Commentary
We have familiar experience of the phenomenon of what are clearly intolerable circumstances being tolerated if they worsened only gradually. Everyone has looked back on a grueling experience and thought that it could not have been endured had the individual known how unpleasant it would become. No matter how familiar anyone may be with the horrors of the Nazi regime, it remains to us inconceivable that the culture of Beethoven and Goethe could have committed such crimes.
The United States has now reached the point where the sequence of outrageous and unconstitutional measures that have occurred in the last six years would have been inconceivable six years ago….