B.I.G.

Glen Reynolds provides an interesting take on why many of the left believe that Donald Trump is not only unacceptable by downright dangerous. He writes:

... if Americans increasingly find it intolerable that their political opponents control the government, that’s because government controls too much.

Then, of course, there was the weaponization of the IRS. When it was Tea Party groups being harassed, nobody cared much. But now Democrats fear that under Trump, the IRS might target them. And they should: Going back at least as far as FDR, as Jonah Goldberg noted in his book, Liberal Fascism, presidents have used the IRS and other parts of the bureaucracy to target opponents.

But now, of course, we’ve just finished eight years of a president who claimed the legal right to kill Americans, without a trial, anywhere in the world outside the United States. One who spied on journalists, and imprisoned those who leaked to them. One who openly boasted that with his pen and a phone he didn’t need Congress.

And that was fine with Democrats, until the other team took power. Then, as libertarian Bretigne Shaffer notes, everything changed: “I understand that a lot of people are worried, upset, even frightened over the prospect of a Trump presidency. Good. They should be. But they should have been worried eight years ago, or at the very least, four years ago. . . . It cannot be that all of these people only see evil when it wears the other team’s uniform. It cannot be that they are more upset by offensive speech than by a man claiming the right to kill any human being on earth at his whim. These things simply cannot be. And yet it sure looks like they are.”

In an odd way, the Left, usually champions of Big Intrusive Government (B.I.G.), are now fearful that it will act against their interests under a new president. There's an easy way to stop that—reduce the size of the federal government and dampen its influence on our daily lives.
As Reynolds notes:

I’m certain that, as my old law prof Stephen Carter has predicted, with Trump in power “the left will swiftly rediscover the virtues of limited government and, in particular, strong constitutional restrictions on the independent exercise of authority by the executive. In a further turnaround, the left will celebrate corporate power as a check on government.” But the truth is, no president should have as much power as presidents enjoy now.

Wow! That's something that the left and the right might now agree on.