Do You Distrust Government Power, or the Culture?

We live in the aftermath of 20th Century totalitarianism (touching most of the globe), and conservatives and statists took away two different emotional positions. In the Third Reich, Soviet Russia, Mao's China, and all of the other totalitarian dictatorships, government was given unchecked power to transform or "restore" the culture. We saw the ugliest tendencies of mankind (class envy, race envy, and neighbor-snooping) given over to the power of government, which is the monopoly on the use of force.

Those on the modern American Left (which I will call "statists" after Mark Levin) took from our shared experience of history that the deepest impulses within our American culture are to be distrusted -- they see the potential for the "majority," if left alone, to usher in a Berlin kind of terror.

Those on the modern American Right took away a profound distrust of government power, that is, a belief that a government that is given sway over every sector of society tends to remake it into something ugly.

Those on the Left distrust our culture and trust our government. Those on the Right tend towards the opposite.