The Totalitarian Moment for American Liberalism

I happened to be reading Anne Applebaum's newest book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, on the train back from Chicago today, and came across this passage, which sent a chill through my spine.   She was citing a work from the 1950s by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski called Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, which had defined totalitarian regimes by reference to five common characteristics:

1. A dominant ideology.

2. A single ruling party.

3. A secret police force prepared to use terror.

4. A monopoly on information.

5. A planned economy.  

Well, that all sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it, living here in American ca. 2013,

• with the ideology of liberalism triumphant (if you don't think so, consider my son, a junior at an all-boys Jesuit high school, who relates that most of the faculty and nearly all of the student body are completely sold on gay marriage as a civil right);
• with essentially a single ruling party in many states and, increasingly, in the national government, regardless of who is President... namely, the Party of Government and the Progressive State;
• with the NSA snooping on our private communications and the NPS barring vets from the Mall in Washington;
• with the mainstream media putting out constant drumbeats of propaganda on behalf of Obama; and
• with the government taking over 1/6th of the economy (health care) and domineering over the rest through the aggressions of the EPA, the IRS, the SEC, etc.  

And, now, today, President Obama holds a news conference to tell us that black is white, and war is peace... to tell us that the debacle of Obamacare is really just a sign of how great it is.

It Can't Happen Here?    It's happening.   In slow motion, maybe, but it's happening.