RAGE AND THE REPUBLIC

Conservative take on a revolution “born in rage.”

Legal scholar Turley opens with a nuanced overview in which the American Revolution, a violent reaction against perceived injustices, is a claim to rights “born to liberty”—and, he adds, while “liberty” is a watchword of the revolutionary era, “democracy” is not. Turley portrays two very different heroes of the period: the dissolute but deeply committed Briton Thomas Paine, and the aristocratic Virginian James Madison. Thomas Jefferson may have been the chief author of the Declaration of Independence, “exhilarating in its language and declarations of liberty,” but Madison proved a counterweight to Paine with the Constitution, a kind of technical owner’s manual for the new country. There’s another distinction Turley wishes to draw: “Where the debate over the Declaration of Independence was all about tyrants and autocrats, the debate over the Constitution was more about tyranny of the majority,” with Madison protecting the rest of the citizenry with the “strikingly countermajoritarian” Bill of Rights. Turley’s argument tacks differently as his narrative moves on, with political liberty augmented by economic liberty: He maintains that Adam Smith, a political philosopher rejoining Paine and Madison, saw “government controls and subsidies as forms of control and potentially forms of suppression of the human will.” Thus no welfare state, no raising taxes on the 1 percent, no democratic socialism. The argument that began with the Revolution takes an even more vertiginous but thought-provoking twist when Turley turns to a near-future scenario in which AI and robotics displace unskilled and service labor, which he seems to think inevitable and perhaps even all right: “There is little reason for a restaurant to employ workers to make Happy Meals when they can be done by robotics without healthcare, wage issues, or scheduling conflicts.” Whither the nation and the pursuit of happiness then?

Arguable, but instructively so, and a fluent take on history and politics from a thoughtful contrarian.