For several generations, historians have told the story of twentieth-century America as a triumphant tale of the ever-expanding power of the central government, which has liberated individuals and a proliferation of minority groups from the shackles of inequality, prejudice, and the repressive ideas of human nature itself. In a reversal of the classically liberal “Whig history” of the preceding century, progressives depicted history as the rise of state power and as the source of genuine liberty.

The election of 2008 and the Obama administration have called this narrative into question and provoked an unprecedented debate over the nature and purpose of American government. No previous expansion of the national welfare state brought the fundamental principles of constitutionalism into such high relief. The persistence of constitutionalism in the thinking of the populace left contemporary liberals nonplussed. Congressional leaders were flummoxed when questioned as to the constitutional source of Congress’s power to enact the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009. The controversy over the Act suggested that the basic features of the Constitution still had life. The Supreme Court and the American public heard lively arguments as to whether Congress could delegate legislative power to bureaucrats; whether it could exceed its constitutionally enumerated powers; whether it could usurp the reserved powers of the states; and whether it could use the taxing power to compel individuals to purchase health insurance. At the same time, the nation’s financial plight provided an alarming indication that the sort of unlimited government represented by the Act makes government not only “destructive of the ends for which governments are instituted among men,” but positively self-destructive as well.