{"id":86801,"date":"2022-10-18T18:07:28","date_gmt":"2022-10-18T23:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=86801"},"modified":"2022-10-18T18:07:28","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T23:07:28","slug":"86801","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=86801","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\/archives\/2022\/10\/thought-for-the-day-beyond-democratic-despotism.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: BEYOND DEMOCRATIC DESPOTISM<\/a><\/p>\n<p>John Adams Wettergreen (d. 1989), writing in 1988 with a startling prescience of our present time:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">In 1970 I believed that Tocqueville\u2019s soft despotism was the aim of the bureaucratizers. However today we cannot be so optimistic as was possible in 1970. Today\u2019s bureaucratizers are not soft despots at all. The political use of criminal law, such as began during the Watergate scandals and has begun to be regularized during the Reagan administration, is characteristic of tyranny-not Tocqueville\u2019s \u2018new,\u2019 \u2018soft\u2019 one, but a harsh one. . . To the carrot-spending unlimited by law-the legislature has now added the stick-the penalties of the criminal law.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What Wettergreen perceived in the shadows more than 30 years ago is now evident to most everyone with eyes to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: BEYOND DEMOCRATIC DESPOTISM John Adams Wettergreen (d. 1989), writing in 1988 with a startling prescience of our present time: In 1970 I believed that Tocqueville\u2019s soft despotism was the aim of the bureaucratizers. However today we cannot be so optimistic as was possible in 1970. Today\u2019s bureaucratizers are not soft despots &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=86801\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-goobermint"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86802,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86801\/revisions\/86802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}