At Cato@Liberty, Julian Sanchez has a post ostensibly about Libya that makes a broader point about how limiting the scope of government can be understood as a meta-choice that constructively constrains democratic deliberation:

We all know that individuals often make quite different choices on a case-by-case basis than when they formulate general rules of action based on a longer view. We routinely make meta-choices designed to prevent ourselves from making micro-choices not conducive to our interests in the aggregate: We throw out the smokes and the sweets in the cupboard, and even install software that keeps us from surfing the Internet when we’re trying to get work done. Faced with a Twinkie or a hilarious YouTube clip, we may predict that we will often make choices that, when they’re all added up, conflict with our other long-term goals. Marketers, by contrast, often try to induce us to make snap decisions or impulse purchases when, in a cool hour of deliberation, we’d conclude their product isn’t the best use of our money.
Following a diet or a budget is one form of choice; so is the impulse buy or the fast food snack. The meta-choice about which kind of choice to make depends on a judgement about which best comports with one’s ideal of rational autonomy given the facts of human psychology. A marketer who hopes to trigger an impulse buy can legitimately say he’s giving consumers what they choose, but there’s a clear sense in which someone acting in accordance with a general rule, formulated with a view to long-term tradeoffs, often chooses in a more deliberative and fully autonomous fashion than someone who does what seems most appealing in each case unfettered by such rules.
Something analogous, I want to suggest, can be said about democratic deliberation. A polity can establish broad and general principles specifying the conditions under which government may or should act, or it can vote on individual policies and programs on a case-by-case basis (with many gradations in between, of course). Both are clearly in some sense “democratic”; the proper balance between them will depend in part on one’s theory about how democratic deliberation confers legitimacy, just as the weight an individual gives to different types of “choices” will turn on a view about the nature of rational autonomy. Limited government is sometimes painted as constraint on democracy—an obstacle to what a majority might favor at a particular time. But political elites, like marketers, understand how the frame and scope of a choice may radically affect what the very same person or polity would choose—and claims by either that only one counts as true “choice” or “democracy” ought to be viewed with due skepticism. [Emphasis added]

Julian is making the very limited claim that partisans of unlimited government aren’t entitled to seeing themselves as the only true democrats.

It’s interesting to think through not only the discrete policy choices we make, but about the meta-choices we make when we create institutions like IPAB, the BRAC commission, etc. As an advocate of limited government, my concern is that the durable political consensus necessary to sustain limited government might never be achieved again. As Bruce Ackerman has argued, the New Deal era was a “constitutional” moment, when extraordinary circumstances led a dominant political coalition to make a series of meta-choices that have dramatically changed the character of our democracy. The struggle over CBR in Wisconsin was, on a far smaller scale, a kind of constitutional struggle as well, as evidenced by the intensity of the opposition, which saw in the Budget Repair Bill a serious effort to change how the public sector does business. During the Reagan era, conservatives and libertarians believed that they had an opportunity to create another “constitutional” moment, or another “refounding.” But the opportunity proved fleeting.

It is at least possible that the exigencies of the coming public debt crisis will force a reckoning, and allow advocates of the more open, flexible system Walter Russell Mead has called “liberalism 5.0” will have an opportunity to reframe democratic deliberation. And I can think of no better vision for this new settlement than the one Yuval Levin sketches out in “Beyond the Welfare State.” But I wouldn’t count on history falling in our lap.