This 250th year of American independence has seen no shortage of paeans to Thomas Paine, the high priest of the American Revolution. Organs of liberal-left politics from the Atlantic to the New York Times to the Nation have implored a return to Paine and his 1776 tract, Common Sense, in our moment of democratic peril. Meanwhile, a widely reviewed new book places Paine at the ideological taproot of the revolutionary politics that ushered in modern democracy, pointing to him as a source for democracy’s renewal today.

However, there is reason to question this copy-and-paste of Paine to contemporary conditions. A revolutionary rallying cry for popular rule in 1776, today common sense is a counterrevolutionary euphemism unable to capture what is most compelling about liberal democracy. As we celebrate Independence Day, we’d also do well to rethink this storied American manifesto.

In Common Sense, Paine issues a withering critique of monarchical rule, calling forth the wisdom of commoners as the commonsensical alternative to the arbitrary power of kingship. “In the following pages, I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine intoned, while urging revolt against the British Crown. With the rhetorical gifts of a radical pamphleteer, Paine cast the revolutionary politics of popular sovereignty as an incontrovertible truth — no more contestable than the color of the sky or the contemptibility of kings. Independence birthed a new nation but also a dominant political idiom, cementing common sense as our collective creed.