If fascism comes to this country, it will be through an apparatus created by the Right in the name of safety and security, hijacked by the Left in the name of the people.
The way tyranny makes its entrance is almost never the way we imagine it. One does not wake to find the banners of a foreign army draped over the capitol dome, nor goose-stepping regiments patrolling the avenues. The reality is subtler, more insidious, and infinitely more persuasive. Tyranny arrives clothed in reasonableness. It comes as the emergency decree, the exceptional measure, the “temporary” curtailment of liberty in exchange for safety. And more often than not, it is ushered in by people of good intention, who genuinely believe they are protecting freedom even as they smother it.
George Lucas, in his rather unsubtle way, made precisely this point in the Star Wars prequels. The Republic, that luminous if flawed federation of worlds, does not collapse because citizens suddenly discover a fondness for storm troopers. It collapses because disorder and corruption make liberty intolerable. Trade blockades, separatist uprisings, assassinations, and war—chaos piled upon chaos—convinced the Senate that the only way to save the Republic was to hand over more power to the Chancellor.
Which, of course, was the plan all along.
And so Palpatine, with the serene face of legitimacy, was granted “emergency powers.” The Jedi, noble to the end, led a cloned army into battle believing they were defending the Republic. In fact, they were midwives to its execution. When the final transformation came—when the Republic became the Empire—it did so not to the sound of protest but, as Lucas put it with deliberate cruelty, “with thunderous applause.”
One need not possess the geek’s affection for lightsabers to see the parallel with our own condition. Conservatism, in its American form, has long defined itself by suspicion of centralized authority. Distrust the state. Guard the prerogatives of the citizen. Leave power scattered among the people. It is in our marrow to resist anything that smacks of Leviathan. And yet, with each passing year, conservatives are being maneuvered into precisely the opposite posture: calling for greater force, greater surveillance, greater powers vested in the state.
Consider the immigration officer today who masks his face. He does so not out of menace but necessity: the left has made it fashionable to dox, harass, and even assault those who enforce the law. As a prosecutor, I understand this instinct entirely. Law enforcement deserves protection. And yet to the citizen, the spectacle is unmistakable: armed men, in government uniform, with their identities hidden. A society that normalizes this image—even for good reasons—is a society rehearsing for the police state.
How did we arrive here? One could almost suspect a deliberate stratagem. The left, after all, has for decades been engaged in the patient erosion of culture. Family life is debased, moral standards ridiculed, civic virtue dismissed as repression. The fruits of this demolition are not liberty but chaos: crime-ridden cities, porous borders, a free flow of drugs into the country, an online discourse so reckless it borders on derangement. Presented with this carnival of disorder, the conservative instinct recoils. And when offered a choice between chaos and control, even the libertarian spirit bends toward control. In this way the left has contrived to make conservatives themselves build the machinery of centralization.
There is precedent for this. Rome’s republic surrendered its freedom not to barbarian invasion but to its own Caesars, invited in to end factional violence. The Weimar Republic, in its weakness, conceded extraordinary powers to Hitler in the hope that he would tame the street brawls and political assassinations. In each case, disorder discredited liberty and made despotism appear as salvation. The pattern is so drearily familiar that one is astonished to see conservatives walking directly into it.
Which brings us back to the Jedi. They never wanted to preside over a military dictatorship. They wanted, in their own phrase, to be guardians of peace and justice. Yet the more chaotic the galaxy became, the more they allowed themselves to be conscripted as generals, to lead an anonymous army of clones, to become instruments of the very power they swore to restrain. They lost the Republic not because they betrayed it, but because they were loyal to it. Their loyalty was exploited by those who understood that fear of disorder is the surest way to persuade free men to surrender their freedom.
We were not wrong, and are not wrong, to say that surging crime demands a greater law enforcement presence. As I argued in Washington, D.C. Needed Federal Law Enforcement — and Other Cities Do Too, and again in A Trump Anti-Crime Bill, not the National Guard, is the Ultimate Solution, there are moments when the Republic must intervene. To insist otherwise is to tolerate anarchy. But the danger is that in demanding more police power we also risk constructing an apparatus that, once built, can be wielded against us. The answer, then, is not to abandon the call for order, but to demand it with caution—and to insist that the ultimate cure is not a permanent state of emergency, but a society so intolerant of disorder, so hostile to lawlessness, that extraordinary force is never needed. A republic that requires constant tourniquets is already in peril; the healthier republic is one whose citizens so value liberty and order that they leave no opening for an Empire to rise.
That is the trap into which conservatives are now perilously close to stumbling. The left has arranged the stage. It has cultivated chaos—whether deliberately or instinctively hardly matters—and it has made liberty feel unbearable. And when conservatives, desperate for order, agree to empower government with new authorities, new masks, new surveillance, we will discover too late that we have been clapping all along for our own subjugation.
Which, of course, was the plan all along.
It is a fine thing to defend law enforcement, and we must. It is a fine thing to demand order, and we should. But when the defense of order becomes the excuse for erecting a permanent machinery of control, we will have become the Jedi—brave, noble, and blind—escorting the Republic into the Empire with lightsabers drawn.
The question is not whether America will face chaos. It already does. The question is whether conservatives will recognize that chaos is the bait, and centralization the trap.
If tyranny comes to America, it won’t be because we elected candidates from the Fascism Party; it will be because, in the face of lawlessness and in the name of liberty, we demanded more government control, more government force, and more government strength—and, like the Senate that crowned Palpatine, we got exactly what we asked for, to the sound of thunderous applause.
