Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court

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 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 hearken 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.

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 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 hearken 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.