THE ECONOMIST: Secret Police And Democracy: What, Me Worry?

Actually, it’s Rik Hertzberg playing the role of Alfred E. Neuman here. But he’s had nearly five years of practice. More:

Why is any of this procedural stuff important in the first place? Because law is coercive. If the coercion of the law is to be legitimate—if government is to be legitimate—the legal rules need to be publicly justified. The rules that govern our lives need to be rules that we can see ourselves as having reason to follow.

When the government appears to be lawless, it loses legitimacy. This doesn’t mean that people immediately rush to string bureaucrats up. They just don’t follow the law any more than they have to. And so we move further down the road toward middle-class anarchy.