Thanks, I've been trying to keep that in mind. I really don't want to skew any more to one side or another than I have to in order to frame the story properly, and besides, there are worse things than being accused of being a libertarian (which I'm not, by the way). Such as being accused of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for coming up with this in the first place.
Most cases of democracy turning to authoritarianism in real history had an outside force attacking it, no nation exists in vacuum not in the past and especially not today. A hostile foreign government (or some other powerful organization) would help immensely in making the actions of the government and extremist more believable.
"If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you." —Don MarquisI present, for your consideration, the script for pages 1 and 2 of the webcomic:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9231579/Remus%2C%20pages%201%20and%202.pdf
Let me know if you think this needs work.
If I were you, I'd lengthen the time frame for the transition to dystopia, and I would not use the CIA as the force behind it. Most of the people in the current military/CIA/FBI would be disinclined to enforce that kind of thing. If you want a president to be the villain, it would probably be more believable to have him accuse the CIA of being behind everything after the initial assassinations and attacks. He could then manipulate the ensuing panic to start an "extremist" witch hunt in the military, FBI, and CIA, a la Mc Carthy.
Those personnel who President Evil expects to oppose him could thus be removed and replaced by personnel loyal to him personally. With them in place, he could then use federal law enforcement as his personal secret police. Even then, though, he'd probably have to start low-key and build up to taking absolute power. Maybe start by having his suborned agencies fabricate new threats, and use that as a pretext to have Presidential term limits removed and manipulate the press so as to make himself seem indispensible to the nation.
Overall, it would probably take more on the order of twenty years just to get to the police state point, at least. Thus securing continued re-elections, he could slowly tighten the screws on Congress and the Judiciary branch through intimidation by the FBI, expand the CIA's remit, and just generally increase his personal power until he had complete control. If there's any point at which there might be an actual civil war, this would be it, as the party opposed to the President and their supporters might try fighting. This would finally allow the President to initiate a complete purge of his opponents, and openly take complete power.
Ultimately, it would take more on the order of twenty years to reach the "iron-fisted dystopia" point, at the very least.
edited 26th Mar '11 5:22:01 PM by Wanderhome
The CIA's role is not to push tyranny on Americans. That's the NSA's job. The CIA does the seedy stuff overseas, not at home
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If you want evil guys on a domestic tyranny scenario, you'd do better of going with the NSA/DHS than the CIA. In fact, loosely National Guard, Military and CIA connected militias could actually be sorta good guys on such a dystopia.
edited 26th Mar '11 7:23:06 PM by SavageHeathen
You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.
Yeah, but the CIA is far more suited to the actual footwork - assassinations and such - than the NSA, which is mostly cryptology. I thought I had added in a bit about the CIA getting authorization to conduct domestic ops. I was actually planning to have something of an internal power struggle already, but tossing the NSA into the mix is actually a very good idea that gets me out of a hole I recently dug myself into. Again, this is meant to be a fairly early stop on the road to an actual dystopia, so not everything is functioning efficiently yet.
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It starts that way, but President Evil ends up getting hijacked by a small faction within the CIA that's even more power hungry than he is. The war is real, and the extremist threat is real - the issue is with the government's response to it, and their failure to give up power after the crisis has passed. As for the time frame, it needs to be a fairly short jump because the entire point of the setting is that A) the transition to dystopia is still in progress and B) the majority of the population still remembers freedom. Also, a few characters' ages start to get a bit weird with any gap longer than 17 years.
edited 26th Mar '11 9:58:32 PM by KyleJacobs
That's what the DHS and the police are there for. The DHS and federal law enforcement are evil enough IRL that turning them into Complete Monster territory would be easy to understand. The NSA would monitor, and the DHS would bag.
edited 27th Mar '11 5:53:55 AM by SavageHeathen
You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

OK, so here's the deal. I'm trying to show how a dystopia could form in a democracy. Here's how the timeline as is goes:
17 years in: Page One.
edited 16th Mar '11 9:15:37 PM by FrustratedRocka