Jonathan Last has performed the essential service of documenting what should be obvious to anyone still capable of elementary pattern recognition: the United States is in the active process of constructing its own Gestapo, complete with unlimited budgets, deliberately lowered hiring standards, and the kind of bureaucratic independence that allows masked men to terrorize families while their superiors claim ignorance of specific operations.

The beauty of the scheme—if one can admire the craftsmanship of evil—lies in its mundane presentation. While the nation's attention was directed toward healthcare theatrics, Congress quietly allocated more money to ICE than most countries spend on their entire military. Not for border security, mind you, but for the systematic intimidation of anyone unlucky enough to possess the wrong complexion, accent, or documentation status in the land of the free.

What Last captures with devastating precision is the deliberate perversion of institutional design. The FBI, whatever its historical flaws, was constructed according to professional principles: educated agents, rigorous training, institutional independence. ICE represents the opposite impulse—rapid expansion with relaxed standards, political appointees answerable only to other political appointees, and a mission that transforms law enforcement into something closer to colonial occupation.

When your government begins recruiting bus station drifters for federal law enforcement positions while simultaneously relaxing polygraph requirements because too many candidates fail basic integrity tests, you are not witnessing bureaucratic incompetence. You are witnessing the systematic construction of a force designed to follow orders rather than exercise judgment, to break things rather than build them, to terrorize rather than protect.

The historical parallel writes itself: every authoritarian regime requires enforcers who are simultaneously stupid enough to follow illegal orders and brutal enough to enjoy carrying them out. ICE's expansion represents the professionalization of exactly this type—masked men with badges who understand that their job security depends not on serving justice but on demonstrating sufficient enthusiasm for cruelty.

That this is happening with the full consent of Congress, under the watchful eye of the Supreme Court, and with the enthusiastic support of millions of Americans who consider themselves patriots, only confirms H.L. Mencken's observation that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

The question is no longer whether America will become a police state—Last has documented that it already has. The question is whether those of us who still remember what constitutional government looked like will find the courage to call this transformation by its proper name before the men in masks come for us too.