Will Wilkson's response to Paul Waldman's post about the above Gallup poll and how Republicans are wrong to be "gripped by a belief that government is dangerously out of control and that it's threatening our freedom" is interesting:
Mr Waldman is right to suggest that today's Republican alarm and Democratic light-heartedness are partisan phenomena. But one is no sillier than the other. The majority of Democrats who saw government as a threat in 2007 were right to do so, and nothing truly significant has changed since then. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of Republicans who were at ease with the state in 2007 were profoundly misguided; one wishes they had been roused from their oblivious slumber for better reasons. The Gallup graph is truly troubling because it shows us that each party's base of supporters is more or less blind to government's threat to freedom when their favoured team is in power. Which is to say, their dogged partisan team-spiritedness keeps Americans from unifying to perceive and combat very real threats to their liberties and lives. It's hard to imagine that Mr Obama would not have done something by now to make government less threatening to citizens if not for the delusive complacency currently gripping Democratic voters.
The thing is that there are genuine ideological disagreements about what constitutes a "threat to freedom." Democrats didn't file a challenge to Massachusetts' health-insurance mandate because it was Mitt Romney's bill, and they wouldn't have done so if John McCain had passed the Affordable Care Act. Likewise, there are no Tea Partiers in the streets protesting the Obama administration asserting the authority to kill American citizens or strengthening the PATRIOT Act because they don't see those things as affecting them personally.
So it's accurate to say that partisanship affects whether or not you see government as a threat, but it's hard to imagine Americans "unifying" against the kinds of threats to freedom Wilkinson mentions because one party only sees them as threats when the other guy is in charge, and the other one doesn't see them as threats at all -- and the reverse is also true.
