How it might happen, or be happening, or be laying the groundwork for happening, or be pseudo-happening...

From Sadly, No!:

It's begun to seem, recently, like something more than a super-cosmic coincidence that the Bush Administration has been carefully setting up a system whose every particular matches the classic template of dictatorial powers and political repression ('terror' is such an ugly term). The only thing glaringly missing from such a scheme would be a large, Federally-organized enforcement arm directly under the authority of the president -- and smarter people than us have already been scratching their heads at the Administration's push against posse comitatus, and at the new Federal mystery-police thingo in the Patriot Act.

You'd certainly think that the Administration would be more worried about appearances than it is -- or, for that matter, that with all these startling 'anti-terrorist' powers springing up all over the place, that they'd have a serious and abiding interest in securing the country and catching terrorists. Which, funnily enough, they don't.

Let's rejoin Katherine for one sentence. (The entire post lives here.)

At some level, I think we read these things and think: well, they can't really mean that.

She's right. But it might be useful to imagine: If you were a brash right-wing billionaire, for instance, or a GOP party zealot, or a Straussian neoconservative, or any of a number of such characters, and you wanted to set up an apparatus of political repression in America in order to push your opponents permanently off the political map, how

would you go about it? It's both a legal problem and a logistical one -- these things don't simply happen on their own; they require planning and hard work. Purely instrumentally, you'd need either to change the Constitution in a way that would be quite difficult to achieve, and that people would tend to notice with all sorts of attendant mess and fireworks, or you'd need to find very specific ways around its protections.

Your to-do list would lack the shock of the unfamiliar. It's the standard panoply of generalissimo powers, issued in emergency decrees after every Latin American coup or African power-grab. You'd want to be able to conduct widespread surveillance on people of your choice without probable cause that they'd committed a crime, and if you decided to arrest and detain someone, you'd want to do it without judicial oversight and away from public scrutiny. There'd need to be some kind of setup for secret interrogations, with or without torture, and you'd have to be able to indefinitely 'disappear' people, if and when you felt it necessary, whether in prisons or (under your authority) by means of execution. This program didn't get off the ground, but it shows the kind of playbook you'd be using (it might have read better in the original East German edition). There's also the sticky, little-assimilated detail that Bush's NSA surveillance program was apparently authorized before 9/11 -- sticky details abound; it's quite a jam-smeared, sticky world in which we now live. But in any case, if you wanted to set up

something like that, with all the legal claims properly paper-trailed and all the operational links in their proper places in the chain, it would take time, canny lawyering, and a certain admixture of restraint and boldness, and you'd probably want to have a huge propaganda apparatus constantly pumping out fog so that America didn't understand (or believe) what kind of government you were striving toward. It might take several presidencies to get your 'permanent majority,' but you'd move forward with due alacrity when you were able.

But they wouldn't do that, would they? And as Katherine asked, at what point are we going to take their claims seriously?