A lot of this is true (with some caveats).
Unfortunately the demoKKKrats of the earlier/not-so-earlier era couldn't help themselves and let rise a thoroughly degenerate fellow like LBJ at a crucial inflection point....to add to the damage "progressive"-autocrats like Wilson (at least before his wife ran everything) and FDR had already done. Each one a long story by itself.
The massive expansion of federal govt was thus greatly accelerated (stripping away state and local govt balance in the process - that are key to your "something for everyone, every budget, ethnicity, political leaning) and on top a bad habit was formed in that era regarding big war mongering + reckless intervention by the "federal govt at all cost" as well.
Hence we now have a totally recklessly sized federal govt with its unnecessary sized flypaper that has caught the cavalcade of other big govt degenerates over time to add to the demokkkrats that started this process (most unfortunately from largely sympathy vote from the assassination of last good democrat that was Kennedy).
i.e folks like the neo-cons, neo-marxists and corporatist weathervanes who absolutely smack their lips at what oversized unaccountable sized (and now largely debt fuelled) federal govt can do.... having now made the very core concept of the federalist papers null and void entirely by their ad-hoc intersectional approach united only by power for powers sake.
What you enjoy right now (the buffet on offer by having federal structure and checks and balances to ensure federal govt is kept at a minimum and focused size for its actual key purposes) is literally from what has been able to endure and survive even with what LBJ set into motion and has since been expanded and exploited to the degree it has.
i.e America would have been far better than it is today without this big Fed govt expansion into fiscal rooms and the bleed over of that into war rooms from the precedent established in the inflection period.
If great society was to work, it should have come state by state to see what worked and why (given the more local a politician is, the more easy and directly they can be hell to account compared to some federal DC stiff).....but you see autocrat-kleptocrats dont care about any of that....and they have long gotten their way at great damage now being done both to potential and actualisation.
Just like that senile useless clown or any of his jackass party (and many of their equivalents in the pachyderms) dont actually pay the slightest attention or care to what the CBO has been saying a long time now about the fiscal cliff of non-funded but commited liability in the road the fed govt is on.
If the US is able to actually understand this and reverse course and shed its federal govt size (and it will come with some pain)....it will do far better and with low risk.
Otherwise this is a managed descent in many ways...waiting for some crisis that brings high risk to the whole.
