It is arguable that medieval Englishmen had more freedom.
Lord Acton makes that point.
Modern Absolutism played a great role in the growth and expansion of modern
statism. But with an orthodox Church there are checks and balances on the King
and the State.Watch "Becket" for a sense of that. Or "A Man for All Seasons"
with Paul Scofield. I think More invokes Magna Carta for the principle of the
Church being free from the King and the State in his trial.
Part of the problem with Obama is his heresy which leads to aggressive Statism.
Orwellian, really. He does not recognize a role for natural law or limitations on the
authority of the state.
In that he is VERY modern, even ultra-modern, you might say. Obama is like a
character out of Prof. Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics or Science,
Politics, and Gnosticism. He makes the major claim of scientism, that he is
"restoring 'science' to its rightful place" as if Bush's evangelical Methodism had
somehow harmed science by dethroning Darwin. I think this line was really about
embryonic stem cell research. This is the language of modern gnosticism,
scientism, and the ideology of progress, scientific materialism, etc. All of the
enlightened, progressive liberal pieties of the Illuminati at Columbia and Harvard.
And of the Enlightenment. He mixes that together with the class warfare rhetoric
of his Alinskyite Fabian Socialism. More Robespierre and Rousseau.
He's like a caricature of that.
