The Eric Metaxas Show - #170 - Jonathan Turley

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

An excerpt from the Socrates in the City conversation with Jonathan Turley.

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Hey there, folks. As you may know or may not know, I am this week in Oxford, England. I don't look like I'm in Oxford, England, because as I say this to you, I'm actually not in Oxford, England. I'm still in New York recording this, telling you that when you hear me say this, I will be in Oxford, England. I say that by faith. Should the Lord Terry, I will be in Oxford, England. And evidently, I'm there right now, even though I'm in New York. But, The reason I'm telling you this is because this week, we're going to be airing on this program right now, Socrates and the city programs that we've done in the past. So this week, while I'm in Oxford, England, I'm going to be interviewing John O'Lennox and a lot of these intellectual heavy hitters that I love to talk to. But I have done 13 episodes for Socrates in the city on the American Revolution to go along with my book. on the American Revolution. If you want more on the American Revolution, perhaps you've already read my book, or perhaps you need to have your appetite wedded to read my book. And as I say,

over and over, I don't care if you read the book, but it wouldn't kill you to buy two or three copies, okay, and do it at Amazon. But I did a lot of wonderful interviews about the revolution with the authors, most of them authors of books that I used in my research on the American Revolution. So this week, we're going to be playing some of those for you. We've got one of those coming up right now. If you don't know all the work that I do with Socrates in the city, and if you listen to this program, maybe you don't, go to Socratesin the city.com, go to our YouTube page, subscribe to the YouTube page, and definitely sign up for the newsletter for Socrates and the city.com. We've got so much going on. We're starting book clubs all over the country.

We've started book clubs all over the country. Is there one in your town? Would you like to start one? Socrates in the city.com. Make your inquiries there. And right now, we return to our regular programming. Let's get it now. Hey there, folks.

Welcome to Socrates in the city, the city in which we find ourselves today is New York City. We're doing a special series, sort of 250th, super centennial series of Socrates in the city conversations with scholars. thinkers, writers, basically around the subject of the revolution. Today it's my privilege to have as my guest the esteemed Jonathan Turley, not to be confused with the other Jonathan Turley. This is the esteemed Jonathan Turley. Some of you know that he's a nationally recognized legal scholar who's written extensively

in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law and much else. in case you didn't know, he since 1998 has held the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University Law School. There's so much to say. He's testified before Congress more than a hundred times, including during the impeachments of presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. On and on it goes. He is the author, most recently, of the book I'm holding called Rage and the Republic.

the unfinished story of the American Revolution. Jonathan Turley, welcome. Thank you, Eric. It's great for you with you. It's wonderful to have you, and I'm champing at the bit to talk to you about the subject of this book. So the first question, the easy question,

what led you to write Rage and the Republic? Well, it's a good question. This is really a book about revolutions, how they start, and more importantly, how they end. They often end badly. And in looking at the 250th anniversary of our own revolution, I wanted to delve deeply into why we had two contemporary revolutions, the American and French revolutions,

and one went on to become the most stable and successful democracy in history, and the other became the terror. And to look at the unique elements that contributed, to those two very different trajectories. So the first half the book looks backwards at what were those unique elements. And then the second half the book looks forward and asks, can this republic survive the 21st century?

Can it survive us? And the challenges that we are about to face, which are unprecedented, everything from the combination of robotics to AI to global governance. And what we have to remember from the founding, as someone who wrote a very fine book on The Revolution yourself, it's hard to encapsulate how fortunate we are,

how unique that moment was, the assemblage of personalities that came together to create what John Adams said were 12 clocks that struck as one. But we really, if we are going to survive this century, we have to remember who we were then and understand. who we are now because it's a dangerous conceit that just because we've made it 250 years, we're going to make it another 250 years. I mean, Franklin really was right that it's our republic if we can keep it. That's why it is always going to be, I suppose, an unfinished story because like Franklin said, every generation has to keep this republic. There's so much. I mean, because I've recently written a book on the Revolution,

I'm just, my head is swimming with ideas about who we are, how we got to exist, and then how it is that we have been able to keep the Republic for two and a half centuries, which of course leads us to the question whether we can keep it much longer. So I found it valuable in my own accounting of the revolution, or in thinking about this, to try to do what you do here in your book. I do it in a different way, but really to figure out what was it exactly, was it providential, was it what really was going on? and was it something that they sort of got right? What is your sense of the forces that combined to create, you know, what came to be called the United States of America? What is your general sense? Well, it's a great question.

