Tag: Thomas Paine

America has been a free speech zone since our founding. Free speech led to The Revolutionary War. It stopped bad wars and ended slavery. America was founded on activism by men of honor whose actions spoke louder than their words. If it wasn’t for Paine’s activism, we’d still be subjects instead of citizens. “A man’s actions say much more than his most noble words.” – Thomas Paine Throughout our modern history, the activism of true leaders has made our nation stronger and far better than it would have been without them. Following the Tea Party Movement, tribal clans of self-anointed activist groups sprang up around America faster than Obama could say “change.” And the America Obama had divided, subdivided into activist bedlam. They were heroes of the day with mock activist groups. But their social media fame faded on Election Day as voters elected people who’d write laws to improve their lives, not to entertain activists. They had no experience, or knowledge of law, and campaigned to cause chaos in Congress.

It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that leading European political thinkers began to question the rationale for monarchies. Hazony explains that “the modern age was born out of an intellectual matrix that was steeped in Hebraic texts.” Nelson, in The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, discusses how political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, influenced by “rabbinic Biblical exegesis,” began “to claim that monarchy per se is an illicit constitutional form and that all legitimate constitutions are republican.” Until the discovery of rabbinic exegesis, the consensus among Christian exegetes had been that ancient Israel had not erred in having kings. Rather, Israel had erred either in selecting tyrannical kings or in asking for a change in government, which was considered a sin of rebellion against God’s established order. If he is instructing them to have a king, then why, in 1 Samuel, did God apparently become angry when responding to Samuel about the people’s request for a king? Rabbi Nehorai dissents, arguing that Moses did not command the Jews to appoint a king. Rabbi Eliezer, in discussing 1 Samuel, stipulates that it was acceptable for the elders to call for a king to establish law and order, but not for the mob of people to do so to emulate the surrounding nations, who were idolatrous. Maimonides had endorsed the idea that Moses was using the imperative. Grotius claimed that “at another time [the Jews] could have erected a king for themselves without sin.” They were not wrong to ask for a king, but they were wrong to ask for one “during that time in which they had an interregnum established by God.” Still another rabbinic discussion—in Midrash Rabbah - Devarim—took an entirely different view of Biblical monarchy, with even greater import. Milton insisted that “God did not order the Israelites to ask for a king … but ‘God was angry not only because they wanted a king in imitation of the gentiles … but clearly because they desired a king at all.’” Milton’s views resonated with many of his contemporaries, including the English politician Algernon Sidney. Influenced by Milton, Paine argued against monarchy and for republican government.