The Patriot act is not incremental. Nor were the even more stringent limits on freedom put on us during WWII. But they were removed after the war. The key here is to have to have the act come up for vote every five years, and not make it permanent.
The ability to "snoop" your library/book store records was in place long before the current iteration of the Patriot Act. After the OKC bombing in 1995 the clinton justice department claimed that they needed a better way to monitor what the evil right wing militias were up to. They claimed that Tim McVey built his bomb using info gleaned from books at his local library. Thus a law was passed allowing snooping of your reading habits. The Dems certainly were not complaining then. Nor was the ACLU. Curious...