Re “Crisis and Leviathan” by Robert Higgs - thanks for the recommendation. I added it to my reading list. It has great reviews on Amazon.
It was an eye-opener for me. I bought the 1987 version of the book, so it was interesting thinking through how events since that time follow the same pattern. A terrorist attack in 2001 leads to intensive government spying on US citizens. A financial crisis leads to Dodd-Frank with all kinds of costly intrusive rules on businesses. A drug crisis leads to the militarization of police departments, busting down doors with no-knock warrants, and civil asset forfeiture. Buy a bottle of cough medicine and you wind up on some government list somewhere as a potential meth lab operator. Etc. Etc. It follows the same pattern because the population not only accepts it, the majority are led by the government and the media to applaud it.
For additional reading with a different perspective, showing how educated moral people can wind up willingly becoming part of a totalitarian system to the point of committing genocide, why the people most likely to willingly do it wind up in power, and how the government leads the population into not only finding it acceptable but even necessary, I found the book "The Nazi Doctors" by Robert Lifton to be enlightening. It helps a person to understand how the FBI and others in government can find it acceptable to invent the whole "Russian collusion" scenario to try to keep Trump out of office, and failing that, to try to keep him from being effective. The end justifies the means.