The following editorial was published at Investor’s Business Daily on May 16th. I’m posting it in its entirety because I totally concur – and couldn’t have said it any better ~
 

The IRS targeting of Tea Party groups is mind-boggling not only for its abuse of government power. It’s also disturbing for what it intended to do: destroy civil society, opening a door for tyranny.
 
The formation in 2009 of hundreds of Tea Party groups at the rallying cry of CNBC news editor Rick Santelli, from places as diverse as Lowell, Mass., Pleasanton, Calif., Asheville, N.C., Yuma, Ariz., and Lincoln, Neb., among hundreds of others, was a spontaneous reaction by ordinary American citizens to an overspending, oversized government whose overreach called into question its constitutionality.
 
Yet it was these very Tea Parties that were specially targeted by the IRS in its outrageously intrusive efforts to learn their every secret, to leak those secrets to a hostile, slanderous media, and to delay beyond justification their approvals as tax-free institutions in an effort to suppress them — while granting those permissions easily to leftist ones.
 
As an agency that favored expanding its own power, the IRS and its political masters naturally felt threatened by Tea Party success, seen in the rallies of millions in February and then April 2009, as well as the proliferation of groups across the country.
 
 
But they weren’t threats to anyone except tyrants, because they were civil society groups with deep roots in the American experience. They were the sort of organizations first observed by French writer Alexis De Tocqueville in his “Democracy in America.”
 
De Tocqueville considered these “intermediary groups” controlled by neither the state nor the family to be the essential element in America’s success with representative democracy — the linchpin to what enabled individuals to be citizens instead of subjects.
 
“Intermediary institutions (clubs, local political organizations, community activities, churches, etc.) tie us — really oblige us — to our neighbors. They train us to recognize the ways we can satisfy our various needs without turning to (the state) to provide the goods we require,” Montclair University Professor Brian Smith told the Evangelical Christian Society.
 
De Tocqueville “says these associations teach the art of being free and living responsibly. Without them, we will fall out of our practice of self government,” he said.
 
And that’s why the IRS attack on the Tea Parties is so disturbing. It has implications for our democracy.
 
As perspective, while De Tocqueville considers civil associations indispensable for democracy, the world’s leading communist tyrants and their philosophers have long sought to destroy them as “bourgeois institutions.”
 
Karl Marx considered civil society groups “a reflection of the egotistical interests of society” that would be better off run as a collective under a supreme leader, while Lenin considered them an obstacle to his “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
 
 
Italian communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci in particular considered them an obstacle even worse than overthrowing the state.
 
“The state was just a forward trench,” he wrote in his Prison Notebooks. “Behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.” That is, civil society.
 
Gramsci advocated establishing something he called “civil hegemony” as a means of subverting independent civil society groups and then merging them with the state as means of making the state supreme.
 
The 1960s radicals called this “the long march through the institutions.”
 
They knew that without true civil society organizations to promote self-government, such as the Tea Party, all that’s left is an all-powerful state that citizens must face alone.
 
The fact that the IRS tried and may have succeeded in destroying some Tea Party and other groups is a sign that the broader agenda wasn’t just suppression of political dissent, but imposition of the kind of tyranny found in places like Cuba, where law-abiding civil society has been replaced by fanatical government-directed mobs.
 
That’s what De Tocqueville warned about. These IRS transgressions ought to be treated as what they are — a fundamental attack on our democracy.