America's Unfinished Revolution

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Good morning. I'm, uh, Michael Kavanaugh, and this is the next Big Idea Daily, your quick dose of the best new nonfiction from some of the smartest authors around. Now, tomorrow we celebrate America's 250th birthday. So here's a question worth sitting with. Is the American Revolution actually finished? The founders said they were building something new, a republic unlike anything that had come before. But what they created was always meant to be a work in progress. And today, with political polarization, the rise of AI, and a, uh, deepening crisis of faith in institutions, the experiment they launched may be facing its most consequential test yet. Jonathan Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School and one of the most prominent constitutional litigators in the country. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His new book is called Rage and the the Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. And he joins us with some of his big ideas in just a moment. And later, we'll hear big ideas from Walter Isaacson, the best selling biographer of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin, who will share ideas from his 2025 book, the Greatest Sentence Ever Written, zeroing in on the single most revolutionary line in the Declaration of Independence and what it still demands of us today. The Unfinished American Experiment, right after this quick break. Today's episode is sponsored by Shopify. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at, ah, shopify.com daily and make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com nbid for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com nbid for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com.

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Jonathan Turley, the author of the new book Rage and the the Unfinished Story of the American revolution. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the first half of this book looks at the unique confluence of characters and events that led to the creation of the American Repub. The second half of the book looks forward and asks whether the American republic can survive in the 21st century with its sweeping economic and political changes, including the rise of robotics and AI. It is the unfinished story of the American revolution. Here are five insights from Rage and the Republic. 1. What made the American Republic unique was that unlike other revolutions, it did not ultimately consume itself. Quote Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children. Those words from journalist Jacques Millay Dupont during the French Revolution refer to the Roman God Saturn, which, or Kronos in Greek. The youngest son of 12 Titans, Cronos was given an ominous prophecy by his mother that he would be overthrown by his own child. That made for less than an ideal family. Cronos would castrate his father and after ascending to the throne, he defied the prophecy by eating each of his children a upon their births, all would become daddy's digestives. Not surprisingly, this familial diet did not sit well with his consort Rhea. So when her son Zeus was born, she decided to trick Cronos by wrapping a stone in a swaddling blanket and handing it to him to devour. She then hid Zeus on Crete and once he reached adulthood, Zeus returned and fulfilling the prophecy, defeated his father. The story of Cronos held obvious meaning for Millais Dupin, who watched with alarm as the French Revolution devoured first its aristocratic foes and then its own supporters. The lesson of Saturn would also be raised in the American Revolution by none other than Thomas Paine. Chronos may have been all too human. In allowing his ambition and rage to overwhelm every other emotion and consideration, he embodied an insatiable appetite that once unleashed, would continue with inexorable and horrible consequences. It is a story played out over and over again in history as ambition becomes activism, activism becomes extremism and extremism becomes authoritarianism. Call it the Saturn gene. We are all Saturn's children with an inherent impulse that rests within each of us. That capacity of all mortals to become monsters. The framers, particularly James Madison, sought to control those monsters that lie within every republic to prevent democracy from becoming tyranny, including tyranny of the majority or democratic despotism. They succeeded in creating the world's oldest and most stable democracy, while just a few years later the French Revolution would become a blood soaked terror. Two influential figures would play a role in both revolutions, Lafayette and Paine. The French Revolution would come close to killing them both. 2. To understand the American Revolution, you should first understand the most revolutionary character of the American Revolution. You must understand Thomas Paine in an intriguing way. A, uh, new emerging people found the perfect embodiment in pain. Impatient, precocious and unpredictable. He came to America to reinvent himself and found a nation looking for the very same thing. He would become the voice not of the powdered and pampered class of armchair revolutionaries, but of the common man. More than any of his contemporaries, Paine understood this nation of immigrants, transplants like himself, who were willing to break free from past constraints and concepts. This was a nation that, in his words, had now outgrown the state of infancy. Before writing those words, Paine had tried and failed at a wide range of enterprises, from being a staymaker or corset maker to being a private volunteer, even an excise officer. He was never more than mediocre at any of these professions. The irony was that he stumbled from failure to failure without realizing that he was his own greatest asset. It was what was in his head that would make him an international sensation. But he would not understand that until he hit rock bottom and drifted onto these shores with the rest of the world's flotsam and jetsam. While Paine seemed perfectly clueless in dealing with other humans, he had a brilliant conception of humanity. His common sense was their sense of what was wrong with the world around them. Paine would also come to know that revolution, once unleashed, can develop an insatiable appetite. It is a lesson that is easily forgotten by a people that have not known revolution for centuries. Radicals today espouse the same reckless demand for change by any means necessary. History has shown that it is far easier to start a revolution than it is to contain one. Paine would discover that fact at great cost to himself and and to those he loved. He was the ultimate example of Saturn's children. He would be devoured by revolution and then emerge with a new perspective on how revolutions are won and lost. If you want to understand the American Revolution and all revolutions, you would be wise to start with Thomas Paine. 