Our Train Trip to Political Hell

by James Bovard, Mises Institute, March 23, 2026

A recent Facebook memory notice reminded me of when I was young and naïve and full of political hope. Okay, maybe I wasn’t full of political hope but at least I wasn’t as old at the end of the last century.

Facebook flashed a jpeg image with a quote from my 1999 book, Freedom in Chains: “It is absurd to expect governments to descend gradually, step-by-step into barbarism – as if there was a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way.”

When I wrote that book, I reached deep within to dredge up whatever remnants of positive thinking that I could find. But that didn’t stop the Los Angeles Times from denouncing my “political paranoid’s view” in which “government assumes an overweening, menacing aspect.” Freedom in Chains was “an unvarnished example of this contemptuous attitude toward the American political system” and the reviewer blamed the ideas that I touted for the Oklahoma City bombing. Heck, I have never even been to Oklahoma. Maybe that reviewer never forgave me for this line: “Rather than ‘government by the people,’ we now have Attention Deficit Democracy.”

9/11 was the first major train stop after that book came out. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Americans’ trust in government doubled in the weeks after terrorists toppled the World Trade Center in New York. Congress speedily enacted the Patriot Act, which treated every American like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel. Two months after the attacks, President George W. Bush suspended habeas corpus and entitled the US government to perpetually secretly lock up anyone he labeled an “enemy combatant”—a vague term which included little old ladies in Switzerland who unknowingly donated to a charity that funneled money to al Qaeda. I thumped Bush’s abuses in Playboy, USA Today, and elsewhere. The Justice Department’s ludicrously-named Patriot Act propaganda website http://www.lifeandliberty.gov included an attack on my writing.

The war with Iraq was the second major train stop. Bush deceived the nation into a war that unleashed vast carnage throughout the Middle East. Since Bush portrayed his invasion as a crusade for freedom, he was entitled to use unlimited power at home and abroad—including torturing any suspected enemies of freedom. After my book The Bush Betrayal came out in 2004, I was denounced as a “communist bastard,” “scum of the earth,” “one sick mother f**ker,” “liberal pig,” and a “blatant opportunist feeding at the capitalist trough.” (LewRockwell.com posted the highlights at “Bush Supporters Vindicate the President”).

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected and promised to curb federal government abuses. But the third major train stop occurred when Obama claimed the right to kill Americans he secretly labeled as suspected terrorists without warning and without any judicial niceties. When I bashed that presidential assassination prerogative in the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere, commenters denounced me as a traitor and urged Obama to put my name on the kill list. In 2015, the Justice Department covertly pressured USA Today to cease publishing my attacks on Attorney General Eric Holder, who championed Obama’s license to kill.

The fourth major train stop began in 2020 when President Donald Trump issued sweeping orders that resulted in shutting down much of the nation at the start of the covid pandemic. President Joe Biden made covid oppression even worse with his vaccine mandate and pervasive censorship of social media. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito aptly criticized covid repression as “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” Despite pervasive abuses of power, not a single government official spent a day in jail for their covid crimes against the Constitution.

Will Trump’s war on Iran be the fifth major train stop? Thus far, this “excursion” (Trump’s term for the conflict) epitomizes his administration’s brazen contempt for constitutional limits on federal power. Americans learned the nation was at war via a bollixed home video of the president released in the middle of a Saturday night. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chief, Brendan Carr, warned television networks on Saturday that their broadcast licenses could be suspended if they criticized the war. Shortly before the war began, Trump vindicated himself in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “Sometimes you need a dictator.”  And, as long as Trump proclaims that he is fighting evil, he is entitled to all the power he can seize and total immunity for any crimes or abuses he commits.

Seeing that quote jpeg spurred me to check that 1999 book to see what followed the train line:

“People forget how quickly the forms of political power can turn civilized behavior into unrestrained pillage and mass violence. Most people strolling the streets of German towns in the late 1920s would never have suspected that, within a few years, the government would launch a policy of genocide. Similarly, someone visiting Moscow in 1913 or Phnom Penh in 1969 would likely not have seen the barbarity just around the bend.”

I warned that permitting politicians to consecrate unlimited power guaranteed horrors that few people could imagine. As Sen. John Taylor declared more than two centuries ago, “Tyranny in form is the first step towards tyranny in substance.”

When I wrote Freedom in Chains, I did not expect to look back on the late twentieth century as comparatively a golden age for American liberty. We have fallen so far from the nation’s lofty founding values that President Trump can ludicrously claim on television that the Declaration of Independence was merely a “declaration of unity and love and respect.” Tell that to British General Burgoyne, who surrendered in 1777 to the American army at Saratoga, and to General Cornwallis, who surrendered in 1781 at Yorktown. Regardless of Trump’s parody of the Declaration of Independence, many MAGA devotees equate exalting the president with America at its best. Is political illiteracy increasing even faster than presidential power grabs?

Is it too late for Americans to disembark from the train trip to political hell? Is it still possible to siderail or even better derail the Leviathan Express? Or is our political system doomed to merely alternate between increasingly-authoritarian rulers who promise voters endless handouts while whipping up their fear and rage?