In the 1996 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over." He did give a sop to New Deal Democrats, saying that we could not go back “to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves,” but all anyone remembers is the concession, one made to Republicans with egg already covering their faces from having shut down the government.
Today, the Tea Party is raising the small-government fetish to the level of lunacy by preferring shut downs to any governance at all. But the Democratic Party, after years of selling out to Wall Street, is starting to remember who it is. A full resurrection will require an explicit reversal of the disavowal of its identity. Government is not the enemy that Reagan made it out to be or that caused it to be.
Believers worship the myth as a precept handed down by the Founders. Even were that true, the world is different from the one the Founders knew and in ways no one could have imagined. Governments are different. Those who see small government as a cure-all are stuck in the 18th century. Progressives, on the other hand, understand that if you want to live in a century that has indoor plumbing, you need an entity to plan it, oversee it, and fund it.
Then there are those who don’t care at all about governance beyond being free of it to wield their power. A hobbling reduction in the size and reach of government would be a complete capitulation to the wealthy and a staggering disaster for the rest of us. The small-government myth is just an attempt to get us to come along quietly.
The counter to both is that the legacy of the Founders is not suspicion of government but suspicion of power. It is Jefferson vowing “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." When the tyranny is government, change the government. When the tyranny is a shadow plutocracy, remove the plutocrats and their puppets, then repair the government.
When someone tells you he wants to drown your government in the bathtub or that he wants to starve the beast, it is not out of patriotism. It is not for liberty, and it is not for freedom. It is simple, loathsome greed. It is a warning to your face. His concern about the size of government is not for your benefit but for his, and the two almost always are mutually exclusive.