Sixteen Republican Senate candidates – almost half the field – have stated their support for diverting some portion of Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts. That reflects the impact on the GOP of the Tea Party movement, which so loves to wrap itself in the cloak of America’s revolutionary past. At least one Founding Father – the most famously revolutionary of them all – would not have recognized their vision of America as his. But he would have found much to admire in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s.

Say what you want about the Tea Party – its devotees truly love the Founding Fathers. And the Constitution, as narrowly interpreted. Wikipedia defines the “Founding Fathers” as

the political leaders who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or otherwise took part in the American Revolution in winning American independence from Great Britain, or who participated in framing and adopting the United States Constitution in 1787-1788, or in putting the new government under the Constitution into effect.

That surely makes Thomas Paine a Founding Father. So what would today’s Minutemen (or Minutepersons) make of Paine? Better yet, what would he make of them?

Paine is an uncomfortable presence for conservatives, and isn’t much read these days by Americans who like to call themselves “patriots” (even though he was a hard money advocate and would fit in well with today’s gold standard fetishists). So, here’s a very short refresher. Paine was the chief propagandist of the American Revolution. In fact, his bestselling pamphlet Common Sense helped prod the armed resistance to what had become a virtual military occupation by the British into an overt struggle for independence. Congress and the New York legislature were so grateful that after the war, they awarded him a large sum of money and the confiscated farm of a Tory in New Rochelle.

Let’s just say that Citizen Tom Paine was no laissez-faire individualist. He wasn’t a socialist either, but he believed that human beings are social creatures and that the earth, as he put it, is “the common property of the human race.” In one of his more visionary tracts, Agrarian Justice (1797), he denounced concentrations of wealth, especially in the form of landed property, and prescribed a cure:

To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property:

And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

In other words, a nest egg for every citizen when she reaches adulthood and a pension beginning at age 50. Note that unlike Social Security benefits, for which you become eligible only by earning a reportable wage or salary, Paine’s pension wasn’t tied to employment. You would receive it because you were a human being who deserved not to starve to death. More than 130 years before the fact, Paine was proposing something along the lines of the Townsend Plan, the popular pension idea that scared the bejeezus out of the Roosevelt administration, prompting FDR to hurry up and develop his Social Security system.

Furthermore, Paine didn’t envision a mere safety net to keep the elderly poor out of dire poverty and salve the consciences of the well off. His plan for reforming the relief system in England included “comfortable provision for one hundred and forty thousand aged persons.” In other words, every person is entitled to a dignified and secure old age – not just to some grudging allocation of public assistance.

It is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of civilization (and the practice merits not to be called either charity or policy) to make some provision for persons becoming poor and wretched only at the time they become so. Would it not, even as a matter of economy, be far better to adopt means to prevent their becoming poor?

There was no name in Paine’s day for either mutual aid or social insurance, but Paine himself fully understood the concepts. Margaret Thatcher, one of the conservative heroes of the past 40 years, once said, famously, “There is no such thing as society.” Paine begged to differ. In his classic Rights of Man (1792), he wrote,

No one man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants, and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to a centre…. [Nature] has not only forced man into society by a diversity of wants which the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no period in life when this love for society ceases to act. It begins and ends with our being.

That “reciprocal aid” is both the foundation of both modern-day anarchism as described in Kropotkin’s classic Mutual Aid (1903) and the basis of social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security that started to materialize in the New Deal era. Paine’s idea for pensions may not have been fully worked out by today’s standards, but the same core feature was there: the current generation of workers contributes to a common fund that’s used to cover the benefits of the current generation of retirees. And so on. Not only does this take care of individuals who have worked all their lives, but it promotes the social solidarity that Paine identified as being vital to our human-ness.

Did I mention that he also proposed a detailed plan for an estate tax?

John Adams, a much more conventionally admired Funding Father, complained that Paine’s “utopian conviction” and “brilliant pen” made him the “most dangerous man in America.” In fact, after Paine’s return to America in 1802 after having committed the unpardonable sin of supporting the French Revolution, the Federalist press attacked him so violently that when he traveled to Washington to pay his respects to President Thomas Jefferson, he had to book a room incognito. Just a quarter-century after America’s own revolution, revolution and the creation of a new society of free persons was no longer in vogue.

But Paine’s ideas keep coming back into style. That’s in part because he addressed issues that never lost their relevance, from land tenure in the 18th century to urban slums and sweatshops in the late 19th century to poverty, wage stagnation, and deindustrialization today. His solutions, starting from a basis of mutual aid, are at least as American as apple pie. No matter what the Tea Party says.