I do not feel tyranized. I feel freer than ever before in my life. I do agree with you that the world is getting to be an ever more dangerous place. I do agree that the power of the federal government has increased at the expense of other government bodies and could be a threat to personal freedom. But I disagree about the causes.
For me the causes are demographic and technological. The enormous increase in numbers and technological power forces the concentration of political and economic power. How that will end I can't say. We'll be very lucky if we avoid a nuclear holocaust.
Well, I too might have said the same before I was married and we had our first child, now expecting our second.
But, now I must attempt some foresight in exercise of my duty as father to provide for and educate our children. And though I know that education and upbringing is the foremost obligation or duty that I have as a husband and father, what dim foresight I have shows a truly unhopeful future for that enterprise.
I care less about economy, technological progress, but education is my foremost concern, and I am now a more political than spiritual man. I honestly do not know how I can raise my children well, to be excellent citizens. The word, excellence, has been pretty much denigrated as racist or sexist, except in the sports arena and even there, children are not taught that winning is important.
In any case my realization is that education is not an enterprise for the individual. It requires good laws, good schools, good music, good entertainment and a community. We have become an atomistic society. There is no longer neighborhood. Schools have ostracized God, our Founders, Western Culture, the great books. Environmentalism poses as science. Multiculturalism as history. We have turned on religion and our past, cutting off our roots. An individual cannot raise a family on his own. It requires, if Aristotle is right, a whole city, with common laws, common customs, common entertainment and music. We have none of these.
I am afraid to say it but our country is dying. The signs are all around, all that is needed is the seeing.
You feel freer than ever before in your life. But what is freedom and what is tyranny? Hobbes thought that man in the natural state had "a right to everything even to another's body." By social contract, men band together to form the Leviathan agreeing to curtail that primordial right. The end of society is to curtail the fear of death and to obtain such things as are necessary to commodious living. If we are free from the fear of death and free to attain by our industry a commodious living, are we free?
A libertarian might say that such a life is truly free. If so we are indeed free. Although our country did not begin as the Leviathan, it has come to pass.
However, in my opinion such freedom is a guise for the worst slavery. Plato thought the passions were a bad ruler. I think they are if not the worst tyrant, at least the most bestial.