I certainly don’t qualify as personally supporting a “large” government, but I recognize that it has a function in society and the better that function is enunciated, explained and clarified, the more its workings become transparent.

As I keep trying to argue, the problem with trying to understand this duality goes to the heart of Western culture, which is monist and presumptively monotheistic.

Consider that our models for democracy and republicanism go back to Greece and Rome, which were pantheistic and that when we went back to them, with this monotheistic religious assumption, it required a separation of church and state, essentially culture and civics. Consider the Islamic tradition of Sharia law is anathema to our modern Western world.

So because of this underlaying monism, our politics is built around, but doesn’t really understand the relationship between liberal and conservative. You could go to any society in history and there would be those pushing the bounds of the culture and those seeking to re-enforce them. much as our personal desires seek to expand and grow beyond our limits, while our rational thought processes try to work within them.

Yet in our world, these become political divisions which, especially in times of stress, view the other as evil, rather than as necessary sides of the overall dynamic.

So when it comes to this relationship between the individual and the structure of the community, it is a mess.

Here is an interesting read on the basis of Western culture;

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Five Stages of Greek Religion, by Gilbert Murray.

One point that comes across is that one of the reasons for pantheism was to integrate the various tribal belief systems, making it an early form of multiculturalism. So monotheism became an effort to further distill it into one central belief system. The original one world government, as the Ancients naturally did not distinguish between culture and civics.

So the reality is more the yin and yang of polarities creating this larger whole, than God Almighty, where there is some pot of figurative or literal gold at the end of the narrative arc.