Poll Leez State?

[Terrance]

Police State:  A state in which the government exercises rigid and
repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the
people, especially by means of a secret police force.

The 1980 election and the 1984 consolidation of those results marked a
decisive realignment in American politics.  Not only did they represent
the most significant electoral shift since the 1930s; they were
accompanied by the largest and most comprehensive policy changes in
modern times.  Reagan's unprecedented success in implementing his
policies was matched only by his ability to move Nation Rightward. 
Instead of an increased polarization, the Reagan Revolution produced a
Democratic Party that accepted substantial parts of the new conservative
agenda and sought to shed its identification with traditional
constituencies. 

Reagan's electoral victories are a direct challenge to the Radical
Left's claim that America is a Police State.  The democratic process
elected Reagan. The shift to the Right had nothing to do with a  Police
State.  That is not what Pynchon argues in his prose fiction (VL) or in
his essays.  What Pynchon argues in VL and elsewhere is that business
and the interests it dominates have largely controlled American politics
for a very long time. Even the liberal socialist politics of the New
Deal and the Great Society were manufactured and produced by business
interests in order to meet their own economic needs while simultaneously
responding to and defusing popular protests.  Labor was defeated by
business. VL is the story of Labor's Defeat.