Miscellaneous
How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none? You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, this is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship. It works the same way every time.