The Common Press
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The Common Press
FOUNDERS MODERNIZATION SERIES
VOLUME II
Common Sense 2.0
A Plain Account of What Has Been Done to This Republic,
and What Must Now Be Done to Restore It
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776
The Common Press
Published without author attribution, in the tradition of Thomas Paine
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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FOREWORD
A Dialogue Across Two and a Half Centuries
What follows is a device, used intentionally. Two voices separated by two hundred and fifty
years examine the same condition from the evidence available to each. Thomas Paine in 1776.
A citizen of the present hour in 2026. The argument is continuous. The evidence has only
accumulated.
Paine published Common Sense anonymously on January 10, 1776, because he believed the
argument should carry itself without the distraction of a name. This document follows that
tradition. The present voice is not named. The argument is the argument.
Thomas Paine, 1776
“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
The Present Hour, 2026
It still is. That’s the problem. You wrote that before they figured out how to buy the cause.
Paine
“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a
necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
2026
We’ve passed necessary evil. We’ve arrived somewhere else. Somewhere the government
is not a necessary evil but a purchased instrument: necessary to those who purchased it,
evil to those who did not.
Paine
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being
right.”
2026
Yes. And a long habit of not naming a thing has made it unspeakable. We call it ‘the
system’ or ‘the way things work’ or ‘that’s just politics.’ The name we don’t use is the
accurate one. Oligarchy.
Paine
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
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2026
Not over again. That’s the wrong frame. We don’t need to begin the world over. We need
to reclaim what was already built, and is being eaten from the inside while we watch and
call the eating ‘complicated.’
Paine
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by
anybody.”
2026
There it is. That’s the whole document in one sentence. You wrote it in 1776. We’re still
waiting for it to stick.
Paine
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of
supporting it.”
2026
Agreed. The fatigue is the point. Comfort is the prison. We have been very comfortable.
And while we were comfortable, the bowl of candy was being emptied by the handful. We
are the elderly couple who left it unattended and trusted that decency would govern the
porch.
Paine
“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
2026
We haven’t started the conflict yet. That’s what this document is for.
The six sections that follow are the argument. The dialogue above is the frame. The conclusion
is the same conclusion Paine reached in 1776, and the same conclusion the evidence demands
in 2026.
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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Read it plainly. Pass it to one person who needs to read it.
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PREFACE
The Servant Has Forgotten Who They Work For
Being a plain account of how we arrived here, and why plain language is now the only honest response
Every four years, Americans gather around their screens and perform a ritual that has come to
feel less like self-governance and more like group therapy. We pick a team. We watch the
numbers. We feel hope or we feel dread. And then, regardless of which side prevails, we spend
the next four years living through an administration: enduring it, narrating it, surviving it, as
though the government of a free people is a weather system; something that happens to you, not
something you do.
This is a symptom. Not of bad politicians, though there are plenty. Not of an uninformed
public, though the information environment has been deliberately degraded. It is a symptom of
a structural condition: the inversion of the servant-citizen relationship. The government, which
exists to serve the people, has been progressively reconfigured to serve other interests; and the
people, who are the sovereign, have been progressively reconfigured to feel like subjects.
The basis of this republic is not capitalism. It is not the protection of concentrated private
wealth. It is not the comfort of those who have managed to position themselves between the
public treasury and the private interest. The basis of this republic is three things: Life, Liberty,
and the Pursuit of Happiness. These are not economic categories. They are human ones. And a
government that fails to protect them, that actively works to concentrate the conditions of their
realization in fewer and fewer hands, has broken the covenant that gives it the right to govern.
The Delaware can be crossed again. It has been crossed before, and
always by people who were told the crossing was impossible.
This document will not be polite about what has happened. Politeness, at this stage, is not a
virtue. It is a choice to prioritize the comfort of the powerful over the dignity of the governed.
We have been polite for a long time. The polite period is over.
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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SECTION I
Of the Disease, and Why We Have Refused to Name It
Being a plain account of what has been done to this republic, by whom, and why silence is no longer a virtue but a
crime
Some truths are called dangerous not because they are false, but because they are precise.
