Too important not to post. Kevin Williamson: ...those colonial costumes and pocket Constitutions and occasionally modified Gonzales flags are not mere markers of retrograde cultural and political tendencies. They are the insignia of a deeply rational movement for self-defense and self-preservation against the plenary state. The American constitutional order is, for all of its defects, the only one of its kind to have resisted Lord Acton’s absolute power with such success going on two and a quarter centuries in a large and complex society. The traditional American distrust of the centralized state is based on the possibly uncharitable but by no means indefensible assumption that every functionary in the Department of Education is a potential IRS rogue, that our National Security Agency can transform life in these United States as deeply and as darkly as co-opted Crimean bureaucracies can help a Russian autocrat fix his fangs in Ukraine, that there is no one who can be trusted with political power, even when we must by necessity invest them with it. Bureaucracies can indeed act swiftly when they wish to.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:22:50 +0000