But something more is in motion with this case than a potential, once-and-for-all movement of government authority from the nation’s parts to its center. As important is who exercises control. The answer is: the mandarins.

Mandarins are the intellectuals who design and order legally enforceable public systems within which the rest of the population resides, or tries to. French policy mandarins are the most celebrated in the world. Their most ardent admirers in America are the people who made the Obama health-care law. …

Why are we so close to falling into the grip of an American mandarinate of the centralizing sort now smothering France? Our version of these controllers came to life in the 1960s. They are a byproduct of the passage in those years of a succession of federal rights and entitlement laws. The former were more admirable than the latter. But the singularly bad effect of that period on the American political psyche was the sense of moral triumphalism that spread among liberal policy intellectuals. From this certitude came the belief they could do anything they wanted to the booboisee in the untrustworthy states.