And you know why I can be so confident that "liberal police state" will never happen? Because liberals don't want that
They don't want hard totalitarianism, but they want creeping increases in government control through more regulation, higher taxes, more domestic government spending etc.
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"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Not that they necessarily want that end, but they want to take continual steps in that direction thinking they will never reach that end. Each new increase is something people get used to, it becomes the new baseline. Then the next increase, is usually relatively small, and has some sort of justification, why don't we "be reasonable", instead of being "a free market fanatic" or "a worshiper of tax cuts".
Each new increase is normally not so large as to be really objectionable, but you keep adding tiny sand grains, and eventually you have a "heap" of them
reason.com
Unfortunately most Republicans aren't much better. |
