Loss of freedom can come either gradually or in one fell swoop. In Germany, in 1933, a dictatorship was established quickly after the Reichstag Fire and the passage of the Enabling Act. The Constitution was suspended and Hitler became the totalitarian "Decider". Freedom disappeared in a few months.

The socialist program in Britain and the United States, on the other hand, has been implemented slowly. The British socialists were heavily influenced by the gradualist approach of the Fabian Society. The idea was to use a political party, Labour, to slowly convert Britain to socialism without a violent revolution. This approach has also influenced American socialists. Socialism became the "American Way" in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, the rapidly executed culmination of the gradualist agenda in the US, largely abetted by the shift to collectivism in the Supreme Court in response to Roosevelt’s threats.

In the long view, we have had a gradual transformation to national collectivism starting right from the beginning of the Republic (the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798), punctuated by dramatic episodes of central power-grabbing by Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt and now Bush. Amendments to the Constitution have helped along the way (the 14th, 16th and 17th), as has the shift on the Supreme Court in the 1930s to favoring national government power over individual and states rights. In the last decade, Ruby Ridge, Waco, warrantless spying, the PATRIOT Act, the Real ID Act, the Military Commissions Act, the loss of habeas corpus and other rights supposedly protected by the Constitution, demonstrate the accelerating pace of concentration of all political power in the central government. Most of these episodes of power concentration have been associated with and enabled by wars: on the Southern States, Spain, Germany, Japan, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Barry Goldwater’s comment, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," now means that any government action is justified if it is said to be in the defense of freedom or "to protect us".

The Constitution has not protected us from the expanding power of government. What we have seen is a long, drawn out constitutional coup in which, at every turn, liberties have been lost. Attempting to restore the Constitution is, in my view, a wishful fantasy. We do not need a national government. Indeed, it has turned out to be, as predicted by the Anti-Federalists at the time of adoption of the Constitution, our worst enemy.