One of the great, hidden ironies of politics in this century is that Republicans pretend they are for small government, but have only ever given the government more control over people’s lives, usually over aspects that have no need for government input.
Meanwhile, they pretend they are economic wizards (and some Democrats pretend they hate capitalism), but “Blue America” actually controls the economy—the staggering majority of American GDP comes from blue states and blue cities within red states (like Austin or Orlando or Atlanta or Las Vegas).
Typical conservative white male: “No! Democrats want to force us to allow transgender bathrooms and ummm…uhhh…racism to be taught in schools!”
Democrats want to stop you from oppressing other people. That’s the difference.
When they have bills protecting gay people or black voters or environmental regulations or the social safety net, they are trying to protect minority rights. When it comes to their economic programs (which are usually seen as the apex of their “Big Government” agenda), these are voluntary, and the people who are able to use them are damn grateful to get access to Pell grants, Medicaid, public housing, food stamps, etc. Many would be living in their cars and scraping together nickels for food otherwise.
But conservatives are masters at allowing the government more control over aspects of life people don’t want or need their influence on.
This is the “War on Terror” that allowed the tapping of millions of phones, Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, a dismal Afghanistan War (the recent killing of Al-Zawahiri there afterwe left shows the U.S. being in Afghanistan actually made it harder to kill major terrorists there), the Drug War, private prisons trying to lock more people up, endless book bans in schools, Muslim bans, a “Stop WOKE Act” that tries to control what private businesses can talk about, bans on gay marriage, trying to undermine integrated schools, abstinence-only sex education, limits on gambling, no liquor sales on Sundays, trying to limit birth control, various anti-transgender laws, “kids in cages,” draconian immigration enforcement and blocking a path to citizenship, endless voter suppression tactics, endless corporate welfare for corporations that clearly don’t need it, sodomy bans, and—of course—abortion.
The argument for Republicans actually being “hands off” seems to come solely from lax anti-trust enforcement, lax business regulations (including pollution standards), and a desire to cut taxes for those that are already doing quite well.
Naturally, all this really does is shift the power from upstarts (scrappy companies trying to compete against monolithic corporations and then citizens who don’t want poisonous drinking water) to those that are already very powerful. That isn’t really what the Founding Fathers had in mind, and they were worried about a business oligopoly controlling everything—as that would just be a new form of monarchy.