“We all love Thomas Paine. We just wish we liked him.” — Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s new book, Rage and the Republic, asks a deceptively simple question: why did the American Revolution become the longest-running successful democracy while the French Revolution devoured itself at the guillotine? The answer, the George Washington legal theorist argues, lies in James Madison’s “auxiliary precautions” — constitutional safeguards designed not to eliminate rage but to productively (or, at least, peacefully) channel it. Turley draws a direct line from the notorious French Jacobin, Robespierre, to today’s radical calls to pack the Supreme Court and abolish the Senate, warning that removing those precautions invites the same mobocracy that sent the Jacobins to the guillotine. While this is the standard Burkeian critique of the French revolution, Turley’s real provocation comes with his analysis of 21st century America. With AI and robotics threatening mass unemployment, he predicts, the United States may soon face a “kept population” — angry citizens subsidized by the state who lose their vital relationship to productivity and self-governance.
So what is to be done? A question that I’m not sure Turley ever fully answers. While the conservative legal theorist is energetic on historical figures like Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and Thomas Paine (brilliant about humanity, clueless about humans), he’s less convincing on how, exactly, the Republic can confront the mass Jacobin rage of a robotic age in which fewer and fewer Americans have jobs. Is more “education” really the answer in a future where machines will be infinitely smarter than humans? How can we realistically confront the ubiquitous rage of an increasingly inegalitarian and workless society?
