EVERYTHING ELSE IS ELABORATION.

Jonathan Turley concludes his "Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court" with "In revolution after revolution, newly-established courts carried out the purported will of the people with terrible consequences. In an age of rage, it is too often reason itself that is canceled."

His essay, as befits a student of constitutional law, focuses on the role of the United States Supreme Court.  In the course of establishing his argument, he makes the following points about the American Founding.

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.

My stance, more as citizen with some knowledge of political economy than as constitutional or legal scholar, is that perhaps in a quarter millennium we got a few things right, as witness the Declaration and Constitution still governing, while France has had Bonapartism and four or five republics over the same time horizon.  Steven Hayward introduces the likely instabilities of any such reforms more directly.  "Progressive reforms would likely cause greater instability in our already unstable politics."  Why?  "If you think government is slow and ineffective now, that Americans are dangerously polarized, and that policy instability is a drag on the public interest, just wait till the Progressives get their way, and then demand another round of constitutional 'reform' when it doesn’t work out the way they hope."  Indeed, or perhaps mais oui!