What’s a republic supposed to do with fear?
It is a question that I asked my students to reflect on last week. This was several days before the tech titans Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis declared that a “brake” needs to be put on AI development until serious security and safety concerns are addressed.
What’s a republic supposed to do with fear?
It’s a loaded question, for it assumes that the United States of America is a republic. In terms of constitutional originalism, it unquestionably is. The two great eras of U.S. constitution-writing—the post-Revolutionary War Founding and post-Civil War Reconstruction—were strongly republican moments in U.S. history, where “republicanism” was understood as a political philosophy meant to empower “we the people” over and against real or pretend nobles, oligarchs, and power elites.
So, what’s a republic supposed to do with fear?
The answer is written in the Constitution, particularly in the Constitutional amendments.
Consider, briefly, the history of U.S. Constitutional amendments.
The Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments) was ratified on December 15, 1791 in light of dangers of an over-powerful government:
The 1st Amendment protects freedoms of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition.
The 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms.
The 4th Amendment protects against unwarranted search and seizure.
The 5th Amendment protects against arbitrary arrest.
The 7th Amendment guarantees trial by jury for serious crimes and lawsuits.
After the Civil War, further crucial amendments were added that protected blacks and immigrants against dangerous forms of white power:
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, ratified on December 6, 1865.
The 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, ratified on July 9, 1868.
The 15th Amendment grants voting rights regardless of race, color, or previous servitude, ratified on February 3, 1870.
And then in the 20th century, women and young people captured political power from a society quite willing to exploit them, even kill them:
The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, ratified on August 18, 1920.
The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18, ratified on July 1, 1971, amid the Vietnam War.
What do all the amendments listed here have in common? They push power down to ordinary citizens on the ground. This is what republics do with fear and danger. They empower ordinary people to exercise political power. A republic deals with fear by empowering ordinary people to generate legal and administrative mechanisms for managing and minimizing danger.
But we live today in a “republic” only in a loose sense. In the classical types of government, we live in something much closer to a constitutional monarchy (with an elected monarch).
This is not just a statement about President Trump (who very much governs like a king, not a president). It is a statement about the broader direction of American governance in the last fifty years. Where do hyper-partisanship, gerrymandering, the concentration of technological and economic power, and elements of conservative ideology take us? To constitutional monarchy (with an elected monarch). To a republic in name only.
The more recent history of constitutional amendments is enormously instructive here. The only Constitutional amendment that has been passed since the 27th in 1971 came in 1992. It prevented elected representatives from receiving a pay raise for which they voted until after the next election cycle. The 27th amendment was not about pushing power downward at all, but about putting a small check on power at the top.
Strategies for checking power at the top are needed, but they are not enough. I’ve said it in these pages before, and I will say it again: the biggest problem the United States faces today is a dearth of effective political power among ordinary people.
We are therefore left where we are right now with AI: elites fighting among themselves about the things that endanger us more than them.
Given all of this, I’d love to see an active push for constitutional solutions that get to the dearth of effective political power among ordinary people—especially new constitutional amendments, written in the historic republican spirit, aimed at curtailing party power. How about starting with election reform: money in politics, gerrymandering, term limits, etc.? Social scientists can argue all they want about the pros and cons of such moves, but constitutional amendments do not need to be “scientific.” They just need to be directional, directing power downward toward ordinary people.
But before we get there, we are going to need something like a quiet revolution. This week I am talking to my students about the 18th century, the century in which ordinary people started printing newspapers, reading, talking about what they read, and making demands of those in government and business. That is, they created a public sphere. The most successful revolutions in history were the result of this quiet revolution, the advent of the public sphere.
This was not Trump-style “populism.” It was not people merely organizing themselves around a Hero or Leader in a great act of guttural boot licking. It was about people claiming their own dignity and developing their own political capacities.
Part of what makes the current technological world so insidious and dangerous is that it seems designed to strip ordinary people of these basic political capacities: the capacity to read, the capacity to speak, the capacity to assemble, petition, and persuade.
Hence, I am all for the organizing that is happening at local levels against big data centers. I am heartened not because they are anti-AI per se but because they are republican, in the best sense—ordinary people exerting their power against powerful interests.
I am also encouraged by the distaste many of my students are developing toward AI. More and more of them feel like a bill of goods is being forced upon them, one they did not ask for. If this means widespread feelings of generational resentment, so be it. College students and recent college graduates have good reasons to be resentful.
And I am even heartened by the border-line panic people are expressing over potential existential threats posed by AI. It says ordinary people are now paying attention.
So, cheers to anti-AI populism!