3. We are living through a crisis of faith where some of the same voices are being heard in this century as some, um, turn to violence and others call for radical changes to our constitutional system. In May 2024, I was working on this book when suddenly I felt pulled into the pages of my own research. A, uh, mob outside was crying, guillotine, guillotine, guillotine. Those words were not chanted in Paris in the 18th century, but on the quad of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. i was literally working on the material from the French Revolution when it seemed like the French Revolution had come to me. Students were holding a mock trial of the university president, the provost, board of directors and others who had refused their demands in an anti Israel protest. In camp for weeks in the yard next to my law school office, the students chanted, off with their heads and off with the MF in gallows with you. No one seriously expected the tumbrils to roll down Pennsylvania avenue. These students were venting and mocking the administration. Nevertheless, the faux trial induced a certain what if moment, considering whether we could ever actually devolve into such madness. It came at a time when protests were becoming more radicalized and at times violent. We have survived every age of rage because of a constitutional system that was designed not for the good times but the bad times that come with democracy. Despite having the most successful and stable constitutional system in history, there is still that moment, a, uh, fleeting doubt as to whether the system could survive the morning, survive the times we are living in, survive us. 4 Throughout history, we have faced existential changes. However, our history and success can become a dangerous conceit. Robotics and AI could change not just our republic, but its citizens. In his debut novel in 1952, Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Wrote of a dystopian world where automation replaces most workers. In one scene, machinist Rudy Hertz watches as a factory of hundreds of lathes repeat his every motion with unending and unfailing precision. His honor of being chosen to quote, have his motions immortalized on tape was followed by all machinists, including himself. Losing their jobs to their automated selves, Hertz had become the player piano of the labor force, the replicated human precursor of a new robotic workforce. Hertz's fate is now being realized by millions. In a new emerging economy with greater automation and AI technology, manufacturing and service jobs are likely to be reduced significantly. Some estimates put the loss of jobs at 80%. From health care to sales to agriculture to manufacturing. The greatest threat of dependency policies is not just their impact on the economy, but but on the citizens themselves. Cradle to grave Subsidies can change how citizens view their relationship to the government and their control over their own destiny. It can change the minds of citizens as dependents of the government. The hold of subsistence subsidies can produce servile citizens who live from government paycheck to paycheck. Citizens will fight over a pie of benefits rather than try to expand that pie. Worse yet, it can create class stratification. With a minority of productive citizens and a large population of dependent citizens with subsidized living and housing, it can produce a society of not just economic but physical separation of classes. In the United States, that type of dependency economy is perfect for the rise of despotic democratic impulse and the repeat of the historical cycle towards authoritarianism. 5 if, as Benjamin Franklin suggested, we are to keep this republic, we must keep faith with who we are as Americans. What was viewed two hundred and fifty years ago as a new type of citizen Admittedly, the story of the 21st century is still being written with new elements and conditions. Whether they be redcoats or robots, the American democracy remains uniquely equipped to face global challenges. The art to living freely in this century is to seek creative solutions without losing the core elements that that have allowed our constitutional system to thrive in ever changing conditions. Ours remains a system designed for revolutionary change without devolving into actual revolution. The success of that system will require reinforcing rather than replacing those structural elements. We have to find what Paine called that happy something that he found on these shores. Over 250 years ago. In the 18th century, a Frenchman wrote a popular work in Europe that revealed the fascination with this new form of citizen. He asked, what then is the new American, this new man? The question today is even more poignant and perhaps for some, more difficult to answer. The greatest challenge of this century may be a rediscovery of that essential character that seemed so clear to these early writers when they first came upon our shores. Call it a crisis of faith or a confusion of the times, but many seem unsure, um, whether we represent something beyond the mere totality of our wealth or power. We were much more than that when we first assume, uh, the moniker of Americans. The question is, what are we now? And perhaps more pointedly, what do we aspire to be in this new century? The answer can be found in the moment of creation when a people was defined by certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are bound by the revolutionary idea that government exists to allow every citizen to pursue one's own manifest destiny. As shown by Paine, we are our own greatest creations. What was true in 1776 is true today. Yes, these are revolutionary times, but we remain a, uh, revolutionary people. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy my book, Rage and the the Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.

