An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will. . . . Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.
Turley does not say much in
this article about the other rail of the Police State Railway that Americans are
riding to hell: the drug war, with its massive arrests, prosecution, and
imprisonment of people charged only with victimless crimes and its
militarization of the state and local police all over the country. (On the
militarization of the police, see especially this research
paper, a revised version of which will appear in the spring issue of The
Independent Review.) This massive bloating of police power and legalized
oppression and the corresponding suppression of individual rights have brought
down to the lowest level the threats to life, liberty, and happiness that the
war on terrorism has created in what most people view as a more remote and less
threatening venue—”out there” somewhere, in drone-istan.
Each day, the U.S. police
state grows larger, more powerful, more pervasive, and more menacing. When will
the majority awaken to the realization that this threat has nothing to do with
party politics, that it makes no difference whether a Republican or a Democrat
occupies the presidency while our freedoms are demolished?
This country was never a paradise
of liberty; it always countenanced the oppression of plenty of people,
especially Indians, blacks, and socially marginalized people who did not behave
as the “respectable” white elites wanted them to behave. Yet, for the majority
of Americans, freedom was a reality in most spheres of life, if only because the
governments of the day were too weak to crush the people’s freedoms more
thoroughly.