Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the "voluntary sector" of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia].

Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen's social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state's intrusive regime.