And, you know, in the book, I talk about an author named Kriv Kourer, who was a Frenchman who wrote under the name, American farmer. And in the middle of his book, which was very popular in France, he asked, what then is this American, this new man? And I asked that book repeatedly, that question repeatedly in the book, of what then is this American? We fascinated the world. They couldn't understand how a people that had nothing in common with each other had no connections to the land, really. None of these calcified institutions or class structures would come together in this place and not only form a people based on ideas, but form a revolution that was the first

enlightenment revolution in history. Because the Declaration of Independence is an enlightenment document. It doesn't talk about democracy once. It refers to liberty. From front to end, it is a statement about how our rights come from God and not from the government, that these are natural rights that make us fully human, that we deserve. as humans. There's never been a document like that to start a nation. And we were a fascination to people like Kriv Kourkeur and others of who are these crazy people. And the book looks at

one character as a narrative. That's what I admire about your book as well, is that many times it's easier to understand these events through the eyes and experiences of individuals. For me, it is Thomas Payne. And, by the way, I really want to talk to you about Thomas Payne. I'm so thrilled that you deal with him as you do in the book. So please go ahead. Well, it's funny because I'm known as a Madisonian scholar in the legal academy, but I became obsessed with Thomas Payne.

He's one of two figures, main figures, that played a role in both revolutions, the other being Lafayette. But what made Payne so fascinating is not just his story, which I think is quintessentially American. But also the fact that he bridged these two revolutions, and in many ways found he was wrong. He didn't agree with Madison on his precautions. He wanted more direct democracy,

and it became damn near to killing him. He was almost executed in France. And so I really fascinated that you have this character who was a failure in everything that he ever did. He had been fired from every job. His marriages were terrible tragedies. He was, he had, every business he started went bankrupt. It's a perfect record of failure.

And then he ended up in front of a man, penniless and unpopular, unkept. And this one individual in London looked at this, just this pile of human wreckage and saw something that no one else saw. And that was Benjamin Franklin. And he paid for pain to come to the new world. You've often heard me talk about the Golden Triangle of Freedom, that intersection of faith, virtue, and liberty. And for that triangle to hold, we need access to the truth.

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I don't remember how old pain was. Was he 34, 35, something like that? Yeah, pain was not a young man when he came here. And in many ways, it's funny because people are surprised that I put so much emphasis on pain because historians have never embraced him. The founding generation didn't embrace him. They liked Jefferson. He was tall and erudite and handsome and a slave owner.

And a slave owner. Yeah. And Payne was not. He was vehemently anti-slavery, but pain was principled and courageous and obnoxious and reckless. In many ways, he might have been the perfect American in all of those senses. He came here. He said there was a special something here. And it was a place that you could start anew.

He even added an E to the end of his name. Actually, I discovered that from reading your book. You know, I thought in doing my research, I'll bump into everything. I had not seen that until I read your book. And that is so quintessentially American to reinvent yourself and to, you know, put an E on your name. I think Dionne Warwick did that, but then she got rid of the E. She eventually got rid of the E because of some numerological issues. That's true.

But it is so interesting to me that he does change his name. He comes over here. And he, I mean, I got this from your book as well, that if he had not failed as miserably as he had in everything, he never would have come here. He never would have written common sense. I think that without that we may not have declared independency. in 1776, it's, it boggles the mind really.

It does. But say more about how is it that he came even to meet Franklin in London at the time? Well, you know, it is intriguing because I say in the book that the American Republic may have been saved by corset making because Payne was a corset maker, a stay maker, his father was a corset maker. It was a dying field, corsets were going out of style.

And he hated. It was a terrible thing to do for a living. And so he decided to become a pirate. He saw an advertisement by a captain death who was advertising for young men to join him on a ship called The Terrible. And what's fascinating is that he joined the crew, and what happened next is his father

put out the word among corset makers, who apparently are this incredible intelligence network at the time. And a corset maker wrote to him and said, said, I found him. He's about to go on the Terrible and become a pirate or a privateer. His father found him on the ship, took him off. And it was great because the Terrible then got into a battle with the French privateer, the vengeance. And of 167 crew members, 150 were killed immediately. He probably wouldn't have survived. So of course, it's making me have saved the Republic. But he went on and he continued to, he actually did spend a time as a privateer.

more successfully and it gave him something he had never had before, which was money. And he used it because he was a self-educated man. And he used it to go to universities and to learn from figures that were associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. But by the time he ended up in front of Franklin, he was penniless again and had a terrible reputation. But what's fascinating Eric is that when he was taken off that ship, he was carried off. He almost died on the voyage.

