The specific controversy of the Kentucky county clerk who is refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses will come and go, but David French gets at the more important point:

… what we’re watching unfold in Kentucky isn’t so much the “rule of law” as the raw exercise of power. Judicial revolutionaries simply wield more power than Kentucky county clerks — partly because the judges enjoy the popular support of millions of Americans (including public officials), partly because their lifetime tenure almost entirely insulates them from accountability, and partly because even the most vigorous dissenters understand that answering one revolution with another will upend the entire system, a price they’re not willing to pay. At least not yet.

In fact, the rule of law has increasingly become a mere talking point, a weapon wielded by the Courts and the Obama administration when it likes a given legal outcome, but disregarded when pesky things like “democracy” and “procedure” interfere with the demands of social justice. For the Obama administration, even proper regulatory rulemaking can be too burdensome. Rule by executive order or even departmental letter replaces constitutional process, with the social-justice Left cheering every step of the way.

We’ve allowed so much authority to bubble up to the highest level of government that it’s increasingly impossible for people who disagree with the elite to find a place in which to live under the policies that they would prefer.  We’re also allowing deterioration of the sense that the law applies to everybody equally — and means what it says in all cases.  That makes control over the federal government an absolute necessity (including circumventing a body of elected representatives from around the country if they impede that control).

Some see the surprisingly successful campaign of Donald Trump as primarily an expression of frustration that the system appears to be rigged to allow no real choices at the highest level. Unless we give Americans tangible evidence that participation in the political process really does make a difference, even at the federal level, and unless we return to toleration for substantially different government at the local and state levels from one place to the next, and unless our broader civic system (expanded to include news media and social institutions) is more overtly fair and even-handed, we’re guaranteeing tyranny from the powerful and revolutionary unrest from those who have been shut out.