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Speaker C: Hi, I'm, um, Walter Isaacson, and I've written some big biographies. But now I've done a Short book, and it's called the Greatest Sentence Ever Written. It's about the second sentence of our Declaration of Independence, the one that begins, we hold these truths to be self evident. Here are, ah, five key insights that are takeaways from the book. Number one, leadership is a team sport. Innovation. It's a collaborative endeavor. We biographers have a dirty little secret. We sometimes make it seem like a guy or a gal goes up to a garret or a garage and has a light bulb moment. And that's how innovation happens. But in fact, innovation, as most of you know from your own lives, comes from working together as a team, bouncing around. You know, when we had our country in its founding, they had a great team. It wasn't just one great leader. You needed people like Jefferson and Madison who were really smart. You needed to partner them with people like John Adams and Samuel Adams who were filled with passion and have somebody with high rectitude and great morality totally respect it, like George Washington. And you also needed a Benjamin Franklin. And his job was to put them together as a team, to bring everybody together. When they were writing that Declaration In June of 1776, the Continental Congress decided not to just have Jefferson do it, but to have a committee, a team put it together. It may have been the last time that Congress created a good committee. It had Jefferson and Ben Franklin and John Adams were among the people on it. And they sat there in a rented room that Jefferson had on Market street in Philadelphia, using a, uh, mahogany laptop desk that he had brought with him from Monticello. And they went through page after page of revisions. They went through four major drafts of the Declaration of Independence. Uh, nowadays, that first draft, which I find really interesting because it has all of their editing marks on it, that's in the Library of Congress. The final one, of course, as everybody knows, is in the National Archives and the big rotunda. I thought for our 250th birthday, they ought to display the different drafts all together. It's never been done that way before because the Library of Congress, you know, doesn't quite get along with the national, uh, Archives. The. But if for our birthday we could bring it all together, we could see how teamwork made our Declaration of Independence. So if you know anybody in Congress or anybody in Washington, tell them to make that happen. For our 250th birthday, the second takeaway, or insight is always revise and correct. Everything should be an iterative process, meaning you keep making it a little bit better, a little bit better. I remember when I was working on my book with Steve Jobs, sitting in his big family room at home as he pulled out bootleg tapes of the Beatles and how they made their different songs. And his favorite was a bootleg he had gotten of the M. Many, many versions over and over again they made of, uh, Strawberry Fields Forever. And he would sit there and listen as John Lennon would start something and McCartney would try something else. And then somebody would chime in and they'd say, okay, let's take it from the top. Let's revise it and do it again. That was also true of Leonardo da Vinci. He didn't just paint the beautiful paintings. He started by making an underdrawing and a sketch and then charcoal and then filling it in some. And so it became sort of a cartoon. Uh, that would be the essence of the painting. And then he would put brushstrokes on it and paint it in over and over, layer after layer of brushstrokes, usually in lightly pigmented oil. And so he could make those brushstrokes overlay each other. It took him more than a decade to do that with the Mona Lisa as he perfected that most amazing smile ever painted, trying to just do version after version. And that was true of the great second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson began the first draft of that sentence by saying, we hold these truths to be sacred. And you can see Benjamin Franklin crossing it out with the black printer's pen that he used, using those heavy backslashes that printers use. And he crossed out, we hold these truths to be sacred, and put in self evident. And his point was, we were creating a new type of nation, one in which our rights were based on rationality, not the dictates or dogma of a particular religion. But then the sentence goes on, and it says in Jefferson's first draft, they're endowed with certain inalienable rights. And John Adams puts in, they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So you can see in the drafting and revising of just one sentence how our founders balance something we don't do very well today. Balance the role of divine providence in creating our nation and the role of rationality and reason. Insight 3. Try to do the same thing with your own life. And perhaps we should do it as a nation. In other words, continually revise and correct our lives. Throughout his life, Benjamin Franklin kept a ledger of the mistakes he had made and how he had tried to rectify each one of them. It was sort of mistakes. And then on the second part of the page, it would be how he rectified it. The greatest mistake, he realized it was not just a mistake, not just a narrative, but it was almost a sin, was that as a printer in Philadelphia, he had owned two slaves who worked in a shop. By the 1760s, they'd wandered off. And Franklin made no effort to prevent that. He even joined an organization that established schools for blacks and freed slaves and slaves in America. And his journey culminated, by 1787, when he