We are told, in this age, that our republic endures. That its institutions hold. That the machinery
of self-governance, however slow, however imperfect, still turns in the direction of the people’s
will. We are told to trust the process. To vote. To wait.
We have waited. And while we waited, the process was purchased.
The question before us is not whether our government has been
corrupted. That is settled. The question is whether we have the honesty
to say so plainly, and the courage to act on what plainness demands.
There is a word for a system in which a small class of men write the laws that govern their own
wealth, fund the campaigns of those who enforce those laws, and then retire comfortably
behind the phrase that is simply how things work. The word is not democracy. It has never
been democracy. It is oligarchy; and the first act of every oligarchy is to make its own name
unspeakable in polite company.
We have been very polite.
The Disease Named
The disease is not greed. Greed is ancient and we have always known how to constrain it with
law. The disease is the capture of the law itself: the moment at which the very instruments
designed to hold power accountable became instruments through which power holds us
accountable instead.
It operates in three phases, and we are deep into the third.
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In the first phase, wealth consolidates. This is ordinary and, within limits, tolerable. In the
second phase, consolidated wealth purchases access: to legislators, to regulators, to media. This
is dangerous, but still visible, still arguable, still resistible. In the third phase, our phase, access
becomes architecture. The rules of the game are rewritten so that no future generation of
citizens can easily reverse what has been done. Transparency is gutted. Enforcement is
defunded. The revolving door becomes the standard career path. The dark money becomes the
normalized funding mechanism. And the people who have benefited from all of this look across
the table at the people who have been harmed by it and say: this is just how things work.
The Original Covenant
The republic was not founded on the genius of its institutions alone. It was founded on a wager:
a bet, made in public, in writing, before God and history, that ordinary people, given access to
honest information and genuine representation, would govern themselves more justly than any
king, any court, any hereditary class ever had or ever could.
That wager has been voided. Not by foreign invasion. Not by natural catastrophe. It has been
voided by the slow, deliberate, and enormously profitable project of making representation a
performance and information a product.
The legislature votes. The vote is theater. The real negotiation happened six months prior, in a
room none of us entered, between people none of us elected, representing money none of us
control.
We do not have a corrupt government the way a house has a leak. We
have a government that has been structurally redesigned to serve a
different clientele than the one it claims.
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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SECTION II
Of the Captured Institutions
A five-count indictment of the systems that were built to serve us and have been turned against us
The indictment is not partisan. Both parties have presided over the capture documented below.
Both parties have benefited from it. The framing of accountability as a left or right issue is
itself one of the capture’s most effective defenses.
Count One: The Legislature
The United States Senate requires sixty votes to overcome a filibuster on most legislation. The
Senate has forty-one members who represent states containing eighteen percent of the
American population. This means that representatives of eighteen percent of the population can
permanently block the will of the other eighty-two percent. The filibuster itself is not in the
Constitution. It was an accident of parliamentary procedure that hardened into a tool of
minority veto. In the same period during which the filibuster has been used to block campaign
finance transparency legislation, political spending by the top 0.01 percent of donors has
increased by several thousand percent. The block has served a function. That function is not
democratic representation.
Count Two: The Regulatory System
The revolving door is the mechanism by which the regulatory agencies of the federal
government are staffed, in substantial part, by people who came from the industries they
regulate and will return to those industries when they leave. The FDA medical reviewer who
approved OxyContin’s misleading label in 1995 joined Purdue Pharma in 1998 at a salary
nearly three times his government pay. The FCC Chairman who eliminated net neutrality in
2017 joined a private equity firm with telecommunications holdings in 2021 and became
president of the wireless industry’s primary lobbying organization in 2025. This pattern is not
exceptional. It is the pattern. The Project on Government Oversight found that more than 80
percent of four-star generals who retired between 2018 and 2023 joined the arms industry. The
revolving door is not a corruption of the regulatory system. It is the regulatory system.