I mean, in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia. So he makes it across barely, barely. Yeah, and he's carried off the ship by Franklin's personal physician. And within two years, he would come out with common sense and be called the penment of the revolution. In some ways, I think part of the resentment of figures like John Adams, who was not very favorable towards pain,

particularly towards the end of his career, is that he was viewed as sort of a coming, Johnny come lately. But even when Common Sense was published, John Adams' wife wrote him and said, because it was anonymous, and said, you know, people are saying you wrote it. And he wrote back and he said, I didn't.

He said, I couldn't have written that book. But I think I know who did. I met a man by the name of Thomas Payne. And he related a story of how he had genius in his eyes. And it sort of brings you back to what Benjamin Franklin saw. There was something about pain, a genius in the rough, that these people did recognize. The story of Thomas Payne, to me, it's so fascinating. But at the heart of it is what you've been saying, is that he's a mess, he's a wreck.

But somehow Franklin sees something in him and says, come to America, you can kind of reinvent yourself or whatever it is. and he is used to do what, it seems no one else really could have done, which is to write something that would convince most people that independence is a good idea. That's so remarkable, and if he'd done nothing else. Right. And in a funny way, you know, you could argue that he did nothing else. In other words, that everything he did before and everything he did

after, it's as if he was created for this moment and that there was this one man who had the ability to put his shoulder to the wheel to get the wagon out of the rut. And then from there on in, the wagon would proceed. But no, that's very interesting you put it that way, Eric, because in the book I talk about how Benjamin Franklin's daughter wrote, it would have been better for Thomas

who have died after common sense. And I noted in the book, she was one of his friends. So you get an idea of how he alienated people. He was brilliant about humanity, but he was clueless about humans. He really had a hard time dealing with people. But you're right about this, particularly. Pain was the righteous rage that we needed at that moment. And then we needed James Madison.

It was that pious logic. What gave us this republic was the combination of the two of these individuals and others, and others that gave us something, a form of democracy that would not become what the founders called Mobocracy. That's what Benjamin Rush called it. They didn't want the Athenian democracy. It lasted a very short period of time relatively and ended up in tyranny. And they didn't want that. That was the legacy of so many systems. And of course, Napoleon's a good example of that. The French Revolution ended up in him, ended up in tyranny. And this was what was the miracle of the American Republic is avoiding that.

That's why the book starts with a quote from a Frenchman who said that revolutions like Saturn devoured their own. And Thomas Paine saw that happen in real time. And I describe a scene where he's in this end with the last of the gherendon, which were the moderate Jacobins. And there's seven of them. And one by one, they're taken away to be guillotined. And then they finally come and they take away the innkeeper.

And so he's left alone in this inn waiting for this knock on the door and it finally comes and the last thing he grabs is the thing he had just finished which was his draft of the age of reason and he took it with him and was able to drop it off with someone before facing the inevitable guillotine he was kept in Luxembourg Palace prison he was saved not by corset making on this occasion but by a swinging door because they had marked a four on the door, which meant that all four of them were to be executed that night. And because the Belgians wanted to give him some air, because he was never of good health, the jailer opened the door,

but it moved the number inside. So when they came to collect people that night, they walked by the cell. Otherwise, we would not have seen Thomas Payne again after that night. It's like something you just made up, except how extraordinary. The story with pain, it strikes me that he was a utopianist. In other words, there's a role for that, and he plays that role perfectly.

It's like he's designed, we need a utopianist. We need somebody who can say, you know, we can remake the world over again, not since the days of Noah. I mean, who else would think that radically? Right. But Madison's not the only one in the world. Many people saw that now there are limits to this. In other words, we like the general idea that we can do something that's never been done before. We can create a government unlike any that's ever existed before.

