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In his new book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” Professor Turley explores the meaning and future of democracy on the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary.
The first half looks back at the unique confluence of people and events that led to the establishment of the American republic.
The second half looks forward, exploring whether the American republic can survive in the 21st century in light of changes ranging from artificial intelligence to robotics to global governance systems.
Turley believes the American republic is uniquely suited to address those challenges, but it will require a return, not a rejection, of the core values that defined the American Revolution.
“Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” Those words from journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan during the French Revolution referred to the Roman god Saturn, Kronos in Greek. Kronos attempted to defy his mother’s prophesy that he would be overthrown by one of his children by eating them upon their births. When his son Zeus was born, Kronos’ consort, Rhea, decided to trick him by wrapping a stone in a swaddling blanket and handing it to him to devour. She then hid Zeus on Crete. Once he reached adulthood, Zeus returned and, fulfilling the prophesy, defeated his father.
Kronos’ story held obvious meaning for Mallet du Pan, who watched with alarm as the French Revolution devoured first its aristocratic foes and then its own supporters. It is a story played out over and over again in history as ambition becomes activism, activism becomes extremism, and extremism becomes authoritarianism. Call it the Saturn gene. We are all Saturn’s children with an inherent impulse that rests within each of us: the capacity of all mortals to become monsters.
Saturn’s lesson would also be raised in the American Revolution by none other than Thomas Paine. Long before Jefferson put pen to parchment on the Declaration of Independence, it was Paine who would speak of the natural and inalienable rights as the basis for the American Revolution. It was Paine, in his pamphlet “Common Sense,” who made the case for “independency.” It was also Paine who saw, firsthand, the ability of a revolution to consume itself.
Paine would play a significant role in two revolutions that took strikingly different paths in America and France. Among the American Revolution’s best-known figures, only the Marquis de Lafayette could make a similar claim.
Paine learned the dangers of unrestrained popular government in the hardest possible way. It came close to killing him in France. He would learn that what was lost in Paris was precisely what he had left in Philadelphia — a system that could channel tremendous political and economic pressures into a stable republic.
We are again living in revolutionary times. It is not just classic revolutions where governments are overthrown but rather revolutions that can change countries from within. We refer to the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution to signify the transformative changes they brought to society. Often those new realities produce countervailing political changes in government. The 21st century has seen the acceleration of new technology like artificial intelligence that’s reframing every aspect of human existence.
These changes will redefine not just the workplace but also the place of citizens in society at large. The question is whether American democracy can survive in the 21st century or collapse under the same forces of democratic despotism that brought down its contemporaries. It is the unfinished story of the American Revolution.
Thomas Paine saw this up close in Paris at the French Revolution’s height. He had been among those voices early on among the French Jacobins who cheered the stripping away of constitutional protections to unleash the “general will.” The insatiable appetite of Saturn took hold of the liberators.
For Paine, the ultimate collapse of his ideals came in December 1793. He had just been stripped of his seat in the French National Convention in a vote of no confidence. In watching the executions in Paris, Paine lamented to a friend, “Ah, France, thou hast ruined the character of a revolution virtuously begun, and destroyed those who produced it.”
The long-awaited knock at his bedroom door came Dec. 28. There stood five policemen and two representatives of the feared Committee on General Safety. When asked for the charge, they just shrugged. Such details were now largely meaningless in France.
It would not be democratic ideals but poor ventilation that would save Paine from joining his decapitated colleagues in Paris. After opening the door to allow more air into the cell, guards missed the chalk mark designating him and his cellmates for death. Paine would soon walk out of the Palais du Luxembourg as the Terror came to an end with Robespierre’s death.
Paine was an imperfect being, a man who often seemed intent on finding his end at the bottom of a gallows or a bottle. It is a miracle neither the crown nor cirrhosis had ended his life earlier. But few could have shown his bravery and strength in pursuing “his principles unto death.” He remains today, as he was then, a figure easier to admire from a distance.
If American democracy is to survive in the 21st century, it must, again, break the Saturn cycle. The country — and the world — are facing profound economic and social changes. The causes may be different in the form of robotics or AI, but the challenge remains the same in maintaining political stability during a period of economic unrest with hard-stratified class divisions, subsistence income and greater social separation. The answers may be found in what occurred 250 years ago and how revolutionary pressures were vented within a Madisonian system. We are witnessing the convergence of radical movements with ominous economic conditions developing in this century due to changes in technology and the workplace.
