Ho hum about tyranny.

If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back, the first thing they’d notice would be that the federal government now routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it — powers never granted, never delegated, never enumerated. These were the words they used, and it’s a good idea for us to learn their language. They would say that we no longer live under the Constitution they wrote. And the Americans of a much later era — the period from Cleveland to Coolidge, for example — would say we no longer live even under the Constitution they inherited and amended.

I call the present system “Post–Constitutional America.” As I sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.^[1]

Being generous in my interpretation, I can count about eight people of personal acquaintance in my adult life who are in some way aware of and vaguely concerned about this. My constitutional law professor most certainly was not. Two lawyers are in this group. Bar associations of which I am a member are indifferent to this issue and instead fret over important issues like “civility” among lawyers, “diversity” within the bar, and pro bono work for those who can’t afford legal services.

Sports generate enormous interest and energy among huge numbers of American teens and adults. Abortion, greedy corporations, pollution, routine fluctuations in world temperature, Iraqi civilian casualties, rain forest depletion, gorillas, windmills, melting icebergs, el mismo.

The erosion of liberty, none at all. Nancy Pelosi’s constituents will send her back to Congress without missing a beat. Basic issues of government are an afterthought, if that.

Tea Partiers are something new. We’ll see how much they are energized over rolling back unconstitutional government or if they are just alarmed by fiscal profligacy.

If the word “tyranny” in the title seems excessive, where exactly does a polity go when the hand brake, brake cylinder, and brake lines have been removed? Liberals salivate over each new incremental adoption of socialism but never show the least concern that the great killer nations of the 20th century were socialist regimes. No one in polite society recoils from any simpleton who swoons over socialism. It’s as though it’s just a cosmic given that someone or they won’t let things go past a certain dimly contemplated tipping point into a nasty Steven King landscape.

Let someone pick out some feature of the political agenda of the KKK he finds attractive, however – say, by way of argument, public funds for the Bureau of Shopping Cart Safety Education -- and the better sort will howl about the slippery slope and the unsavory bigger picture in an instant.

Notes
^[1] "How Tyranny Came to America." By Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s, 1994?