Hence the draft, before proceeding to critique it I wanted to make sure I was attacking a steel man of moderate social democracy the currently reigning Western ideology.

If the goal was to discuss a steel man of social democratic theory, it seems to me that you've done a reasonable job. But not being a social democrat, I don't know that my opinion should count for much. You disagree with the social democrats for some reason. You don't share some of their premises, so that what is steel as evaluated by your premises (or mine) is likely not so steely to them.

I like your basic thrust, of first identifying what government is supposed (by them) to be for. I was actually meaning to ask this of the social democratic crowd in our next monthly politics thread. As I related, in the US we have a specific narrative of what government is for, grounded in the ideology, events, and documents of the creation of the country. I don't have a real sense of where Europeans get their answer to the question, "what is government for?".

Should it be a goodness machine? I liked your explicit identification of it. That's starts sounding uncomfortably theocratic, because it is.

But I haven't liked your using "democracy" as a short hand for the party platform of generic social democrats. Calling it Social Democracy would at least consistently make it clear that you mean a complex of procedures, programs, and values, and not just voting, which was my initial impression when I've seen you question democracy in the past.

Unless you're really opposed to voting per se, your use of democracy as shorthand for social democracy easily leads to mistaking your views on voting, and is just unnecessarily unclear regardless.

Looking from the outside it seems pretty obvious the US government is expected to be a goodness generating machine.

That's the thing. The news you get is filtered through European Social Democratic media perusing American Social Democratic media. That's the view you get from the outside.

But those who control the centralized levers are hardly all of the country. You're not hearing what's said at churches, and picnics, and group emails, and talk radio, and small town newspapers. Many people hear these voices instead, and don't spend so much time listening to the Social Democratic media.

And as for "the educated", you've got a biased sample again. Much of the educated are in science, technology, and business, and they are not quite so liberal. Socially liberal, but not social democrats.

I was most amused the other day to hear my sister rant about how the government had no right to tell her she had to wear a seat belt. I remember my dad similarly ranting, and thought the attitude was a rather old fashioned one that had died out as we increasingly accepted hyper regulation as an unquestioned fact of life. Having my thoroughly apolitical sister rant in this fashion was a surprise.

Probably in half the country, there is a large sentiment toward the negative rights view of government. People aren't entirely consistent in this regard, and have been corrupted by programs such as Social Security that dishonestly sold themselves as government pension plans that you "earned" by paying into them. So they support this wealth transfer program because they feel they, and others, have earned their benefits.

And as long as the government is passing out goodies, people will push for their goodies. But talk to them about what government is for, and whether they want government to be passing out goodies at all, and you'll get a different answer. There's no real logical contradiction between condemning the trough and bellying up to the trough while it's there.

If anything, in my lifetime, the negative rights view has made a huge comeback in the US, and particularly on explicit ideological grounds.

What does the "pro-freedom" or negative rights camp have? A few internet blogs and think thanks?

I was born in 1965. There was no institutional support of small government, libertarian ideas. Barry Goldwater had just gotten crushed when he ran for president, but he at least won the nomination as an explicitly pro freedom, small government candidate. See the quotes. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater

Reagan ran on smaller government themes, which have largely become official Republican dogma. At least when they need to win an election. Like now.

Meanwhile, now they have blogs, and talk radio, and have even been making significant inroads into culture. Much of fantasy/scifi culture is explicitly libertarian. On the internet, libertarians have a huge presence, and the social democrats are usually on the retreat against them.

Multiple states have medical marijuana laws, which are largely hypocritical legalization laws, while explicit legalization initiatives in some states, and the demographics of support for legalization makes it almost inevitable to increasingly pass and spread in the next 20 years.

I mean look at the Republican party.

The Tea Party is largely made up of those who lean Republican but oppose the big government excesses of the Republican Party.

When people actually discuss the proper role of government, lots of Americans are very libertarian, and increasingly so in my lifetime.

Libertarian governments tend toward rent seeking bureaucracies as time goes on. But rent seeking creates pressure, both fiscal and regulatory, for a return to libertarian principles.