In the United States, the political divide has become deep and increasingly violent. At the same time, the country is facing what could be the most significant economic shifts since the Industrial Revolution with the expansion of robotic manufacturing, AI, increased undocumented migration and widening wealth stratification. After the last industrial revolution, social upheaval and displacement were followed by political instability. Yet the massive rise in production and wealth eventually brought prosperity to this and other nations. It is less clear that the new economic and technological advances will produce the same wealth infusion for the middle class, let alone the lower class. We are already seeing the signs of political atrophy as influential figures join the call for sweeping constitutional and institutional changes in the United States.
The assumption that the Constitution can, once again, weather this period of unrest and uncertainty is a dangerous conceit. The coming storm will test again a system that has lost key allies in politics and academia.
In the last 10 years, we have seen radical voices on both the left and the right dismissing democratic traditions and safeguards to achieve immediate change. It seems if “democracy is at stake,” even democratic norms can be sacrificed to save it. There are growing calls among academics to radically change our constitutional and political systems. In a New York Times column titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” Harvard law professor Ryan D. Doerfler and Yale law professor Samuel Moyn called for the Constitution to be “radically altered” to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks warned the public not to become “slaves” to the Constitution if it stands in the way of real change. Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is the author of a book titled “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
In May 2024, I was working on this book when suddenly I felt pulled into the pages of my research. A mob outside was crying, “Guillotine! Guillotine! Guillotine!” Those words were chanted not on Paris’ Place de la Concorde but on the quad of George Washington University in Washington, DC. I was literally working on the material from the French Revolution when it seemed like the French Revolution had come to me. Students were holding a mock trial of the university president, the provost, board of directors and others over their refusal to yield to demands in an anti-Israel protest. Encamped for weeks in the yard next to my law-school office, the students chanted, “Off with their heads” and “Off to the motherf–king gallows with you.” No one seriously expected the tumbrels to roll down Pennsylvania Avenue. The students were venting and mocking the administration. But the faux trial induced a certain “what if” moment, considering whether we could ever actually devolve into such madness. It came at a time protests are becoming more radicalized and at times violent. There was also a guillotine at the Jan. 6 riot in Congress when a mob broke into the Capitol. On that terrible day, someone also erected a gallows for Vice President Mike Pence. After Trump was re-elected, leftist protesters brought guillotines to Capitol Hill at the inauguration and during later protests. It is not the first time effigies or mock gallows have been used to convey rage in our history. We have survived every age of rage because of a constitutional system that was designed not for the good times but the bad times that come with democracy. Yet though we have the most successful and stable constitutional system in history, there is still that moment. A fleeting doubt as to whether the system could survive the morning, survive the times we are living in, survive us.
Many voices today are mere echoes of the past, calling for direct democratic change and attacking constitutional limitations on the “general will.” They are a rising class of American Jacobins, budding bourgeois revolutionaries striking out at the status quo and constitutional values. A mob can be irresistible to a politician if it can be set upon one’s opponents. The problem is controlling the mob when today’s revolutionaries become tomorrow’s reactionaries. They are part of a counter-constitutional movement that includes professors and politicians. Most of these figures are not calling for violence but rather fueling the rage and demanding fundamental change in our system of government. It is the same dangerous game, as shown by the French Jacobins who found themselves pursued by the very mob they enabled and encouraged.
We will continue to yield to violence, greed and madness when conditions produce rage rather than reason. Some of those conditions are growing in the 21st century. But the true story of democracy is one of hope. It is a shared hope that bound many of the figures in this book in the promise of humanity to be something greater as a people than we are as individuals. For Paine and the French, it was realization of the “general will.” For Madison and the framers, it was the liberty that would unleash a golden age. It is the hope of every immigrant who comes to these shores seeking a future of their own making. We are not bound by generations in a country but a type of ancestry of ideas founded in liberty.
We are bound by a faith that we have the capacity to be something greater. So again we ask the same question of a Frenchman in the 18th century, “What then is the American?” The answer is found at the moment of creation, when a people was defined by “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is seen in an imperfect people of the insatiably curious, brash jar-openers who refuse to be denied new opportunities. We are bound by the revolutionary idea that government exists to allow every citizen to pursue one’s own manifest destiny. As shown by Paine, we are our own greatest creations. What was true in 1776 is true today: These are revolutionary times, but we remain a revolutionary people.
English (US)