How Both Parties Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Government

Once upon a time, there was a group of Americans who said they supported limited government.

That group may always have been skittish about actually making government smaller. But the sentiment that government should live within its means, and mind its own business, was once a staple of the political landscape. It was an idea worth supporting, regardless of which political party held a majority at any given time.

Those days are gone, and that sentiment is fading fast. What’s replacing it? As Reason’s J.D. Tuccille writes, more myopic partisanship as demonstrated in a recent Gallup poll.

Or more specifically, principled stands have been replaced with a reflexive and corrosive negative partisanship that wants to use state power to punish opponents:

With the major parties having a near-total lock on political power, Americans are stuck voting for different brands of the large, intrusive government most tell Gallup they don’t want.

The irony is that people who don’t like each other can get along reasonably well under a smaller and less-intrusive government by leaving each other alone and just rolling their eyes at the strange ways of those others. But the increasingly authoritarian parties for whom they’re actually voting, and their selectivity about favoring smaller government only when their faction is out of power, guarantee continuing conflict. A big government that interferes in many areas of life is too dangerous to be allowed to fall into the hands of enemies who will use it for their purposes—and it will change hands so long as there are competitive elections.

The entire essay is worth reading. But for those in a hurry, here’s the wrap:

It’s encouraging that Americans tell pollsters, year after year, that they want a smaller government that does less; that’s a recipe for a freer, more peaceful society that makes room for people of varied values and preferences. But advocating restraint only when you’re out of power is only another way of saying that you want to kneecap your enemies. To end the alternating bouts of kneecapping, people are going to have to adopt smaller government as a principle that applies to everybody, including themselves and their allies.

This is absolutely correct. Negative partisanship is a one-way trip to a more intrusive, more expensive, more unaccountable government.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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