Happy Birthday, America: 249 Years Was a Pretty Darned Good Run
Say anything to take power. Do everything to hold power. That is effectively the mantra of a rising dictator. And in the United States today, on the eve of the annual Independence Day celebrations, the verb tense has now changed from "rising" to "risen." In a conversation earlier today, a friend said, "People talk about whether there's a constitutional crisis. That's no longer the question, because ...." and I finished the sentence, "we're already in post-constitutional mode." Given my decade-long series of analyses concluding that the US would soon no longer be a constitutional republic governed by laws and not men and with institutions guaranteeing ordered liberty, this is hardly surprising. My friend and I both agreed, however, that this happened much, much more quickly than we expected -- and we honestly thought that we had long been on the outer boundaries of pessimism. Oh well. How do we know that that fundamental chan...