My Country, Police State Of Thee...
Wendy McElroy writes at TDVMedia of America's slide into a police state:

A police state is generally defined as a totalitarian government that exerts extreme and pervasive social, political and economic control over peaceful citizens. Ayn Rand called it "the ultimate inversion...the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission."

There are various ways to measure where a nation sits on the police-state axis.

One way is to compare what you see in America with the following standard description of a police state. A police state maintains its control through the pervasive surveillance of peaceful citizenry, through a vast number of laws with draconian enforcement, and by converting rights into privileges that can be withheld - for example, the ability to travel. Typically, there is a special police force, such as a Stasi, that operates with no transparency and few restraints. The special police do not address violent crime; instead, they exert social control and enforce the law whatever the law may be.

This describes America. Surveillance of daily life has soared; even the Supreme Court has consistently expanded the "right" of police to perform warrantless searches. A vast array of laws now dictate the minutia of life, from what you may not eat to the light bulbs you may not use as well products you must buy (e.g. health care insurance). On one day in January alone, Obama issued 23 executive orders to start the process of gun control. Enforcement is becoming every more draconian, with police departments pursuing militarization of their procedures and attitudes. A special police force called the Department of Homeland Security has spearheaded this military zeal; the DHS functions without transparency or accountability. Travel, formerly a right, is now a privilege granted by government agents at their whim.

Does the foregoing describe a free society or a police state?

She gets how 9/11 has become the ticket for politicians and post-government profiteers like Michael Chertoff to "walk past the traditional protections of liberty that restrain the state":

The war on terror is an engineered hysteria. In its wake, the institutions of America have changed. Public ones have swelled in size and appetite; private ones have retreated. Some of the changes are so glaring that people noticed immediately. It is difficult not to notice the militarization of law enforcement when your children are lined up at airports and touched by uniformed strangers in a manner that would be called child molestation elsewhere. But the dehumanizing process is accepted in the name of security.

The foregoing scratches the surface of "how" a society becomes a total state. It does not explain the "why." Why do Americans who pride themselves on rugged individualism stand by and watch the triumph of totalitarianism?

One reason is because the behavior encouraged by institutions (such as obedience) tends to become character traits not only of individuals but also of society itself. And, so, society becomes closed rather than open; insensitive to brutality by authorities, and afraid of dissent. Rewarded by the authorities for doing so, people even come to spy on their neighbors as a civic duty of which they are proud.

Another common reason: people do not or prefer not to notice. Because they wake up in their own homes, eat the same breakfast cereal, work at the same job, they have a sense that everything is normal. They do not notice that the legal structure and other institutions that guarded their freedoms are going, going, gone. People who are accustomed to liberty can be blithely unaware of how important mechanisms like rule of law or due process are to their freedom and true safety. The daily erosion of freedom is far less real to them than their daily routines.

The difference between America and a communist regime lay in its institutional protection of the individual against the state. That difference no longer exists.