Joe Manchin is as plainspoken as the day is long. He is a serious guy who does not like to waste time playing games. He has spent his entire career in defense of common sense. We know this because Manchin tells us as much on the first page of “Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense,” a new book that is part memoir, part manifesto (Manchinfesto?), part compendium of folksy and occasionally tautological aphorisms. The last of these are scattered throughout the text, in bold font: “You can always do better.” “The road to success is always under construction.” “When people stop caring, the only ones left are those who don’t care.”
This pompous and wholly uninsightful tome groans under the weight of such language—the next time I hear someone use the phrase “every cliché in the book,” I’ll assume that this is the book they’re talking about—but the notion of “common sense” gets a particularly heavy workout. In addition to including it in the subtitle, Manchin says that his father rolled it together with “street sense” and “business sense” to forge principles that stuck with him for life. Manchin runs for governor of West Virginia, in 1996, on a platform of “common sense and practical solutions”; he doesn’t get past the primary, but later, after finally becoming governor and then being elected to the United States Senate, he backs commonsense approaches to guns, congressional accounting practices, voting rights, and an ethics reform that would have banned senators from campaigning to unseat their colleagues. On the second page of the book, he condenses his “commonsense politics,” which he is “thoroughly convinced that the majority of people in our country share,” into a brief list: “Put people first and country before party. Be fiscally responsible and socially compassionate. That’s it.”
There’s nothing revelatory in pointing out that “common sense” is highly subjective—what embodies it for one person is, to another, idiocy—or that it has long been used to give contentious claims a sheen of self-evident rationality and popular legitimacy; in the United States, politicians have been doing as much since before the states were united. (See: Paine, Thomas: “Common Sense,” 1776.) But the centrist gloss that Manchin puts on the concept—the idea that common sense is the preserve of an increasingly disenfranchised moderate middle, and “can’t be weaponized like the extremes”—comes off, in our current moment, as a dangerous delusion. As we speak, it is being weaponized, in extreme ways.
Last August, I wrote about the term “election interference,” and how its meaning had become obscured as different actors lobbed it across the political divide. By way of example, I pointed to a bizarre exchange of recriminations in Washington State, where Bob Ferguson, a Democratic candidate for governor, decried as interference the recruitment of other people named Bob Ferguson to run against him, while himself being accused of interference for trying to outmaneuver them on the ballot. Around the time that my article appeared, Democrats in Georgia expressed alarm that Trump-allied officials on a state election board had opened the door to post-election interference by implementing new certification rules. The chair of the state Republican Party defended the board’s moves as “common-sense changes.”
Since then, as was the case with “election interference,” different politicians have brandished “common sense” to very different ends. Kamala Harris pledged to seek “common sense solutions” if elected President; Democratic-leaning critics blamed her defeat on her party’s (real or perceived) abandonment thereof, on issues ranging from trans participation in sports to the use of the word “Latinx.” This month, a Democrat running for governor in Kansas and a Republican running for Senate in Iowa both cited common sense as they promoted their campaigns. Last week, the O.G. Bob Ferguson, now the governor of Washington, blasted the federal government for failing, thus far, to extend “common-sense tax credits” under the Affordable Care Act.
But, as was also the case with “election interference,” Donald Trump’s recent use of “common sense” overshadows all others’. He has extolled the idea throughout his careers in business and politics, but seemed to really lean in during his 2024 campaign, using the term repeatedly to describe not only his agenda but the Republican Party as a whole. In his Inaugural Address, Trump hailed the dawn of a “revolution of common sense” that has since, well, revolutionized paper straws, the Gulf of Mexico, NATO, the Kennedy Center, forestry protections, federal procurement, office-space management, school discipline, truck-driving regulations, and more. Shortly after he took office, his Administration directed immigration agents to use their “common sense” as it permitted them to arrest people in churches and schools; last week, an official complained that a California bill barring agents from wearing masks while engaging with the public defies “common sense.” “I’m not a dictator,” Trump said last month (after suggesting that some Americans might nonetheless like to have one). “I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”
In February, Carlos Lozada, of the New York Times, published a smart column breaking down the different rhetorical ways in which Trump has weaponized the idea of common sense. In part, the President has used the term like every other politician does—to automatize the righteousness of contestable claims. But he has invoked it in darker ways, too. Following the Pulse night-club shooting, in 2016, Trump said that “common sense” might call for profiling Muslims in the U.S., even though, he claimed, he personally didn’t like the idea—a “pretense of reluctance,” Lozada wrote, that painted him as a realist who “would rather be guided by his better angels.” Around the same time, Trump conflated “common sense” with “honesty,” as if to suggest that his opponents were not only wrong but lying. Ultimately, in Trump’s world, it isn’t so much that he does things that are common sense—it’s that things become common sense when he does them. The consequences of this can be frightening. When the journalist Jonathan Karl pointed out to Trump that his supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol on January 6th, Trump replied that Pence—who, as Vice-President, was responsible for overseeing the certification of election results in the Senate—should have had the “common sense” not to “pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress.” (Pence had no power to block the vote, which, obviously, was not fraudulent.)
