When William F. Buckley Jr. died last year, most obituaries mentioned National Review’s dubious record on civil rights. Some of the magazine’s statements from that era are indeed difficult to read today, but however incautiously they may have been expressed, it’s important to remember that they were motivated partly, perhaps mostly, by small-government principles. In discussing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, NR cited with approval Barry Goldwater’s view “that the bill’s famous Title VII, creating the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, would unwisely extend a federal bureaucracy into areas of personal relationship and property management that should better be left to moral suasion and to State regulation.”

Anyone who knows what “states’ rights” meant in 1964 must shudder at those words; but in retrospect, Goldwater and NR had at least half a point. When the bill was being debated on the Senate floor, one senator asserted that it would make racial hiring quotas mandatory for businesses. Sen. Hubert Humphrey was adamant in his reply: “If the senator can find in Title VII . . . any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.”

There is no reason to doubt Humphrey’s sincerity; like many civil-rights idealists, he truly believed in a color-blind future. And yet, less than a decade later, in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court made “affirmative action” all but mandatory. Today, any employment test or requirement on which blacks do worse than whites invites a lawsuit, and despite occasional modest revisions of that ruling, no end is in sight (our current attorney general and newest Supreme Court justice are both fervent supporters of the “disparate impact” standard). So what was sold 45 years ago as a simple, ringing assertion of equality has long since degenerated into a morass of lawyers, consultants, and bureaucrats enforcing the opposite of what the legislation promised.

The following year saw the landmark Voting Rights Act. Buckley thundered against it on similar grounds: “The setting of voting standards — of whatever difficulty — is a legitimate exercise of what used to go by the name of the sovereign power of the states.” He wasn’t the only one who questioned the constitutionality of giving a federal agency control over state voting laws, but most objectors overcame their scruples in view of the massive historical outrage involved and the limited duration of the act’s toughest provisions — just five years. Besides, affected jurisdictions could escape the law’s reach by reforming their procedures to boost black turnout. Surely such a targeted and temporary measure was acceptable to reverse a century of injustice.

Since the act was passed, America and the world have changed greatly. Immigration and various social revolutions have transformed the U.S., for good and ill, and technology has made colossal amounts of information available to virtually anyone, virtually anywhere. Ancient battles have been forgotten, new ones have been joined, and younger generations have cast aside old ways. Most notably, perhaps, a black man has been elected president.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department thinks it’s still 1965. As Abigail Thernstrom recently wrote in these pages (“Integration Now,” June 22, 2009), judges, civil-rights lawyers, and weak-kneed politicians have combined to renew and maintain the Voting Rights Act’s draconian restrictions. Even the tiniest change in voting location or procedure in affected areas must be pre-cleared with the feds, and the obstacles that a jurisdiction must overcome to “bail out” of the law’s reach are so onerous that very few even attempt it. (One reason it’s so hard: All the formulas for deciding what jurisdictions the Voting Rights Act covers are based on data from 1972, with no updates permitted.) While the act unquestionably achieved tremendous things for civil rights, Buckley’s worries about the iron grip of federal control have proven all too prescient.

All this helps explain why Obamacare has run into such trouble. Anyone old enough to remember LBJ’s civil-rights laws, and the many other reform measures enacted from the Great Society to the present, has learned two things: (1) A federal bureaucracy must either grow or die; and (2) a federal bureaucracy never dies. As the abuses that a law was designed to fight are eliminated, the enforcement apparatus does not shrink to match; instead it expands and finds new abuses — and when those run out, it starts inventing them.

This has always been true, though it took many years for the lesson to sink in. For much of the 20th century, government intervention seemed the best way to tackle virtually any problem. From Progressive-era legislation on workplace safety, clean government, and antitrust into the 1960s and beyond, bold laws and sweeping court decisions made, or seemed to make, great improvements in American life — initially, at least.

The Food and Drug Administration, for example, took shape during the 1930s, a time when adulterated and spoiled foods were widely peddled and consumers laid out large sums for useless or dangerous quack remedies (potions containing radium were a popular pick-me-up). Safeguards were put in place, large strides were made in safety and efficacy . . . and a few decades later, the FDA was trying to ban saccharin and to regulate tobacco as a drug.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was enacted to fight discrimination in the sale and rental of residences, a major problem at the time. Its provisions brought about many improvements — but before long, the federal government was dictating banks’ and insurance companies’ business decisions, forbidding agents to answer a customer’s questions about subjects like a neighborhood’s population mix, and even regulating the race of models used in real-estate ads.

When the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, America’s air was filthy, its rivers caught on fire, and its wilderness areas were rapidly being despoiled. Today the situation is much better, but instead of sticking to what it was created for, the EPA regulates shower heads and holds up vital public works for years over minor threats to endangered species. Ominously, the agency now has the power to massively reorder American life by regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and it is seeking similar authority over water vapor.

For most Americans before the 1970s, the experience of government fixes was positive: the New Deal (which, for all its failures and overreachings, was undeniably popular), civil rights, consumer protection, poverty reduction. The enabling legislation in all these cases was passed by wide bipartisan margins in response to crying needs; they all showed dramatic early results, usually at modest expense; and, inevitably, all were stretched way beyond their original limits once the easy cases had been solved.

Today’s health-care fight, by contrast, takes place amid trillion-dollar deficits in a nation that’s sadder but wiser about big government and is facing no particular crisis. To be sure, America’s health-care system has plenty of room for improvement. But in view of what happened with these earlier laws, all of which were passed for the best of reasons, is it any wonder that so many Americans don’t want an arrangement that satisfies 80 percent of the country to be turned upside down, shaken to pieces, and put back together by the friendly folks in Washington?

So what if the Democrats’ health-care bill does not explicitly mention a single-payer arrangement, abortion funding, death panels, treatment for illegal aliens, or any of the other “myths” that “alarmists” are peddling? There’s plenty of wiggle room, with determinations to be made by boards and committees and experts and administrators; and even where no explicit authority to regulate exists, imaginative bureaucrats and their judicial enablers will conspire to create it.

The cost, of course, will increase far beyond projections; just look at Social Security and all the other federal entitlement programs. At the same time, careerism, mission creep, idealism ripening into zealotry, and simple lust for power will combine to expand the bureaucracy’s authority — only this time, its authority will be over the most important and personal details of our lives. There’s never been a social reform program that stuck to what it was designed for; why will the biggest one of all be any different?

Today’s voters have seen the aftermath of the programs that looked so tempting to their parents and grandparents: skyrocketing expenses, ever-expanding regulatory reach, and a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences. So you can’t blame Americans for being reluctant to surrender control of their money, their health, and perhaps even their lives, in hopes that the government will get it right this time.