Why Americans Dislike Government, Even When It Works

  • fivethirtyeight published a similar article a long time ago, saying that maybe counter-intuitively people turn against their party when their party takes action.

    I feel like the big government programs, medicare, medicaid and social security are facing an inevitable fall. There's just not enough unity for people to think that the government should be spending that much money for the public good. And it's odd, maybe because my life is and has always gone fairly well(this is certainly not a consistent yardstick so shrug) but I've never had reason to have animosity towards government. I do understand the cases presented by lots of entrepreneurs as to why they're antagonistic, but everything else.

    But really hard to imagine things will get better without these programs.

  • > And non-trivial proportions of Republicans, about 40 percent, and Conservatives, about 45 percent, also prioritized better government rather than simply smaller government.

    I wonder if this research fed into DOGE being disguised as an efficiency drive.

    The Republicans can be surprisingly data driven, like when they discovered it was easier to attack Obama from the left and make people not want to vote at all than to switch to vote Republican.