Chief Justice John Roberts begins his 2025 Year-End Report with a meditation on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Among the points Roberts highlights in anticipation of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is Paine’s urging Americans to think of themselves as Americans. More precisely, Roberts focuses on Paine’s urging of the “colonists” to understand themselves as “a distinctive people”:

Shunning legalese and embracing language that ordinary citizens could understand, Paine advanced several key points. A government’s purpose is to serve the people. The colonists should view themselves as a distinctive people—Americans, not British subjects. The colonies had reached “that peculiar time which never happens to a nation but once, viz., the time of forming itself into a government.” And, in view of the foregoing propositions, as an independent nation, the colonists would “have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

The unity of this one distinctive people as Americans in 1776 is what enabled that people’s creation of the Constitution that went into effect as law in 1789.