Comment by HillRat

It's all a matter of degree. In the 1950s and '60s, African-Americans in Mississippi were terrorized by the State Sovereignty Commission, a kind of Cracker Barrel Stasi that had files on virtually every black citizen in the state, kept surveillance on anyone associated with the Civil Rights movement, and regularly used their power to hound undesirable citizens out of jobs, call in bank loans, deny credit, and so on. They weren't cross-burning Klansmen -- in fact, they saw themselves as anti-Klan -- but they ran a second-rate police state down in the Delta for decades. And where they didn't operate, Hoover, with his voluminous blackmail archives on politicians and his secret campaigns of vilification against civil rights leaders, did.

Today, we have pervasive state surveillance, a culture of secrecy that permeates every level of government, and a society that maintains a separate class of police and law enforcement officials who arguably operate with near-impunity, with tacit sanction for everything from extrajudicial beatings (and, at the risk of sounding overheated, SWAT-based extrajudicial executions) to prosecutorial misconduct. Thanks to Bennis, SCOTUS has ruled that the government may seize your personal property if you are the innocent owner of an item that the government might proceed against in rem (e.g., United States vs. $124,700) -- and those proceeds then go to fund further law enforcement and security operations.

We live in a state where Lincoln's fear that "all the laws but one go unexecuted" is the spoken and unspoken impetus for all security and law enforcement efforts -- every immigrant may be a terrorist, every demonstration a riot, every black man a gang member. In a state that is organized for the security and convenience of the police power, what else is there to call it?