Jonathan Turley

All of those things were what Washington and Madison rejected.

And in some ways,

I think Paine was the voice of righteous rage in our revolution.

And Madison was the voice of pious reason.

And Washington preferred Madison after the revolution.

As I say in the book, there's nothing more inconvenient than a revolutionary after a revolution.

And that's what Paine found in two countries.

Well, that really gets back to where we are.

And you're so right about that.

I mentioned the book that I was working on the French chapter of this book.

I was sitting in my office at George Washington.

And all of a sudden I heard guillotine, guillotine, guillotine.

I had this sort of odd moment.

I felt like I was being pulled into my pages of the French Revolution.

In fact, students outside my window with a guillotine during the pro-Palestinian protest, they brought a guillotine and they were listing people they wanted to guillotine from the university.

Now, I don't think that they really wanted to see anyone guillotined.

But it made me think, you know, is it possible?

You have that moment of doubt after all of our history.

Could we still lose it all?

And the answer is, of course, we can.