“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” wrote the great English radical Thomas Paine in his hugely influential pamphlet Common Sense, calling for American independence from British rule under a republican government which guaranteed individual rights and liberties.

The pamphlet, which sold upwards of half a million copies before the end of the American War of Independence, was published exactly 250 years ago today, on 10 January, 1776. By the grimmest of ironies, its anniversary comes at the very moment when the cause of America and global liberty is fast foundering as the fundamental principles of 1776 are discarded by the equally radical American counter-revolution of 2026.

Donald Trump and his administration openly despise democratic and legal restraints, transforming America into the antithesis of Paine’s expectations. In the space of a few days, the US has kidnapped the president of an independent state, taken control of that country’s oil wealth, asserted its right to seize any vessel on the high seas, and reiterated its plans to annex the vast Arctic island of Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous part of Denmark.

Even before the thirteen colonies had declared independence, Paine believed they had already established a better society than in the old world. He pointed to America as “the asylum for the lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither they have fled, not from the tender embrace of the mother [country], but from the cruelty of the monster.”

Fast forward to the present day and few fleeing cruelty and monstrous autocracies will automatically take refuge in the United States. What would Paine have made of the masked paramilitaries of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terrorising immigrant communities routinely demonised as criminal and alien by Trumpers? What would Paine say were he to watch videos showing the merciless killing of Renee Nicole Good, 37, in Minneapolis?

An amateur poet and mother of three, she is seen trying to manoeuvre her car to avoid burly ICE agents, none of them in any danger, when one of them opens fire at point-blank range. Disgracefully, Trump and his ghastly crew of fanatics and crackpots pretend that this presumably terrified woman was some sort of terrorist using her car as a deadly weapon to run down an ICE agent. In a more than usually revolting rant, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Good was committing an “act of domestic terrorism”. Local law enforcement in Minneapolis will not be allowed by the Trump-controlled FBI to investigate what really happened.

Unrestrained violence is deployed against anybody identified as an enemy of Trumpian power at home and abroad. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, White House deputy chief of........

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