IMPRIMIS

SEPTEMBER 2026 | VOLUME 55, ISSUE

By Jonathan Turley - September, 2026

Author, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on August 6, 2026, in Washington, D.C., at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship.

Nothing quite says popular justice like a good old-fashioned guillotine. Across the country, protesters have dragged around makeshift guillotines as they call for “radical” and “revolutionary” changes to our constitutional system. The symbol of the French Revolution remains a chilling reminder of how revolutions devour their own. What is even more unnerving than these prop guillotines is the increase in calls for radical and revolutionary changes—including the elimination or the packing of the Supreme Court, trashing the Electoral College, and doing away with the U.S. Senate—by establishment figures on the Left.

Today’s attacks on the American judiciary do indeed harken back to the rhetoric that raged before the advent of “The Terror” in revolutionary France—the rhetoric that gave rise to the kind of “mobocracy” that the Founders sought to avoid by designing our constitutional order as they did.

To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.

Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre—who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy”—to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.

There is a radical movement rising in the U.S. with chilling parallels to the French Revolution. Demands for the elimination or packing of the Supreme Court and other measures are ripped from the French revolutionary handbook. Most worrisome is the surrender of establishment figures, particularly in promising to make radical changes to the Supreme Court. Indeed, offering the Supreme Court up to this movement has become a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and U.S. Representative Ro Khanna have embraced it. Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom have characterized reluctance to change the Court as “nostalgia” and have warned that “nostalgia is not working.” The platform of the increasingly influential Democratic Socialists of America calls both for dissolving the Supreme Court and for creating a unicameral legislature by eliminating the U.S. Senate.

Much of this is animated by undisguised power politics. Here’s former Attorney General Eric Holder arguing that packing the Supreme Court should be made a priority: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.” And Democratic strategist James Carville: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. . . . Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman has laid out an agenda by which the Democrats can guarantee that they will never lose another election but warns that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything [that agenda consists of].”

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Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Law School. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law. He previously taught at Tulane University Law School. He has written for several publications, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of two books, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage and Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.