And so that's part of Adams' reservation. When he reads common sense, he says, you know, so much of this. is great, but he can kind of sense that there are limits to where it goes. And I mean, I think that that's proved in what happens with pain in France. I mean, when you unmoor that utopianist urge from whatever, the sense that man is fallen, that we need checks and balances, that we may, you know, career over the cliff if we're not, you know. So it's interesting to me that we needed that in him at a certain moment. But then after that, we needed Madison.

No, I think that's so true, Eric. And, you know, he died basically alone. Most people don't realize that we have no idea where pain is today. He was buried with only about five people at the graveside. And then an Englishman decided years later that he belonged to England. And went and stole his body. And the sheriff was going to stop him, but it took so long for the sheriff to rent a horse

that he missed this Englishman. And so all we know is that he was put on a ship to England. There were rumors in well-detailed accounts that his skull was found on the desks of, various individuals, even that his bones have been made into buttons. But we've lost Thomas Payne, which is very fitting in some respects, because pain is such a curious figure. I'm not too sure he belonged to any country.

Maybe it's best that we don't know. But in some ways, I think that he belonged most here. He was accused of sedition in all three countries that claimed him as a citizen. He was arrested in all three countries that claimed he was a citizen. he was unpopular in all three countries by the end of his life. But in some ways, I do think that he belonged here because he is a quintessential American. He came here because this was where you could invent yourself anew.

And he did. And he found that the most valuable thing he had to sell was what was in his head. And the other thing is he also acknowledged that he was wrong in the end. He acknowledged that Madison was wrong. about things like bicameralism, other protections for these systems. There's more than a lot of people of his generation. That's amazing.

I didn't know that. And I do know, you know, for folks who know nothing about him, I mean, the idea that this great thinker, this great man, who was not an intellectual, and that's by the way, praise, right? He's not an, because the intellectuals didn't write as winningly and as persuasively and as clearly. And it was because of his writing style that he was able to put these ideas over. But it seems, it's amazing to me that he fought beside Washington, that he crossed the Delaware, that while he's, you know, while they're retreating through the jerseys, you know, toward the Delaware, he's writing his next essay. At the behest of Washington.

Now, I didn't know that it was at the behest of Washington. Well, Washington at one point says, you're much better as a writer. The fact is he was a mediocre soldier, and I think that Washington certainly recognized that and said, what we need from you is to write, which is what he did. And of course, he wrote American Crisis. And it was funny, Eric, is that for all of the time I spent researching pain, I so much wanted to understand him. He's almost impenetrable, despite the fact that he wrote so much and wrote continually

letters and other things. The closest I ever felt I came to pain was in letters in Luxembourg palace prison. And it was about George Washington, as you mentioned. And you really, I think, identified the key here to pain in that until those letters, I didn't feel I ever saw pain to pierce that veil. I, but in the letters, there's a wounding. a deep hurt that Washington had not rescued him from this dungeon, had not done more. Now, just to be clear, I know he became embittered toward Washington, but is this, just chronologically now, because obviously it's no longer 1776, this is the 1790s.

Washington is president of the United States, and so he was bitter that Washington, as president of the United States, did not rescue him. That's right. And, you know, we had, there's this long period in which Payne was claiming American citizenship that would get him out of that dungeon. But Monroe was the ambassador then who hated Payne

and did very little to help Payne. So Payne wrote to Washington. And in these letters, it's the only time that I felt like I heard his true voice. And it was a voice of, no pun intended, but true pain. that he felt that he had been betrayed by the man that he respected more than anyone else. And it's such a curious thing that pain held Washington in that special place.

But the response to that wounding was very typical pain. He wrote publicly and attacked Washington. And that did it. So when pain eventually made it back to the United States, taxi drivers would not pick him up. Carriage drivers would not accept him. He went to vote and they said, no, you can't vote. You're not American citizen, which was untrue. He was that disliked, and it was largely because of his public attacks on Washington.

And do you have any sense of why Washington didn't do something to rescue him? That's also sort of interesting because Payne had dedicated his book to Washington, Age of Reason, and Washington didn't like it because it created a very serious, diplomatic issue for him. Pain was now the most revolutionary of the American Revolution. Even though he was more circumspect after the French Revolution, he still wanted to see a revolution in England. He still wanted to see democracies overthrow these countries. Washington at this point was now President Washington, and he didn't like the dedication, he didn't like the problems that caused him. But I am surprised that

Washington left him there. I shared sort of pain to hurt that he was dying there. He could have died in there. And by the way, he came, as we know, he came within 24 hours being guillotine. So this was not a matter to delay, not in the French Revolution.

