Americans love the state. That at least is what major opinion surveys from late last year until the present are indicating, with up to 54 percent of respondents reacting positively to statements such as, “The government should do more to solve problems and meet the needs of people.” One recent Gallup survey had a slight majority of self-described independents expressing a preference for more government for the first time since 2001.

In some instances, many conservatives agree. A recent Economist/YouGov survey stated that almost 40 percent of Republicans overall say they are willing to “support increased spending, even at the risk of higher taxes.” That number skyrockets with younger conservatives, with 74 percent of Republicans below the age of 45 agreeing with that statement.

In national emergencies, it’s unsurprising that people want the government to do more. So it might be tempting to see these numbers as driven by COVID worries. The problem with that thesis is that the number of Americans favoring bigger government has been steadily rising since 2010.

However we read such surveys, we are a long way away from Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Address, in which he declared that “in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Not to mention Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union, which proclaimed that “the era of big government is over.” Even some conservatives have insisted over the past five years upon the need for government to, among other things, play protectionist and industrial policy games with the economy, use the administrative state to engineer a decisive break with the Founders’ preference for limited government, mandate worker (i.e., union officials’) representation on company boards, or simply to redistribute more money more directly to more families.

The present infatuation of such conservatives with political power wielded by experts and an activist state is not so different from that of progressive Americans, who favor similar policies. But this growing preferential option for government across the political spectrum also suggests that some Americans have lost sight of certain truths about the nature and limits of government.

One such truth is that while government certainly does have particular responsibilities (national security, rule of law, the police power, a minimal safety net, a stable monetary system, etc.), the state is not especially proficient at addressing a host of social and economic problems. Indeed, government interventions often worsen the situation. That surely is a central message to be drawn from, for example, the history and legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.

A second lesson is that the failure of government interventions rarely causes their architects and implementers to have a change of heart, or even to consider whether the problem is better addressed by non-state organizations. For every Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Michael Novak who rethinks his core assumptions, there are 200 Bernie Sanders who insist that the program failed because it wasn’t given enough money in the first place, or the experts weren’t delegated sufficient power to do the job properly. Failure thus becomes the rationale for denying errors, doubling-down on failure, and bureaucratic empire-building.

This brings us to a third forgotten fact: the sheer difficulty of dismantling failed programs and the government bureaucracies that have a vested interest in maintaining them in place. Public-choice theory has its limits, but one of its insights is that the workings of incentives and self-interest are not confined to the economy. Human nature doesn’t change just because you work for the government in Washington, D.C.

But on an even deeper level, we should also be worried about what these growing expectations of government indicate about many Americans’ attitudes and beliefs. Could it be that Americans are losing sight of those better lights which tell us that we have personal responsibilities to those in need, and that there’s nothing particularly virtuous about delegating such obligations to a state that isn’t especially good at addressing many of poverty’s deeper causes, like family breakdown, addiction, or substance abuse?

Or: Could it be that some Americans are increasingly willing to settle for the mediocrity of the soft despotism against which Alexis de Tocqueville warned? By this, I mean a political dynamic in which people vote for those politicians who promise to use government power to give the citizens whatever they want. The political class says it will deliver, just so long as people do whatever the government says is indispensable to provide for everyone’s desires. The softness of this despotism consists of people’s voluntary and ongoing surrender of their freedoms.

Then there is a third possibility: that the state is regarded by at least some Americans as a way to usher in a world in which all the problems of human existence are somehow resolved once and for all. The utopian temptation never quite goes away, despite all the evidence about where utopian politics eventually takes us. Some people will never accept that neither politics nor the state can abolish human error, weakness, and suffering, let alone answer life’s ultimate questions.

All these possibilities should remind us why protecting and advancing constitutionally limited government, a dynamic civil society, and a market economy remains so important. For the great strength of this project is that it reflects realism about the human condition: that we are free, creative but also fallible; reasonable but also swayed by the passions; capable of deep sympathy for others but also motivated by self-interest.

Many Americans these days are apparently reluctant to acknowledge the political and economic consequences of such truths. But denying truth — especially truths about human nature — has a way of coming back to haunt us. If a growing preference for more government action gets translated into policy, the price to be paid down the line will be considerable. The question is whether enough Americans will notice or even care at that point.