For a truly negative assessment, who can beat Dr. Fleming (writing in response to this comment)?

They are a great many assumptions here, or, perhaps questions that would need to be answered first. The Left has, as you say, reengineered society and uses government in a thousand unimagined and possibly illegitimate ways? But which actions of government infringe on a decent person’s moral liberty? Does government compel you to send your kids to a public school or require immoral young women to seek abortions? While the scale of the abuse of power may be unprecedented, the abuse itself is hardly anything novel. Secondly, what do you mean by collective action? It seems a deliberately vague term that might refer to the secession of South Carolina in 1860 or the secession of the colonies in 1776 or to members of black or white nationalist groups who murder out of a shared conviction that it is the right thing to do. I think you are being rather too optimistic in assuming that there is some level of society where one can take one’s stand. That was probably true in the 1860’s but it has never been true in my lifetime, and with each passing day one is more aware of the complete and hopeless decadence of the majority of the American people. Any individual or group action against authority, unless it springs from an authentic, historic, legitimate political community, is no better than terrorism. The problem, though most conservatives today fail to realize it, lies not in the government but in the people. The handwriting was on the wall in the 1860’s–as prescient people like Henry Adams and Owen Wister realized–and was written as high as a skyscraper by the 1920’s. What are we going to do today? Herd suburbanites into concentration camps and recondition their minds? Who will give the order? Who will carry it out?