You could have your head cut off in a blink of an eye. So I understood it. When someone came upon him after he was released, there's this wonderful figure called Red-headed York, who is this figure from England.

And York went to see him in Paris. And when he asked where pain lived, everyone knew where he lived, but he said that everyone then detested him. And he said that pain looked very sad and melancholy. And I think that he probably felt the most alone at that time. The whole thing is so extraordinary. What's interesting to me about pain, I mean, because my understanding of him is cursory compared to yours, but he really was this radical utopianist at a time when it was particularly needed for us

to see the only way forward is independence. But in common sense, he makes certain references to the Bible. He seems to have a kind of general respect for the biblical worldview, and I assume as a polymacist, in the good sense of polemicist, as a persuader, he knows that the American reader will respond to that. But he seems to veer away from that, because the French Revolution famously is as irreligious as the American Revolution was religious. and in the age of reason,

maybe it would have just, maybe it embarrassed Washington to be associated with that level of... I think that's true. Benjamin Franklin advised him, don't publish us. Ben Franklin said, you are attacking faith.

And not only will it not be good for you, it won't be good for this work. No one will read it, essentially. And Ben Franklin always would appear suddenly and give Payne this advice, I'm forgetting he was in Paris at the time. Yeah. By now, he's in France because it's the 1780s.

That's right. But also pain, you know, it's not that pain was against religion. I don't think that's true. But it was an area of the greatest division with him and others. What's also interesting in the book is, you know, the second half of the book looks forward and asks, how do we keep this republic? And one of the things I argue is that we have to have what I call a liberty enhancing economy. And I note that this is the 250th anniversary of both the American Declaration and Adam Smith's wealth of nations.

That book was embraced by the founders. They recognized that those economic principles were the perfect companion for their enlightenment principles. And what is not known about pain is he was a huge advocate of Adam Smith. He believed in free markets, even though he had some very progressive ideas, including a type of universal basic income. He believed in the free market. So he was a much more complex figure than the cutout that many people portray him as. Well, it is amazing. I want to talk a little bit about the second part of your book, because

As you said, there's no guarantee that we ought to be able to carry on, that whatever was formed 250 years ago, no one knows, no one can say whether it will last forever or how long it will last, and in some ways it seems miraculous that it's lasted this long, because there have, of course, been tremendous challenges over the last two and a half centuries. So what are some of the things that you see now as potential threats to whatever it is we're talking about? What are we talking about? We're talking about what existed in 1787? In other words, to what are we looking back?

Well, we're looking at the elements that allowed us to survive. Ages of rage, including ours, and rages all around us. It's addictive and it's contagious. And what people don't admit is they like it. And we've been here before. But what we are going to face is something we've never faced before. I talk about the combination of robotics and AI. I take the most conservative estimates on the loss of jobs.

We're looking at the largest, not just unemployed, but unemployable class. I believe the free market will adjust and create new jobs for a new economy. But we're looking at a number of years where we will face. something we've never faced before. And we have to preserve that liberty-enhancing economy, that belief that you can never truly be free unless you're independent from the government. We can't be a kept citizenship.

And we can't be an arts and craft citizenship where the government just pays us to learn to blow glass and make pottery. That's not who the citizen is at the heart of the American Republic. So we have to preserve that and how we do it is essential. And what the book says is that, look, I expect Congress will make all the wrong decisions.

It usually does. And it will subsidize jobs that are not coming back. You're gonna see fewer taxi drivers and fewer radiologists. Those are gonna go the way of course it making. We have to focus on jobs that are homocentric, jobs that will survive if we are to survive. But the most important thing is,

how many of us can answer Kreb Kaur's question today of who then is this American? Who were we then? Who were we now? Can we answer that question? We're not having a constitutional crisis. I just had a debate with a Harvard law professor who believed that this was a constitutional crisis. That what's a constitutional crisis? We're in this, that we have to get rid of the constitution. You have... Excuse me? When I read that in your book, I thought we have to touch on that. The idea that some people are seriously proposing that. I mean, we don't have to talk about it the second, but... No, it's a significant number of people. It's a mind-blowing statement that we need to...

