Glenn “Instapundit”
Reynolds points to the trend of more and more Americans
disliking and distrusting the federal government. From his latest

USA Today column:

Americans are out of sorts, and increasingly they’re unhappy
with the government. According to a Pew
poll released last week, more than half of Americans view
government as a threat to their freedom….

Add this to another recent
poll in which only 22% of likely voters feel America’s
government has the “consent of the governed,” and you’ve got a
pretty depressing picture — and a recipe for potential
trouble.

What’s driving the disaffection
with government? Reynolds notes that as government gets bigger,
more people are willing to do whatever it takes “to seize the
prize” of increased power, wealth, and domination (he likes to use
a Hunger Games metaphor to describe the way in which riches are
flowing from the provinces into the Capital District).

That’s true and it’s no way to win the hearts or minds of
citizens. A few weeks back, New York Times blogger Nate
Silver
suggested a related reason for growing disaffection: The
government has morphed over the past 40 or so years from providing
basic infrastructure and services to being the nation’s insurance
agent. That is, the portion that the feds spend on health care,
welfare, and retirement pensions has steadily – and seriously –
increased as a percentage of overall government spending and as a
percentage of GDP.

Looking at the increase in relative and absolute
spending on social insurance and the long-term declines in trust of
government,
Silver writes:

The declining level of trust in government since the 1970s is a
fairly close mirror for the growth in spending on social insurance
as a share of the gross domestic product and of overall government
expenditures. We may have gone from conceiving of government as an
entity that builds roads, dams and airports, provides shared
services like schooling, policing and national parks, and wages
wars, into the world’s largest insurance broker.

Most of us don’t much care for our insurance broker.

Glenn Reynolds notes that after the 2004 elections, liberals and
Democrats started talking about taking the country back, which is
similar to conservative and Republican complaints post-2012. He
even suggests that if current trends persist, we might even hear
calls for a Constitutional convention. I doubt that but I do hope
that as support softens for the government (and
as a majority continues to believe that government is doing too
much), we’ll see some real changes over the coming years.