In this way, Trump has weaponized appeals to common sense to cover for (sometimes explicitly) revolutionary actions. If this dynamic seems contradictory—it’s fair to ask how an idea can be stitched into the fabric of received wisdom and at the same time set fire to that fabric—it isn’t new, or even inherently illiberal. Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian of the concept of common sense, explained in a recent interview with Current Affairs that after the term entered currency in England, in the eighteenth century, it took on a democratizing flavor, sending the message that even regular people could engage in politics. Paine, of course, marshalled the phrase in service of a radical anti-authoritarian movement.
As Lozada put it, however, “Trump is not the rebel. He is the crown.” (Those lining up to praise his “common sense” recently have included Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister and Viktor Orbán.) Faced with this apparent inversion of what Paine stood for, it’s tempting to want to do away with the idea of “common sense” altogether. And yet, as Rosenfeld noted, democracy does rely on an “appeal to some shared values,” such as the importance of rules and facts. Defining these values as “common sense” might be eye-rollingly trite in normal times. But, in these times, there’s arguably some merit in a politician defending them forthrightly from a perceived middle ground—a politician, perhaps, like Joe Manchin. This invites the question: is that what he’s doing?
In “Dead Center,” Manchin punches left much harder than he punches right. He characterizes President Barack Obama as aloof and recounts furious disagreements with President Joe Biden while broadly chastising the Democratic Party—which he represented for most of his career in the Senate, before becoming an Independent—for having let down and lost working-class voters. Though he criticizes the Republican Party at times, he also paints it as a bastion against the torching of institutional guardrails—so much so, he writes, that he had hoped the G.O.P. would regain the Senate in 2024. (I would describe this view as having aged poorly, but that risks implying that it was sensible at the time.) Trump, meanwhile, is depicted quite warmly. In interviews to promote the book, Manchin has spoken against Republicans’ ceding of legislative privileges to Trump, and Trump’s self-enrichment and buddy act with Putin. But, when asked about the book’s relatively tepid judgments of the President and his party, Manchin has deflected or demurred. During an hour-long conversation, Tim Miller, of the anti-Trump news site The Bulwark, repeatedly teed Manchin up to condemn Trump before eventually asking him, as plainly as possible, if Trump is the worst President he’s dealt with. “They all have a different approach,” Manchin said. O.K., Miller pressed, so what about the best President? The “most engaging,” Manchin said, were Bill Clinton and Trump.
As fate would have it, Manchin is promoting a book about moderation and civility at a tragically opportune time: less than a week before its publication date, a gunman assassinated the hard-right activist Charlie Kirk, allegedly citing Kirk’s “hatred”; Trump and his allies have responded by threatening an Orwellian crackdown on some vast, ill-defined left-wing conspiracy of violent hate. Given that the institutional leadership of the Democratic Party has not sought to escalate this tense situation with gutter rhetoric, and does not currently have much power, I personally don’t think that ordering “both sides” to turn the temperature down is very helpful right now. But there is undeniably an opening for that sort of message. In his book, Manchin, who has been the victim of threats himself, shows that he is capable of bluntly accusing leaders of inciting violence: he writes that the Biden Administration put “a target on my back and on my family” by publicly singling out his opposition to a spending bill. And yet, when addressing Kirk’s killing in recent interviews, Manchin hasn’t gone far beyond vague remarks regretting the tone emanating from “the top” and urging Trump to play “the comforter-in-chief.” (The bluntest Manchin disavowal that I’ve come across was in an interview with Semafor, when he said, of Trump’s response, “I’m not seeing what I would like to see.”)
Since his death, Kirk has himself been claimed, entirely predictably, as an avatar of “common sense,” including by Trump; one pundit on Fox, after fulminating about left-wing militancy, suggested, darkly, that the right should now respond with “common-sense extremism” and “ideological reform.” And yet, rather than fight robustly for his conception of common sense as an antidote to extremism in this context, Manchin has repeatedly invoked the sort of providential language that, as Lozada noted, can read as naïve or indulgent—the opposite of that hardheaded, rational redoubt of true common sense.
Earlier this week, Manchin sat down with the Fox host Brian Kilmeade, who was last seen apologizing for saying that mentally ill homeless people should be executed. (No word on whether Manchin considers this to be “common sense.”) After spending most of the interview reflecting witheringly on his experiences with Biden, Manchin turned his attention to Trump, and said that he was “praying for his better angels to say, ‘Mr. President, let’s calm it down.’ ” With that, the closing credits began to play, but there was still time for Manchin to plug his book one last time. “ ‘Dead Center,’ baby, come on!” he said. “Buy it up today!” At last, he was speaking plainly. ♦
