Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Interests, his and ours

 Before Americans won their independence, Thomas Paine urged them to ditch the idea of monarch, a person who presumed to rule rather than lead, and create a representative government. However, Paine warned that such governments have limits.

Elected representation works only when the elected never forms an interest separate from the electorate.

 

If you started a list of the newly elected’s interests and compared them with those of the electorate’s, you’d be at work on an epic.

• Source: Thomas Paine, Collected Writings; New York: The Library of America, 1984, p. 8. The line is from “Common Sense,” first published in January 1776.

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