How successful or unsuccessful were the efforts to reduce the size and scope of government?

Can big government be rolled back?

                                        Michael Barone

It is a rare proposition on which liberals and conservatives agree: American history over the last hundred years has been a story of the growth of the size and powers of government. This growth has not been steady. Conservatives, with some bitterness, have embraced a theory of ratchets: in every generation, liberals succeed in ratcheting up the size of government and conservatives fail to significantly reduce it.

Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., argued for a similar theory of cycles: we have periods when liberals succeed in expanding government and then periods when conservatives resist further expansion but do not roll back previous growth.  In Schlesinger’s view, each cycle of government growth begins with a major electoral victory for the Democratic party: Woodrow Wilson’s election in the three-way contest in 1912, the five consecutive victories of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman from 1932 to 1948, the landslide for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the victories of Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008.  

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