How can we be a threat to tyranny?

Daniel Greenfield tries to answer that question.

Unfortunately we live in an age in which people take systems for granted. The world around us teems with complexity. We use technologies we don't understand. We rely on bureaucracies whose complexities we can't navigate. The dramatic expansion of the government has made its workings incomprehensible. The ObamaCare bill alone defied anyone to read through the whole thing. In the face of such complexity, it becomes easier to be satisfied with symbols. And it also becomes easy for those in charge to play on that resignation, blurring the lines between permissible and impermissible uses of authority, and then wiping out those lines altogether.

Law has always been the obstacle of those who want unlimited power because laws are created to form boundaries and restrictions. Those who want unlimited power will either tear down law or make law itself so complex that it becomes nearly incomprehensible. To multiply law upon law, until there are so many laws that everyone is either guilty of something, or suspects that he might be until the citizenry themselves will happily tear down the law, will ignore wrongdoing by the high and mighty, and instead of knowing their rights, they will look for someone to protect them.

Freedom requires independence from authority. Rights only exist so long as those in authority are prevented from rewriting the laws to give themselves absolute power. But political and cultural elites habitually attempt to rewrite the laws, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes with the worst, but whatever their purpose, the new laws eventually promote centralization and eliminate rights. Finally the only law is that of power. No other laws matter anymore.

They believe in wealth redistribution, but primarily for themselves. And by consolidating power, they also consolidate wealth. In the name of the people, they rob the people. And they do it under the symbols they have misappropriated. The symbols that mean their actions are illegitimate.

The greatest threat to tyranny is a people who refuse to give up their rights, or to let those in power rewrite the laws to suit themselves. The political and cultural elites will always attempt to do this, undermining the system as it is, in order to gain power, loot and pillage everything under the control of that system, and then preside over its decline. The Constitution was created to stop that from happening. It represents a shield against tyranny, but all documents are in the end only words and paper. It is only people who can preserve and realize them. There is no magic in paper and parchment, nor in ink alone. It is living men and women who are the stewards of their heritage, living Constitutions and flags, blood not ink, skin not parchment, who give it potency, who can keep its ideals, so that it does not become only a symbol enshrined in a glass case. Because only a nation of living Constitutions can be free.