I have been delighted by the reviews and the reception of the book, including debuting at #2 on the New York Times Bestsellers list (NF).
The most recent review was written by Adam J. White, the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance at the American Enterprise Institute and codirector of the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
The review focuses more on the historical exploration of the American Revolution in the first half of the book. The second half of the book explores whether (and how) this unique Republic can survive in the 21st Century. It looks at new challenges, including the rise of AI, robotics, global governance, and the “new Jacobins.”
The first half of the book examines the Founders’ emphasis on crafting a republic that could avoid the historical pattern of democracies turning into “mobocrasies.” When rage becomes revolution, it can invite a form of “democratic despotism” unless those passions are funneled constructively in a constitutional system.
The Wall Street review states:
“Those dueling impulses, rage and reason, are the focus of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution” by Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. The question of democratic rage is timeless, and Mr. Turley’s historical narrative is sweeping—from the trial of Socrates to the rhetoric of Huey Long.”
In the brief discussion of the second half of the book, the review notes that the book focuses more on voices on the left. That was a conscious choice and I wanted to further address it.
Rage and the Republic calls out the reckless rhetoric on both the left and the right. However, my earlier book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, discussed the rage on both the left and the right in American politics. That earlier work explores precisely the issue raised by White, who notes that “political rage is a bipartisan sport.” That is not the focus of this book.
This is a book about revolutions. I address the anti-constitutional rhetoric on the left because that is where we are hearing calls for radical changes to our system to allow for greater direct democratic expression. The book examines the implications of fundamental changes to our constitutional system from both historical and contemporary perspectives.
The calls for packing the Supreme Court, changing the Senate, and trashing the Constitution are primarily coming from the left today, particularly from academia. Moreover, some of these voices echo the language and rationales of many intellectuals in the early Jacobin movement before the French Revolution—the core element of the book’s historical and political narrative.
The review also notes that the book briefly references the work of law professor Mary Ann Glendon in her criticism of “rights talk.” I wanted expand on that point to place the criticism in context.
I respect Professor Glendon’s work, Rights Talk, even though I disagree with her on critical points. Professor White notes that Professor Glendon “believes in constitutional rights but warns that framing political issues mainly in terms of competing claims of absolute rights makes our political debates more pointed and less productive.” I present that view in a block quote from Professor Glendon, and I want to explain the more nuanced point I was trying to make on the page referencing Glendon’s work.
The Glendon reference comes in the chapter titled “Why Big Fierce Rights are Rare.” The title is a reference to a book by Paul Colinvaux from the 1970s:
“As an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, I read Paul Colinvaux’s book Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare. The book explained that large carnivores are present within a given ecosystem at lower densities than their prey populations because they need to consume more to survive. Moreover, big fierce animals tend to frighten locals and are targeted due to how they impact lives or threaten commerce or agriculture. These animals tend to modify the behavior of their prey and produce an “ecology of fear.” The result is that they themselves are hunted to make life easier and more productive. Big fierce rights can follow the same pattern as big fierce animals. These rights can threaten the range of action within a given society, particularly in implementing sweeping political agendas and majoritarian policies. They menace and frustrate those who want to implement reforms. As a result, those seeking sweeping changes, particularly law professors, tend to resist big, bold rights in favor of more nuanced and flexible interpretations.”
My reference to the Glendon work did not say that Glendon, who is justifiably one of the most influential academic voices in the United States, is opposed to core freedoms. Rather, I address her criticism of those of us who focus, in her view, too much on individual rights as opposed to more fluid and functionalist understandings of right. I highlight a quote from her work, including:
“In its relentless individualism, it fosters a climate that is inhospitable to society’s losers, and that systematically disadvantages caretakers and dependents, young and old. In its neglect of civil society, it undermines the principal seedbeds of civic and personal virtue. In its insularity, it shuts out potentially important aids to the process of self-correcting learning. All of these traits promote mere assertion over reason-giving.”
The point is not that Glendon opposes those rights, but rather that her approach can allow for a more functionalist treatment of rights that encourages greater trade-offs with rights such as free speech. Both of my books criticize these tradeoffs and functionalist approaches.
As I state in Rage and the Republic, the thrust of academic work has been to whittle away at robust interpretations of core freedoms, the very “rights talk” that Professor Glendon has addressed:
“This brings us back to the Colinvaux book, which explores different explanations for the relative scarcity of big fierce animals, including the theory that smaller animals simply have greater reproductive rates. Colinvaux argued against that theory and noted that “numbers are set by the opportunities for one’s way of life, not by the way one breeds.” He offers the cheeky example that the population of professors is not set by their productivity but the availability of professorships. Colinvaux embraces the theory that we must think of big fierce animals in terms of their biomass and the calories that they must consume to survive. Large animals like lions must burn a huge amount of calories to hunt and, therefore, must consume large quantities of calories to survive.
In a way, big, fierce rights are similar. What some professors object to is how a right like free speech consumes so much in the constitutional ecosystem. As previously discussed, Professor Wu describes the First Amendment in virtual predatorial terms, complaining that “nearly any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment.” He objects that courts have allowed it to become so big and fierce that it now “threaten[s] many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” The solution of many academics is to scale down the rights so that they do not threaten policies and reforms that are deemed of greater importance.”