No, it's true. You know, the dean of Berkeley Law School is a book saying no constitutional lasts forever, and various academics are saying the Constitution is now the threat against the American people. These are the rise of what I call the New Jacobins. And it's not a constitutional crisis. It's a crisis of faith. That they've lost faith in our Constitution. And they're like priests that have lost their faith, but continue...

to wear their frocks and continue to give sermons. But behind all of that is in many ways the same themes we saw on the French Revolution, this idea of more direct democracy that brought the instabilities that existed back then. And the question then is, are people able to answer those questions today? Do Americans have a sense of who they are?

Because they are still unique. You know, that's what I try to talk about. about in this book is that these really are revolutionary times, but we are a revolutionary people. We still are. We're still different from any other country, even today. Oh, there's no question. And I think that's part of what many people today don't realize. They have forgotten the wildness of the American experiment. They kind of think, well, we're sort of like other Western democracies. And you guys, well, no, actually we're unique.

Well, which brings us to this idea that some, it seems to me, crazy legal scholars have or profess intellectuals have, that we could do away with the Constitution. Because I guess I get the idea that honest utopianists, whoever they are, whether in the Soviet revolution, revolution or in the French Revolution, that they really believe that, and I think pain was probably one of them, that if we are totally free and everybody gets a vote, that it will lead to something

good. They really believe that. But I wonder if today, you know, given these checkered histories that we can look at moments in history, whether the folks talking about getting rid of the Constitution secretly know that it will be some elite class of experts who are actually ruling and that they would think of themselves as being among that elite class, that they don't really believe in the kind of pure democracy that we've seen fail. No, that's so true, Eric. And I think that is the question, because the French Revolution was really Rousseauian Revolution.

They believed in Rousseau. who is a beautiful writer, but incredibly naive. And Rousseau believed that because people are good, that all you had to do is release what he called the General Will. And that as long as the General Will is released, then it will be good because we are good. And of course, the French Revolution showed the truth of the matter. I call it in the book Saturn's Gene.

And it's more than the fact that revolutions devour their own. It's more that a recognition of something that we own. know down deep of this sort of Saturn's gene, the ability of every mortal to become a monster. And we've seen it. And we saw it in the French Revolution. If you read Robes-Pierre's early writings, you would think he was an ACLU lawyer. He would talk about due process and all of these fundamental rights. Within a couple of years, he would be saying terror's virtue because it corrupted them all.

And I think that in the end, what you see with the new Jacobins, so many American scholars are calling to scrap the Constitution, is you're hearing the same voice of Rousseau, this idea that the general will will take care of it. You know, I was speaking in Europe, and I had a EU member ask me, he said, you know, your book is very confident about the U.S. surviving this century,

but I was a little uncertain about whether you thought the EU would survive. And I said, I'm very surprising, because I thought I made clear in a book I don't think you will survive, and I think you'll fail in spectacular fashion. If what I say in the first half of the book is true, then, of course, the EU will collapse in time. Because you've destroyed all of the democratic elements, all of the key elements, not just the Madisonian elements,

that you're going to need when that hurt comes down that mountain, and it's coming down now. And I told him, the thing that bothers me is that you don't have a clue what will follow you, neither do I. So when you collapse, what happens then? Because historically, what happens then is tyranny. And that could be a cost of the entire world.

But I think that the EU is an example of what not to do. They've destroyed what they'll need to be in the 21st century. And in what sense do you mean that? Because I think, well, I guess going back to Rousseau and, you know, I think of Rousseau as a Freudian, even though he predates Freud. There's this idea that there's something good in us, and if it can only be released, if it's not repressed, whatever, which is a view of man that most of the founders and the revolutionaries did not have.

They had a biblical view that man is fallen, and so there are, you know, because human beings are made in the image of God, there's a huge upside, and that's the utopianist strain, but we have to be careful because man has fallen, and so we have to have the checks and balances, otherwise everything you've been saying will happen as it's happened, so on and so forth. And that to me seems at the heart of this is that our revolution,

the American Revolution, was grounded. in that biblical view. You don't need to be a Christian. I mean, if you're any kind of a realist, an observer, you see that, that there's a danger there. But that's really fallen out of fashion. So when you bring up the EU, clearly the secular bureaucrats in Europe,