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Count Three: The Financial System
Citizens United v. FEC (2010) held that corporations and other outside groups may spend
unlimited amounts on political advertising. McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) eliminated aggregate
limits on individual political contributions. The combined effect was the creation of the dark
money architecture: an unlimited, anonymous political funding system operated through
501(c)(4) social welfare organizations that are not required to disclose their donors. The 2024
election cycle produced a record $1.9 billion in dark money. A single donor transferred $1.65
billion to a political advocacy organization in 2021 in a transaction structured to avoid an
estimated $400 million in capital gains taxes. The DISCLOSE Act, which would require
disclosure of these donors, has failed to break the Senate filibuster fifteen times since 2010.
Count Four: The Information System
In 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the majority of American media. By 2011,
that number was six. The 3,300 newspapers that have closed since 2005 were, in most cases,
the primary accountability journalism institutions for their communities: the institutions that
covered the school board, the city council, the local court, the local developer with the local
variance. When those institutions close, local power operates without local scrutiny. The
information environment has been simultaneously narrowed at the ownership level and flooded
at the content level, making it possible for the population to feel more informed than ever while
actually understanding the mechanisms of its own governance less well than at any point in the
modern era.
Count Five: The Judicial System
The federal judiciary is appointed for life and confirmed by the Senate. Between 2016 and
2020, a single Senator refused to hold hearings on one Supreme Court nominee and then
confirmed a different nominee weeks before a presidential election. The practical effect was the
installation of a judicial majority whose rulings have systematically narrowed the scope of
federal regulatory authority, contracted voting rights, and eliminated constitutional protections
that had governed reproductive healthcare for fifty years. The network responsible for building
and funding the pipeline of judicial nominees was funded in substantial part by the $1.65
billion dark money transfer described in Count Three. The judicial system that is supposed to
serve as the check on captured legislation and captured regulation is itself the product of a
captured nomination and confirmation process.
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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SECTION III
Of the Comfort of Compliance
On the absurdity of continuing to do the thing that has repeatedly not worked, while calling this prudence
There is a version of civic responsibility that has been so thoroughly absorbed into the common
sense of this era that it has become invisible as a choice. It presents as realism. It presents as
maturity. It presents as the serious, measured, responsible alternative to alarm.
It goes like this: The system is complicated. Change takes time. Work within the institutions.
Support the better candidate. File the comment. Sign the petition. Vote. And then, when the
vote produces the same outcome as the previous vote, when the comment goes unread, when
the petition generates a form letter, when the better candidate takes office and proceeds to
accommodate the same interests as the previous candidate: nod, accept it, and prepare to do the
same thing next cycle.
This is not prudence. It is the decision to participate in a performance that does not change the
conditions it is supposed to change, while calling the participation civic virtue.
The opposite of compliance is not chaos. The opposite of compliance is
accountability. These have been made to seem like synonyms for
radicalism. They are not. They are the operating requirements of a
republic.
Consider what happens when the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, passed in 2010 after the
most catastrophic financial crisis since the Depression, is systematically weakened through
regulatory rule-making over the following decade: not through Congressional repeal, but
through the slower, less visible mechanism of agency interpretation and the appointment of
regulators who define the law’s requirements in the narrowest possible terms. The financial
industry spent approximately $1.4 billion lobbying against Dodd-Frank between 2010 and
2020. The provisions that survived were the ones the industry decided it could live with. The
provisions that did not survive were the ones that would have mattered.
Consider what happens when the DEA’s ability to suspend drug companies’ licenses to
distribute controlled substances is eliminated through a piece of legislation drafted with the
assistance of the drug industry’s lobbyists and passed with bipartisan support in 2016, at the
height of the opioid epidemic that has now killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The
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Washington Post and 60 Minutes documented this in 2017. The legislation’s primary sponsor
withdrew from a Cabinet nomination under scrutiny. The legislation remained law.
At what point does the record of what the formal mechanisms have produced constitute
sufficient evidence to demand different mechanisms?
Henry asked this question in 1775 about a decade of failed petitions to the Crown. The question
had the same answer then as it does now: when the evidence is in, the evidence is in.
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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SECTION IV
Of What Must Be Demanded
Four non-negotiable pillars of accountability, and why each is necessary
The argument of this document is not merely diagnostic. Diagnosis without prescription is
complaint. What follows is the prescription. It is not a complete legislative program: that exists
separately, in the AAST Act framework. It is the irreducible minimum; the four things that
must happen before meaningful accountability is possible.
