Politics & Power Quote by William Kunstler

Liberty, in Kunstler's telling, doesn't get confiscated in a single raid; it gets deducted like a fee people stop noticing. The line pivots on a deceptively casual phrase - "on the other hand" - as if the erosion of freedom is just the other side of a tidy civic bargain. That conversational shrug is the point: power rarely announces itself as tyranny. It arrives as paperwork, policing, "security", the routine inconvenience that becomes the new baseline.

Kunstler's intent is prosecutorial. He frames government not as a neutral referee but as an institution with a built-in appetite to expand, taking "a certain amount" by default and "all" when the conditions permit. The subtext is a warning about liberal complacency: the threat isn't only authoritarian regimes "in some countries", but the quiet assumption in democracies that rights are self-sustaining. His bleak prediction - "it will, everywhere" - refuses American exceptionalism. No constitution, no tradition, no good intentions are a firewall if opposition goes soft.

Context matters: Kunstler came of age in the mid-century security state and made his name defending unpopular clients and movements, from civil rights activists to Vietnam-era radicals. He watched courts, police, and public opinion coordinate to define dissent as disorder. So "people who fight government" isn't a romantic call for chaos; it's a civic role - adversarial, relentless, sometimes irritating - that keeps the state from treating consent as surrender. The sentence is built like an ultimatum: resistance isn't a hobby. It's the mechanism that prevents "a certain amount" from becoming everything.