At the time of America's founding there were very few organization which might be recognizable today as corporations.  They were held in the deepest suspicion by the class of men who made up the Founding Fathers.  Their right to exist, for limited times and specific purposes, was held to be entirely dependent on government sufferance, and wholly subservient to government regulation.  They owed that sufferance only to the condition that they might promote the common welfare, in addition to the enrichment of the corporation's members.

The word “soulless” was commonly used in discussing corporations formed for profit, and Thomas Jefferson was concerned that corporations, if allowed to grow too wealthy and powerful, might subvert the Republic itself.  (What a worry-wart!)

The idea that business corporations might, as entities, claim the right of free speech, comparable to that of individuals or the press, would have been as surreal to the men who framed our system of government as the idea that a herd of cows might claim the right of free speech.  Cows were not thought of as human beings in the early days of this republic, and neither were state-chartered corporations.

The growing power of corporations in the American economy has resulted in a creeping diminution of views like Jefferson's.  This was inevitable, but it still had a logic to it.  It was recognized that corporations quite often contributed greatly to the common good, sometimes in spectacular ways.  Their potential for ill was never lost sight of, though, and the government always retained its right to reign in the corporations when their wickedness grew too potent, or too blatant.

This was what underlay the Progressivism of Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, at bottom a conservative Republican, who saw nothing un-American about restricting the right of corporations to contribute to election campaigns or otherwise seek to subvert popular government — that is, government by actual human beings.

All of that changed with the recent ruling by the Roberts Court, expressly granting the rights of an individual human being to any corporation.  The “original intent” of the Founders and one hundred years of explicit legal precedent were simply thrown out the window.

All Americans need to read Justice John Paul Stevens's dissent against this disastrous ruling.  It may be the last time we ever hear the voice of Jefferson, the voice of the Founders, on this issue.  Barack Obama, who thought he could fight the corporations with attitude and supplication, is not going to be re-elected in 2012.  His successor will be a Republican, who will in all likelihood appoint the next new Supreme Court Justices — and they will all be corporate lackeys.

The great American experiment in democracy is over.  It may not be revived in our lifetimes — it may never be revived.  Reviving it will require what Lincoln called, in the midst of the Civil War, a “new birth of freedom” — and probably a cataclysm as great at the Civil War to spark it.

In the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (above), speaking for the majority, wrote that black people have “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”  It was, sad to say, a theoretically justifiable opinion, from a Constitutional point of view.  The framers clearly had no intent to grant blacks the rights of American citizenship.  Good sense and common decency might have stretched the legal niceties a bit, but that didn't happen.  What the decision meant was that the issue of slavery could never be solved except by war, by the shedding of blood.

Ironically, the new Supreme Court decision is a kind of demonic mirror of the Dred Scott decision.  In the latter, the insane notion was proposed that blacks were not human beings.  In the former, an equally insane notion was proposed — that institutions which embody vast agglomerations of wealth and power are human beings.  Neither decision is compatible with a rational, humane society.

The time of the temporizers, of the cosmetic progressives like Barack Obama, is over.  It is a time for patriots — or slaves.  There is no more middle ground.

The choice will be ours, each individually, but being an American in spite of myself I say, with Douglass — my hopes were never brighter than now.  The issue has been laid out starkly, for all to see.  Only those who accept the condition of slavery for themselves and their children will close their eyes to what's at stake, and if they do, their enslavement (if not the enslavement of their children) will be richly deserved.

Left-wing commentators and Democratic Party officials are making quite a spectacle of themselves in the wake of Scott Brown's victory in the race for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat.  They are offering sarcastic insults to Brown and self-righteous insults to the woman he defeated, Martha Coakley, for her inept campaign.

Only Fox carried the whole of Brown's victory speech.  The left-leaning news organizations apparently just don't want to know what defeated them, what they're up against.  (The ever-smug Keith Olberman announced MSNBC's termination of its coverage of the speech by saying, “We're going to cut away before he gets down to offering his family chowder recipe”, utterly tone-deaf to the down-home appeal of Brown and his family — it was the “chowder recipes” which got him elected.)

I watched the whole speech, even though I had to switch reluctantly to Faux News to do it, and I can tell you this — Scott Brown is a star.

The first thing Obama did when he got to the White House was pull his pants down, bend over and beg the big corporations to be gentle with him.  He begged the heath care industry and its shills in the Congress to let him pass something that looked vaguely like a heath care reform bill — he's still down on his knees to the large financial institutions begging them to behave morally and responsibly.

Faced with that, it doesn't matter that Brown and many of his supporters are hairpins, mad as hatters — all they have to do is cry, “The emperor has no clothes!” to gain credibility, because everyone, of every political stripe, can see that's it's true.  Even if they won't admit it, they feel it in their gut, the place where most votes by most people originate.

People don't vote for policies, they vote for stories.  Brown can tell the story people most want to hear now — that we can fight the systemic corruption in Washington, that we can take the country back from the special interests.  He can tell it and Obama can't, because Obama has proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he doesn't believe in it anymore, if he ever did.

You can draw your own conclusions about what this is going to mean next November, and in 2012.  I'll say this, though — expect Brown to be a player in the race for the Republican nomination for President in 2012, and if he gets it, expect him to beat Obama.