they're not thinking about that. I don't know what their worldview is at this point. No, nor do I, and what's really troubling is, nor do they. The fact is that they've adopted this global governance system, which I talk about going back to the early mega corporations at the beginning of our founding, and we're seeing this global governance model taking hold through the EU, where they're actually threatening U.S. companies

that they have to adhere to their own standards. But it's an inherently unstable system. And so they're breaking down those interstitial localized systems in various member countries. And they're shifting this power to a global center. And when that falls, they don't have the infrastructure that we had in the United States to take on those pressures. You know, in the first half of the book, it's sort of a tale of two cities of Philadelphia in Paris. and it captures after the revolution that violence was breaking out in both cities

and it talks about the attack on Fort Wilson which is the home of James Wilson and people died and Cannon were being pulled into the street and what years? This is after the revolutions we're talking right before the French Revolution in the 1970s this is a period of great instability but right as the U.S. Constitution was being

ratified and then it's stung And the only thing that did happen in that period was the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which was not popular in Pennsylvania. It barely passed. But people seemed to accept that it was a system that gave them a voice, and they didn't have to go into the streets and kill each other. And the U.S. went on to become the most stable, successful democracy. And, of course, France became its error.

What people are talking about today is they rip up those key elements that led to that change, that true miracle of Philadelphia, is they're going to plunge back into what led to the French terror. And all people, when they started a revolution, can't imagine its end. People that started the French Revolution wouldn't have imagined how it would turn out. And the same as today. What bothers me about the EU,

and this is something I've talked about over in Europe repeatedly, is that you don't have the slightest idea of what happens if you should fail after everything you've torn up. You know, the EU has many wonderful principles that led to it, but global governance is not the system. The U.S. system is based on localized rights and localized power. It is a system designed to avoid the concentration of power. The EU is based on the exact opposite.

They have concentrated power continually. They admit, some of the founders of the EU admitted that they had to sell this, gradually and criminally to get people to give up their national identity. Well, good luck with that. The question is what happens if you don't succeed to the world? It's like they've never read the tiny short story in Genesis about the Tower of Babel. I mean, it's amazing to me that they could be that ignorant, or even that it seems to me to be tremendously naive.

I mean, the idea that we can just wipe away national boundaries and sovereignty, and it'll be fine, we'll be fine. And you think, well, why would you say that? And I guess, you know, it makes me think of Burke's little platoons, that they're already in that, in the family and in localities. You have, it's like a baffling to prevent, you know, things from just getting out of control. You have these structures kind of in place that create some stability. And they seem to want to wipe that away without really thinking when has that worked. Right. I mean, where the French believe in the general will,

they believe in this sort of transcendent global governance. And they believe so deeply that they're willing to untether themselves from those cables. that held previous governments together. And I don't think it'll end well. The question is, how will it end for the rest of us? I actually think that the American system could thrive in the 21st century, if we can answer of course question

of what then is this American. But we have a system that's built for bad times, not good times. It was written in times like ours. It was written four times like ours. If we actually preserve those things, We will thrive in the 21st century. This is an entire country built on economic change.

So the only threat to us, and this sort of captures Franklin's view, is really ourselves. It's the crisis of faith is greater than the constitutional crisis. If we lose faith in each other, then we're lost because, you know, this republic is based ultimately on each individual citizen. And in some ways, pain is a reflection of that. You know, we all have something in common. You and I are the product of people that came to this country that wanted to be something new. And succeeded fantastically well, as so many others did. We have that in common, that we have a legacy of an idea that is still there, that this is a place that you can follow your own manifest destiny.

and create your greatest creation, which is yourself. Our parents and our grandparents believe that. I just want to make sure that we don't lose that because if we become a kept citizenry in the 21st century, this republic will collapse. Because we need that citizen. Well, I guess that's why I wrote my book and why I'm thrilled you wrote your book

is because to me the only way forward is to rediscover what does it mean to be an American? What is it that our parents bought into? Because to be an American, you have to buy into these ideas. Or you have to at least not be actively opposed to the ideas. You have to buy into a culture that accepts certain things and that if enough Americans don't agree on those things, America effectively ceases to be.

I mean, at that point, we're already evaporating. That's what I love about your writing, is that you return to the faith basis often of the American Republic. And that was so key. And you've written in a past, as I have, about Mayhew and others, that gave his famous sermon long before the American Declaration. And he sort of put a stake through the heart of the British argument that you had a religious obligation to follow your sovereign king.

