I’ve read about this in history books. It’s what happened to the Weimar Republic in Germany when its currency collapsed and anarchy followed. The result was Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
In the wake of the Great Depression, the wheels began to come off the Weimar Republic, a liberal democracy that had been in place since the end of World War One. In 1930 President Hindenburg assumed emergency powers. By 1933 three Chancellors had preceded Hitler and when the Nazi government took over it simply ignored Germany’s constitution.
A lot of scholars who know much more about the U.S. Constitution than I are increasingly speaking out about the same scenario occurring here. Radio personality Mark Levin considers President Obama a despot in light of his refusal to negotiate with the Republicans and the resulting shutdown of the government. Suffice to say, his refusal, carried out by Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, worked.
For the ordinary citizen, Obama’s actions during the shutdown have been instructive if they were paying attention. He threatened not to pay Social Security retirees, Military retirees, disability recipients, and federal retirees. The elderly and the military were the prime targets for his threats and, despite the fact that more than eighty percent of the government was still functioning, he directed that national parks be closed; most dramatically in Washington, D.C. where veterans of World War II and the Vietnam War were denied access to the memorials to their service.