Book Review: ‘Rage and the Republic’
by Mark Franke
Why has rage become the dominant form of political expression? Why has violence against persons and property become acceptable to a growing percentage of our young people? And how are these excesses against law and justice claimed to be done in the name of democracy, and with a straight face?
More importantly, is democracy nothing more than the exercise of the will of the current electoral majority?
Jonathan Turley’s “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution” (Simon & Schuster 2026, 342 pages plus notes, $25 hardcover at Amazon) warns against existential threats to the Constitution and hence to our Republic from unrestrained majoritarianism leading to trampling the rights of everyone else. This is unfettered democracy, extreme to the point of authoritarianism.
Turley, a much quoted and interviewed law professor, has written previously on the threat to freedom of speech in an age of rage. He returns to that subject with an historical lesson of previous democracies that serve as clarion calls to 21st century America’s direction into super majoritarian rule.
Before looking at the historical examples of democracy run amok, it will help to set the stage for Turley’s prediction of where we are going.
Turley distributes the blame for our devolution into majoritarian authoritarianism among three Ps: politicians, professors and the press. Note that all of these represent factions of the elite of our society, a self-appointed aristocracy. (Aristocracy is, by definition, rule by the best, as these groups clearly think of themselves.)
One expects politicians to lead this hall of shame and perhaps they are too easy to blame for everything. But then, we elect them. It is no wonder that politicians have learned the path to success lies in pandering to voters’ grievances, inciting passion at the expense of reasoned solutions found only by making tough decisions.
Turley indicts the press for completely surrendering to advocacy journalism at the expense of objectivity, accuracy and fairness. He quotes the editor of a major city daily as saying, “Objectivity has got to go.” And gone it has across newsrooms and journalism schools from coast to coast. Advocacy journalism is nothing new to our nation; see the fevered journalism of the 1790s. The difference is that previous bias was balanced among parties and factions; you pay your money and take your choice.
Turley reserves his most poignant criticism for the academy, a place where he works as a law professor. He doesn’t simply make sweeping generalizations of higher education’s movement further and further to the left. He gives literally dozens of examples taken from their own published books and interviews to show a complete disregard for liberty as we know it, particularly freedom of speech. What we conservatives have claimed about university faculties for decades is documented with these quotes and by polls revealing the inbred left-wing political bias of the professorate. Turley labels the radical professorate as the Jacobins of the 21st century.
Turley’s thesis is that unrestrained democracy is programmed to regress to authoritarianism imposed by an intolerant majority. He sees the natural path as ambition leading to activism to extremism and finally to authoritarianism. This progression is not that far off from Polybius’ taxonomy of government forms, always moving toward authoritarianism until restarting the process.
To prove his point, he offers three examples from history.
He begins with that model democracy—Athens—and debunks much of what we learned in school. The hero, as we were instructed in school, was Pericles and his “Golden Age.” Turley compares Pericles to the Emperor Augustus who hid his dictatorship behind the euphemism “First Citizen.” Pericles was little different and Athens’ democracy at this time was in reality a one-man rule, albeit with democratic trappings as the assembly gave Pericles whatever he wanted, that is until it devolved into mobocracy after the great man’s death in the plague of 429 BC. A favored tactic of this putative democracy was the use of ostracism, in which a public figure was charged with a crime against the state and exiled by majority vote. Reminds one of cancel culture in our day, doesn’t it? Then there was the democratically sanctioned execution of Socrates. So much for Athens as the birthplace of democracy.
Turley’s second example was the short-lived popular democracy in the city of Philadelphia during the War for Independence. It was popularly supported until hijacked by extremists who used it to provoke violence against those supporting the rule of law over against political mobs. The issue was the imposition of price controls during the horrendous inflation of the war years. “Profiteers” were attacked, verbally and physically, by democratic mobs seeking justice. Again, we have a current reprise as the Indiana Attorney General mounts a well-publicized populist campaign against price gouging at the gas pump.
Then there is the French Revolution. Its descent into a bloodthirsty hell is too well known to need rehearsing here, but Turley’s account is worth reading. Thomas Paine, an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution in its early days, ended up imprisoned by those who were his political heroes. One can only imagine his disillusionment. The adage that revolutions devour their children proved true in Paine’s case but he fortunately avoided the guillotine when the guard failed to see the chalk mark on his door identifying him as one to be executed that day.
Turley is so impressed with Paine that he bookends his writing with his story. One can argue that he was the most effective publicist of our War for Independence, especially with his treatise “Common Sense.” George Washington used it to maintain the morale of an army that seemed to be constantly in retreat. It is political writing with a blunt end, leaving no doubt as to who was on the side of the angels.
Turley then follows Paine to France where he became an enthusiastic supporter of that revolution even in its most bloodthirsty days. The irony was that the radicals eventually turned on each other, including Paine who came within minutes of an appointment with Madame Guillotine. He died in poverty and disillusion, a man without a country. Somehow Turley views Paine as a hero in all this, a sentiment I have trouble endorsing.
The final section of the book deals with our modern society, one that appears to be ready to trample individual rights in service to super majoritarianism. After all, if the majority wants something, isn’t that democracy in action? Turley paints a bleak picture of where we are heading — a society with high unemployment due to artificial intelligence and advanced robotics — leaving an open door for transnationalism to run amok such as we see in the European Union.
But Turley does end on an optimistic note. What he foresees is not a prediction of our future but only a projection of what it might be. He opens the book with the story of Saturn devouring his own children, just like the French and other revolutionaries have done throughout history. He concludes the book with the story of Pandora and her box of evils followed by hope as the last to come out.
His thesis is well summarized in the title of the book. Rage is no way to run a republic. Rage does work quite effectively as a rallying cry for totalitarian movements claiming to represent “the people.” Democracy without structural protections for the natural rights of each individual will naturally evolve into a tyranny of the many and then to a tyranny of the few but in the name of the majority. It is only to be expected that our modern Jacobins see the Declaration of Independence as irrelevant and the Constitution as a barrier to be removed.
The Declaration is aspirational yet it concretely grounds liberty as directly given by God to individuals. There is no government intermediary which can grant or revoke liberty no matter how many people vote to do that. The practical political genius of the Constitution is to get in the way of power grabs by government or demagogues. Its protection is built with bricks such as the separation of power among the three branches of government with multiple checks and balances, a bicameral legislature, independent courts, and, most importantly, the Bill of Rights. Each contributes to preservation of liberty against putative totalitarians. Imposing a dictatorship of the majority in the name of “democracy” just won’t cut it…if we remain vigilant.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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