Down the Slippery Slope Towards Tyranny

Thomas Sowell has a thoughtful piece on the subject:

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.

Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.

In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

The president's poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

There's more at the link.

Unconstitutional actions seem to be the norm for this administration, and woe be it unto the person who challenges them on it.  They're demonized and held to ridicule for daring to suggest that we follow the laws of our nation.  And sadly, as Sowell suggests, there are way too many people who've become comfortable living on the dole and believing that the world and anyone in it with any degree of wealth owes them something.  It's classic redistribution of wealth and it will be our nation's downfall if we don't stop it.