Or, imagine the Surveillance State erected under Obama and Bush put to use by a President Trump, or President Clinton, as The Guardian’s Trevor Timm asks. It’s too easy to grant greater power to government, while much too hard, vanishingly so, to decrease government power. And if that power ever is wrested from the hands of government, think of all the damage that power will inflict in the meantime. A sufficiently politicized fear, void of reason or fact, directs the population into accepting decreased liberty, but once that power exists, almost no amount of reason and fact will be enough to reverse what has occurred.