accepted, at age 81, which, by the way, was considered old back then, the presidency of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. And so you can see, he was not a perfect man, but he kept trying to perfect himself. And the moral arc of American history during its subsequent 250 years mirrors the personal narrative of Franklin's life. As we head into our 250th, uh, let's not just celebrate our goodness, or for that matter, just assail our flaws. Let's celebrate our ability to revise and correct ourselves when we get things wrong. For example, Abraham Lincoln opened his Gettysburg Address in 1863 by referring directly back to that second sentence of the Declaration. He said, fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a, uh, new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. At a cost of close to, uh, 620,000 lives, including 7,058 buried in that cemetery he dedicated that day in Gettysburg. The Civil War brought an end to slavery. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. Said, echoing an 1853 sermon by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. But it's important to remember the ark didn't bend itself. This was and remains a constant, uh, American struggle to make the phrase all men are created equal, truly inclusive, to revise and correct our mistakes as we go along. Insight 4. There'll be people who tell you at the graduation speeches or in pep talks to follow your passion. But my insight number four is it's not about your passion. It's about connecting your passion to something larger. When I graduated from college, I don't think I remember who the graduation speaker was, but I remember what the minister of the memorial church in our college said on that baccalaureate sermon on our graduation day. The name of the sermon was what we forgot to tell you. And he said that he had a student come up to him, and he asked the student, what do you want to be when you leave college? And the student said, I want to be powerful. I want to be successful. I may even want to be president. And the Rev. Gomes said, Aim higher. Our college has put out a lot of successful people and it's even put out a few presidents. But what it needs to do is put out more good people, people who connect their passion to, to the causes and the needs around them. Steve Jobs, when he was dying, sat in his back garden and I asked him what was it all about? And I thought he would have some great thinking about how the iPhone helped connect the world. And he said, no, what it's really all about is what my guru in India taught me. He said, life is like a river. And if you're very successful, you get to pull things out of the river. But at a certain point near the end of your life, you realize it's not about how much you get to take out of the river, it's how much you get to put into the river. What ideas, inventions, thoughts, paybacks. You've done that people in the future will be able to find in that river. Benjamin Franklin not only helped craft the sentence, but that defines our American creed. He lived it by putting things back in the river. He organized a police corps, a fire corps, a street sweeping corps, a public library, a hospital, and a school that became the University of Pennsylvania. He also created a widow's pension fund and a mutual insurance cooperative. He ran a newspaper that was dedicated to publishing a wide variety of opinions and, and following no party line. And on his deathbed, he bequeathed a revolving loan fund for young people to start enterprises. During his lifetime, he donated to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia. And he helped lead the fundraising for a new hall that would provide a pulpit for visiting preachers of any belief, as he put it in the fundraising letter. So that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service. And on his deathbed, he was the largest individual contributor to the congregation Mikveh Israel, the first synagogue built in Philadelphia. So when he died, 20,000 mourners watched his funeral procession, which was led by all the clergymen of every faith in Philadelphia, including the local rabbi. Walking arm in arm. That's what our founders were fighting for 250 years ago. And that's what we must continue to fight for today so that we can preserve for ourselves and our posterity the rights and aspirations we all share, including to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Finally, number five hang together. When we were young, we were taught to all hold hands when crossing the street. That's still a good lesson for today. When we as individuals and we the people as a nation, still have many dangerous streets we must cross. At the official signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, wrote his name with his famous flourish. There must be no pulling different ways. He said, we must all hang together. And Benjamin Franklin replied, alluding to what would happen to them if their revolution failed. Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or, uh, most assuredly we'll all hang separately. As Franklin pointed out, our, uh, life or death challenge as a nation, whether it be in 1776 or 2026, is this. When there's so many forces dedicated to dividing us, how can we best hang together? Thanks for listening, and happy birthday, America.

Speaker B: Thank you, Walter. All right, everyone, if you got something out of today's show, please leave us a rating and review so others can find it, too. And grab copies of the books we talked about using the links in the episode notes. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter so you can get these big ideas right in your inbox. That does it for us this week. I'm, uh, Michael Kovnat. I'll see you Monday.