Implementing the perversion the Left has long dreamed of

"Michael Ledeen on Tocqueville on Us [Andy McCarthy]

"The tyranny [Tocqueville] foresees for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. He apologizes for lacking the proper words with which to define it.

• He hesitates to call it either tyranny or despotism, because it does not rule by terror or oppression. There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture. “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel,
  

but minute and meddling.” The vision and even the language anticipate Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World.

Tocqueville describes the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to watch over us all,

• and regulate every aspect of our lives.

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which

• the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of

• two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power:
  

• the corruption of our character, and
  

• the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives.... "via the Rush Limbaugh radio show