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“The US Constitution was the bedrock of my American identity. I had been told all my life that the carefully crafted checks and balances built into the system limited the government’s ability to seize power in exactly this manner. Even if all the branches of government were to work in unison to encroach on people’s freedom, the Bill of Rights stood as a final bulwark against the destruction of our liberties. I had been told the Second Amendment existed primarily to make sure nothing like this could ever happen. Yet freedom of assembly and worship had been summarily abolished and very few people seemed to care. Obviously the politicians had buckled under but even those around me who I’d known for decades and who largely shared my political views were happy to go along. Conservatives and libertarians who had spent their whole lives railing against government tyranny found ways to excuse and deflect. When tyranny came, nothing happened. The Constitution I’d believed in my whole life did nothing. Those who had parroted the myth of limited government seemed to go on as if nothing important had been lost.”
― Auron MacIntyre, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies