Thoughts on our current state from Michael Auslin:

…in relations with the federal government, we are increasingly seen and treated as serfs, with no protections save what the lord at the time deigns to give us. The courts have long acted as a type of lord, arbitrarily decreeing what our freedoms should be; now they are joined by an activist president and his minions. The apparatus of the state towers over the representatives of the people, half of whom currently support the ever-encompassing grasp of government, the other half being too fractured and outmaneuvered to champion the rights of individuals (and usually reversed when a president of a different party is in power). Rather than legally passed legislation, it is executive order that more and more determines the nature of the interaction between villein citizens and the government. Let us be clear (to use a phrase currently in vogue), when the state gets to determine what counts as a religious organization, and when it determines what that organization must do, then we are not free men, but serfs to an increasingly confident master. That is the nub of the HHS-mandate ruling.

As he says, it may be time for a new Magna Carta.

Some thoughts on today’s holiday:

we were still blessed by Providence to have had him, because he was the right man at the right time. It was he who rose to be the leader and articulator and symbol of the civil-rights movement, a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” and not the loathsome racist Elijah Mohammed or the criminals of the Black Panther movement or even Malcolm X and his late embrace of mainstream Islam. Would any of these men, or the frauds and swindlers who claim to be “civil rights” spokesmen today, give a speech that ends this way?:

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

There is no one like him comparable today. He was a Republican for a reason. His modern heirs are leftists.

…so let it be done. I don’t think that I’ve seen a president so intrinsically contemptuous of the Constitution in my lifetime. And that’s a lifetime that included George Bush (who should have been impeached for signing McCain-Feingold) and Bill Clinton.

[Update a few minutes later]

The new authoritarianism:

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.

There’s nothing new about this, really. Today’s “progressives” are very similar to the original ones, from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, on whose legacies European fascism was forged.