good read.

"We want limited government -- and we should want limited government -- because more government means less liberty. But even the most manifest modern versions of vile malice, like Hitler's Third Reich or Stalin's empire, were not so much sins of "statism" as sins of "partyism." Nazis and Bolsheviks saw government as a hand puppet of the Party. In 1942, enemies of Nazism were writing of the "Nazi system, with its .. .absolute claim to the precedence of the Party over the whole State." The very term "Nazi" refers to a party, not a government.

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and our other great founders grasped this. They constructed in our system of government safeguards for little states against big states, separation of legislation and execution of laws, sovereign states to limit the federal government, and so on. Without party trumping government, "checks and balances," "separation of powers," and "federalism" are self-correcting mechanisms. The toxin the founders dreaded was "factions."

We saw this dysfunction during the health care debate. The legislative branch adopted, without reading or understanding it, a massive bill that Obama wanted. State governments, whose interests lay in opposing this federal power grab, instead responded to ObamaCare along predictably partisan lines. Six of twenty-six Democrat governors, all from conservative states, voiced concerns about ObamaCare. Nearly all Republican governors -- Arnold being an exception -- opposed ObamaCare. Democrat state attorneys general were much more reluctant to file lawsuits against ObamaCare than their Republican counterparts. It is party driving the state, and not the other way around.

The left is an interest group movement, just like the Nazis and just like the Bolsheviks. It embraces Nazi themes like "social justice" -- consigning whites, males, Christians, the affluent, patriots, and others into a leftist-patrolled ghetto. The KKK also supported "social justice" -- so did Father Coughlin, Juan Perón, Fidel Castro, and all those sibling interest-group parties or movements. The state can be used by these odious types, but it is the social justice thugs, not the state per se, which are the problem. In the current immigration firefight, what do conservatives want? More government! We want the federal government to rigorously enforce the law. The left wants the state to vanish and our borders to become meaningless.

This sort of bigotry against certain citizens in favor of others is so common now that we forget that the prostitution of government to the needs of only some Americans is the opposite of what Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin wished to leave us. Whatever structure of government is bequeathed to a people, political parties which champion particular interests will, inevitably, destroy the worth of that structure. Interest-group parties are poison to ordered liberty.

Nominal parties -- Republicans, Democrats, Federalists, etc. -- can also be corrupted. While certain parties, like the Democrats today, seem to be in the belly of the beast that is interest-driven government, certainly Republicans like McCain and Crist can be just as debased. That is why the Tea Party resonates so well. Far from championing any particular factions of America like Obama, who plans to reinvigorate his party by enthusing the young, African-Americans, Latinos, and women (see video below), the Tea Party champions simply ordered liberty."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/more_than_just_government.html