To put it another way: The GOP tends to talk about the US as existing entirely sepearate from its government. They talk about it as one would talk about an ethnicity. That kind of makes their obsession with racial and cultural politics make more sense.

It’s very odd. They fetishize the Constitution, which is the founding document of a government, but then they talk about the country as though the government is an unfortunate tumorous growth.

The Founding Fathers weren’t anarchists who regretted the necessity of government at all, they really wanted to construct a government that would function, that would govern while not unduly limiting freedoms. And the original government was also supposed to be highly non-military; they didn’t want a standing army, so obviously the main purpose of the government wasn’t the administration of the armed forces, as many glibertarians imagine it to be.

The founding fathers didn’t mean to make the US an anarchy but fuck it up. They really meant it to be a modern nation, a nation of laws, that could adapt and serve its people as necessary. This was immediate apparent when they bought Louisiana.