Government of, by, and for the People.

The fuel that will power the agenda of opposition will be love of humankind. The loyal opposition will not resist the current administration but oppose it in every lawful way by everywhere and always loudly proposing an alternative vision and path — grounded in love, claiming freedom.

Right now, joining that opposition begins by providing support — whether of time, talent, or treasure — to November ballot initiatives in Oregon, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts that seek to replace our current party primary system with all-party primaries. Why start with something that seems so small? Because these measures are planting a flag for an alternative political system where the People — all the people — have the strongest voice. To form an opposition, we need people to rally round the same flag. These initiatives offer that flag.

Said Paine, “O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!”

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