Since the indignities of the Great Depression swept Franklin Roosevelt and his crack team of social engineers into the highest offices in the land, the Left’s primary political strategy has been to pass as big an expansion of government as is feasible in their brief moments of ascendancy and then to dare the dissidents to take its fruits away when, eventually, they get back into power. As we have all learned over the last 80 years or so, progressives tend to view the welfare state in much the same way as conservatives regard the Constitution: as settled and almost holy writ, the fundamentals of which should be changed only in extraordinary circumstances.

Source: Charles C. W. Cooke, nationalreview.com