The Crisis, No. 1

On the lie that nothing can be done

These are the times that try men’s souls.

I take those words from Thomas Paine, who wrote them in December of 1776, when the revolution was dying. Washington’s army had been routed. Men were deserting by the hundreds. Enlistments would expire on the first of January, and most of what remained of the Continental Army would simply go home. The British were confident the rebellion would be crushed by spring. Many Americans agreed with them.

Paine had been marching with the troops. He had seen the hopelessness in their faces. And somewhere along the frozen roads of New Jersey—legend says by campfire light, using a drumhead as a desk—he wrote the words that would keep them fighting.

“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. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Washington ordered the pamphlet read aloud to his troops on December 23rd. Two days later, they crossed the Delaware and took Trenton. The revolution survived.

I am not Thomas Paine. I am a former technology executive who writes a newsletter. I claim no special authority, no military experience, no credentials beyond citizenship itself. But Paine was a corset-maker before he was a pamphleteer. The revolution was not saved by credentialed men. It was saved by people who decided to speak when speaking was dangerous, and to stay when staying was hard.

I take his title because someone must. And because the times demand it.

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Two hundred and forty-nine years later, the American republic faces a crisis of a different kind.

There is no foreign army on our soil. The threat comes from within—from an executive branch that has declared war on the constitutional order, from a legislature that lies supine before it, from a judiciary whose orders are ignored, and from a class of wealthy men who have purchased the government and now demand that the rest of us show gratitude for their tyranny.

In Minneapolis, three thousand federal agents occupy an American city. They wear masks. They operate without meaningful oversight. They have killed two citizens in less than three weeks. They have tear-gassed crowds, including children. They have refused to let local police secure crime scenes. When a police chief insisted on preserving evidence, they tried to order him away.

The Attorney General of the United States has sent a letter to Minnesota officials: ICE will leave if the state turns over its voter database.

This is not immigration enforcement. This is extortion. This is the use of state violence to seize control of elections in a swing state. This is the thing itself, undisguised, in plain sight.

And yet I am told that I, as a single human being, cannot do anything about it. I am told that those who can act will not. I am told that it does not matter that there is a constitution, or laws, or any of the structures we were promised would protect us.

This is the voice of despair. I understand it. I have felt it myself, in the small hours of the night, when the news is unrelenting, and the powerful seem untouchable. It is not stupidity. It is the rational response to watching institutions fail, over and over, while the people charged with defending them issue statements of concern and do nothing.

But the logic of despair is backwards. It waits for the system to fix itself before participating. The system does not fix itself. It never has. The system is made of people. It only works when citizens make it work.

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This is what Paine understood, and what we have forgotten.

The Constitution is a piece of paper. The laws are words. The institutions are buildings, procedures, and norms. None of it has any force whatsoever unless the people insist on it. The republic does not keep itself. It is kept, or it is lost, by the choices of citizens who decide whether to demand that its principles be honored.

Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what kind of government the delegates had created. “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”

Not if it keeps itself. If you keep it. The verb is active. The subject is the citizen. The keeping is not a spectator sport.

In Minneapolis right now, fifty thousand people marched through subzero temperatures to demand that federal agents leave their city. Businesses closed in solidarity. Protesters fill the streets every day, facing tear gas and the threat of arrest. They are not waiting for someone else. They are not asking what a single human being can do. They are doing it.

That is what keeping looks like. That is citizenship in action. That is the answer to despair.

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Paine did not only inspire. He also shamed.

He called out the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot”—the people who supported the revolution when it was fashionable, who melted away when it became difficult. He understood that the cause needed not just encouragement but accountability. That some people would only act if they feared the judgment of their neighbors and of history.

We have summer soldiers among us now.

They are the tech executives who post about AI and tariffs while federal agents execute civilians in the streets. They are the “heterodox intellectuals” who spent years warning about wokeness and now cannot bring themselves to speak clearly about fascism. They are the anti-anti-Trump commentators who built careers on the proposition that the real danger was always somewhere else, and who now must reckon with what their misdirection enabled.

They are the members of Congress who know what is happening and do nothing. Who have the power to impeach, to investigate, to defund, to obstruct—and who instead issue statements and schedule hearings and wait for the next election, as if elections can be trusted when the executive is demanding voter databases at gunpoint.

They are all of us, every time we look away. Every time we tell ourselves it is not our problem. Every time we wait for someone else to act.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.

History will remember who stood and who shrank.

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I do not call for revolution. The revolution already happened, two hundred and fifty years ago. What I call for is the defense of what that revolution created.

We do not need to overthrow the government. We need to insist that the government follow its own laws. We need to demand that the Constitution be honored by those who swore an oath to it. We need to hold accountable those who have violated that oath—not through violence, but through the mechanisms the Founders gave us: protest, petition, the courts, the press, the vote, and the unrelenting pressure of citizens who refuse to accept tyranny.

This is not radical. This is the most conservative position possible. It is the insistence that the rules apply to everyone, including the powerful. It is the demand that we be governed by laws and not by men. It is the keeping of the republic.

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In five months, the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. On July 4th, 2026, we will celebrate—or mourn—the republic that began with a declaration that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, and entitled to a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

What will we have to show for ourselves on that day?

Will we have kept the republic? Or will we have watched it fall, telling ourselves there was nothing we could do, waiting for someone else to save it?

The answer is not yet written. It is being written now, in Minneapolis, in every city where people are showing up, in every act of witness and resistance and solidarity. It is being written by the choices we make in the coming days and weeks and months.

Paine wrote fifteen more Crisis papers after the first one. He kept writing through every setback and every victory, for seven years, until the war was won. He understood that the battle was not a single moment but a sustained commitment. That someone had to keep saying, through all of it: this is worth it. This is who we are. We do not yield.

I intend to do the same. This is the first. There will be more, as long as the crisis continues. I do not know how it ends. I only know that the keeping of the republic requires that someone keep writing, keep speaking, keep insisting—and that I am able to do that, and so I will.

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These are the times that try men’s souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink from the service of their country. But those who stand now—who show up, who speak out, who refuse to look away—deserve the love and thanks of every American who wishes to see the republic survive.

What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value. The republic was purchased at great cost by those who came before us. The question now is whether we will pay the cost of keeping it.

I believe we will. I believe that the American people, when they understand what is at stake, will rise to meet this moment as they have risen before. I believe that the love of liberty is not dead in us, only sleeping—and that it is waking now, in Minneapolis and everywhere that citizens are gathering to say: this far, and no further.

A republic, if you can keep it.

Let us show ourselves, and the world, and the generations that will follow, that we can.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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