I was thrilled to see in your book that you referenced Mayhew's, sermon because I discovered it and I thought, wow, everybody needs to know about this. So he gives it in 1750 and John Adams says that everyone read that, everyone knew that sermon. So tell us about what is the case that Mayhew, who's really the intellectual descendant of the Puritans. What is the case that he makes that was so central to our revolution? Well, he explains that things like Romans 13 and other passages, do not bind you blindly to a sovereign, that he says that God gave you certain rights.

And if a sovereign denies you those rights, then the sovereign is committing blasphemies, creating an offense against God. He can't claim to be the representative of God if you are denying the thing that God gave every human being. And the key here is that even if you don't have a religious foundation, you can believe that these are human rights. To be fully human,

you have to be able to exercise your faith, to be able to speak freely, to associate freely, that these are things that make you human. And to deny that is to make you something else. And Mayhew brought that forth. He removed the last obstacle of what was a religious and a patriotic country just saying, enough. We're going to create something here with these foundational beliefs. And I think you're so

right to write about it as I have because that's the touchstone that people have to come back to. Right. You know, who we are really is really who we were. Right. And I think that your book, my book, and other books, not as many as I wished, are trying to get people to in some ways have that muscle memory that they've lost, that it will remember, wow, we really are a unique people. Yeah, and there's nothing jingoistic about it. I mean, we would love everybody in the world to buy into these ideas. This is not something unique to this continent.

So it's exciting to me to think that in keeping the republic, if by God's grace we keep it, others would see us, you know, like getting back to Winthrop's 1630 sermon, you know, as a shining city on a hill and say, whatever they're doing there, could we do that? And I've seen that actually in Europe or in other places where there are people, you know, Uber drivers who kind of see something that is happening here and they hadn't thought of that before and they like it and they want that. And the question is whether enough of them in other places

will be able to articulate it, understand it, and then figure out a way to make it happen there. I think that's so true, Eric, and one of the reasons I talk so much about pain is that maybe he's a vehicle that is more accessible for people

rather than giving them with speech or even make you sermon. That maybe what makes pain so fascinating for me is that he's so flawed. And maybe people can identify with that, that he didn't have a perfect life. He struck out at the plate over and over again.

And, you know, I was asked recently, not a while back from Library of Congress, a historian asked me, after researching pain so long, do you just, do you love him? Is this, your attachment to him so great? And the only thing I could think of is I'm a big film noir fan. I have to have something playing in the background

when I write. And it's almost always film noir, which drives my children crazy. And the greatest line ever delivered in film noir, I suggested this historian, which is by Robert Ryan delivered it to Joan Fontaine and born to be bad. And he had spent a beautiful night with this Femfetal,

thinking that she had finally come back to him. She'd stopped lying and devouring everyone. Was Joan Fontaine the Femfantile? Oh, she was the world's greatest Femfantel. I didn't know. She could, she had that word. She was scarily good at it. And so he realizes, oh, my God, she lied to me too.

And so he goes to the door and he turns and he says, you know, I love you so much. I only wish I liked you. And in some ways, I love pain so much. I only wish I liked him. He's hard to like. That's why he had so few friends. He just had a hard time dealing with human beings.

But I loved him because, of he was such a principled individual he didn't take virtually any money from his bestsellers common sense was the world's first global best seller he gave almost as you say mentioned your work that he gave virtually everything to the revolutionary so good he kept his prices low

because he wanted people to read them he was never he was always penniless he was always sort of bitch of a mootcher you know he would he'd live off people drive them crazy. But down deep, there was something about pain that I think resonates with all of us. And maybe because he was so flawed,

we could learn something from him. Well, he believed in the cause so passionately. I guess I'm reminded a little bit of Samuel Adams, who, you know, he burned all of his papers and he didn't care if he'd be remembered. He just wanted the cause to succeed. And there's something beautiful about that. Well, we'll have to end it there.

I'm just so grateful to you, Jonathan, for being with us here. The book is Rage and the Republic, the unfinished story of the American Revolution. That to me is an unbelievably exceedingly important idea, that the revolution, for me, is worthless, unless we understand that it has to be carried on. We have to understand it so that we can carry it on. So really grateful to you for the book. And of course, we only scratched the surface in this conversation, but I'm glad we did at least that. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.