Throughout history, there have been tyrannies that have been imposed on the citizenry through non-democratic means. Monarchies have been one example. Another example have been communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Still other examples have been U.S.-supported national-security-state coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile.
What many Americans fail to realize, however, is that it is entirely possible to have tyranny with a democratically elected system. The common mindset is that if people are free to democratically elect their officials, then that means automatically that people are living in a free society. The common refrain becomes, “If you don’t like what’s happening, be sure to vote in the next election.”
But the fact is that a democratically elected regime can be just as tyrannical as a regime that has taken power in contravention of democratic processes. It all depends on the powers that the regime is wielding and exercising and the control that the regime is imposing on the citizenry.
Central to a democratic tyranny is securing the approval of a vast majority of the citizenry. After all, the regime knows that if it alienates the citizenry, voters might decide to cut short the regime at the next election — assuming that the democratically elected tyrannical regime continues to permit elections.
Thus, what democratically elected regimes do is adopt measures that are designed to secure the approval of the citizenry to being subjected to tyranny at the hands of their own government. That’s how tyranny often comes with democratic systems — with the citizenry cheering and supporting the demise of their own freedom.
One way to do that is through fear. Keep the citizenry afraid all the time. The best way to do that is to come up with all sorts of scary official enemies. During the Cold War, for example, Americans were inculcated with the fear of communists and communism. The Russians are coming! Americans were more than willing to trade away their freedom in exchange for “safety” and “security” from the Reds, who were supposedly everywhere and coming to get Americans.
Today, U.S. officials have done a masterful job in creating a new array of scary official enemies to replace the Reds in the hearts and minds of the American people. There are the illegal immigrant “invaders” who are coming to get us. There are the Muslims who are hell-bent on fulfilling their centuries-old dream of an American caliphate with sharia law. There are also the foreign murderers, rapists, robbers, and burglars who are coming to do us harm. There are the terrorists and the drug dealers, who are now being conflated into “narco-terrorists.”
Moreover, many of the “narco-terrorists” are also part of the illegal-immigrant “invaders.” Imagine — all three official scary enemies — drug dealers, terrorists, and invaders — combined into one official very scary official enemy!
Oh, and don’t forget those scary members of that gang in Venezuela called the Tren de Aragua. Why, never mind that Americans had never even heard about that gang a couple of years ago. If our federal officials have decided that those scary gang members about 1000 miles away from the United States are coming to get us too, that’s good enough for many Americans.
This is where the state’s system of public schooling meets the drug war, the war on terrorism, and the war on immigrants. Public (i.e., government) schooling molds children’s minds to be deeply fearful of whatever scary creatures that state designates to be scary official enemies. Moreover, such mindsets have been molded to automatically defer to the judgment of U.S. officials, especially when it comes to protecting “national security.”
It is not difficult for libertarians, who have broken free of state indoctrination, to see where all these rackets — the Cold War racket, the drug-war racket, the war-on-terrorism racket, the war-on-immigrants racket, the foreign-gang racket, and the national-security-state racket —are taking our country (along with the welfare-state/income tax, IRS/paper-money, Federal Reserve, and regulated-economy rackets). They are all taking us down the road to a full-fledged tyrannical system — one that is based on total federal control over the lives, privacy, and fortunes of the American people, all enforced by the IRS, ICE, the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, and all the other federal bureaucracies — for our own good, of course.
The most important part of all this tyranny is that American schoolchildren continue to be inculcated with the belief that all this is “freedom.” American adults who received their education in the state’s educational system are characterized by the effusive thanks and praise they heap on federal officials, especially the troops, for their “service” in protecting our “freedom.” Modern-day state-educated Americans exemplify perfectly the words of Johann von Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” That’s what enables the tyranny to get worse and worse. That’s how freedom is brought to an end in a democratic society — to the cheers and with the enthusiastic support of the citizenry.