Pillar One: Full Beneficial Ownership Disclosure
Every entity that does business with the federal government, donates to a political organization,
or lobbies a federal official must publicly disclose its beneficial owners: the human beings who
ultimately own or control the entity, through whatever chain of intermediaries. Shell
companies, nominee arrangements, and layered holding structures must disclose the person at
the end of the chain. Dark money must disclose its source. This is not radical. It is the basic
condition of a republic whose citizens are supposed to be able to evaluate the interests of those
who seek to influence their government.
Pillar Two: Mandatory Audited Asset Registration for Public Servants
Every federal official above a specified seniority threshold, elected, appointed, or career senior
executive, must file a complete, audited, publicly accessible financial disclosure upon entry
into service, annually during service, and upon exit from service. The disclosure must include
all assets, all liabilities, all income sources, all financial interests of immediate family
members, and all financial arrangements that will take effect upon leaving government service.
The audit must be performed by an independent auditor, not self-reported.
Pillar Three: A Citizen Enforcement Bounty Mechanism
The enforcement of disclosure and accountability requirements cannot depend on the good
faith of the agencies responsible for enforcement, because those agencies have been
systematically captured by the interests they are supposed to police. The AAST Act framework
establishes a citizen bounty program: a structured financial incentive for citizens who identify
and document violations of the Act’s transparency and accountability requirements. Bounties
are funded through a percentage of recovered assets and assessed penalties. The program
creates a distributed enforcement network that does not depend on the adequacy of captured
regulatory agencies.
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Pillar Four: A Total Self-Dealing Prohibition
No public servant, while in office, may take any official action, legislative, regulatory, or
executive, that provides a direct financial benefit to any entity in which they or their immediate
family members hold a financial interest. No public servant, upon leaving office, may accept
employment from or receive compensation from any entity that directly benefited from their
official actions during a minimum five-year cooling-off period. The prohibition is not limited
to direct bribery. It encompasses the full range of mechanisms through which official action is
converted into private financial benefit.
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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SECTION V
The Dare
Addressed directly to three kinds of reader
This section has no patience for evasion. It is addressed to you, specifically, in one of three
configurations.
To the Person Who Agrees But Will Not Act
You have read this document and found yourself nodding. You have thought: yes, this is right,
this is accurate, this is precisely the situation. And you are already composing the reasons why
this agreement does not require anything of you right now. The timing isn’t right. The
movement isn’t organized enough. You have other responsibilities. You’ll watch how it
develops.
You are choosing a side. You are choosing the side that wins when people like you make
exactly the calculation you are making. This is not a neutral choice. Inaction in a system that
depends on citizen disengagement to perpetuate itself is active support for that system. Dress it
however you like. The functional result is the same.
To the Person Who Is Waiting for Others to Go First
You are waiting for the movement to be large enough, visible enough, credible enough to be
worth joining. You are waiting for the critical mass before you contribute to the critical mass.
This is the collective action problem as personal philosophy. Everyone waiting for everyone
else guarantees that no one goes first. Someone went first at Seneca Falls in 1848. Someone
went first at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960. Someone went first at the March on
Washington before there were hundreds of thousands of people there. They did not wait for the
critical mass. They became it.
To the Person Who Believes It Is Too Late
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It is not too late. It is late. It is later than it should be, later than it needed to be, later than it
would have been if earlier generations had not also believed it was too late. But it is not too
late.
The abolitionists were told it was too late to end slavery. The suffragists were told it was too
late to win the vote. Every generation that has confronted concentrated, unaccountable power
has been told that the window has closed and the fight is futile. This is what concentrated
power tells the people who are thinking about fighting it. It is almost never true. It is always
self-serving.
COMMON SENSE 2.0
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Whose side are you on, and what are you willing to do about it?
The answer you give in the next thirty days will be the answer you carry for the rest of your
life.
Join the march. Sign the framework. Pass this document to one person who needs to read it.
https://thecommonpress.substack.com/
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the
sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but
he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776