… is from page 61 of GMU Law professor Michael Greve’s superb 2015 monograph, Federalism and the Constitution: Competition versus Cartels (original emphasis):
Federalism’s transformation during the Progressive Era and the New Deal suggests the limits: when the basic premises of constitutional understanding and the dominant incentives of political actors and institutions change, the text of the Constitution provides very little defense.
DBx: If people have ideas hostile to liberalism – if they believe that state power is a source of secular salvation and see, in their minds’ eyes, such power as being relatively benign and unlikely to be abused – if people talk with contempt, or even with only indifference, of constitutional constraints on the exercise of power – no amount of constitutional architecture and clarity of language will prevent despotism.
