Jacob G. Hornberger: Copying the communists

  The biggest mistake the American people ever made was the conversion of the federal government from a constitutionally limited republic to a national-security state, a type of governmental apparatus that characterizes totalitarian regimes. A national-security state consists of a large, permanent military establishment and a secretive “intelligence” agency with omnipotent powers and whose purported mission is to gather “intelligence” about supposed threats to the country.

  That fateful decision ended up costing the American people their founding governmental structure of a republic. Even worse, it stultified the consciences of the American people, leading them to defer blindly to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA as those three components of the national-security establishment led the country increasingly toward the dark side that characterizes totalitarian regimes.