"Ungovernable"

The fact of the matter is, the last time liberals and traditional media sources were asking the question, they were asking it while Jimmy Carter was President. It was the penultimate moment of the Carter Presidency when, breaking out of the echo chamber, liberals in the media began to openly ponder the ungovernability of the American Republic and whether the Presidency was too big for one man.
Turns out the Republic was just fine. It wasn’t that the Presidency was too big for one man. It was that the particular occupant of the office was too small for the job. When Reagan became President, the question was rendered moot.
As my friend Josh Trevino has pointed out, this question has been raised throughout the history of our Republic in one form or another. That it is being raised again shows a lack of appreciation for our history, a misunderstanding of our constitutional order, and a constrained sense of exactly what governing success looks like.  http://www.redstate.com/erick/2012/06/18/weve-reached-the-penultimate-jimmy-carter-moment-of-the-obama-presidency/

The heart of this point is - what is the purpose of government?  If your answer is "to defend the rights of the individual" then you know that may be accomplished by an entity even so clumsy as government.  When governments try to do more than that they stumble into the land of the fatal conceit.