Leadership Quote by James Q. Wilson

A single, dry sentence that lands like a verdict: the federal government, once expanded, does not shrink. Wilson isn’t offering a partisan jab so much as puncturing a recurring American fantasy that “small government” is a knob you can simply turn down after an election. The phrasing matters. “Yet succeeded” implies repeated attempts and predictable failure, turning decades of campaign rhetoric into a record of unmet promises. “Size or scope” widens the target: it’s not just headcount or spending, but the reach of rules, programs, and expectations that accrete over time.

The subtext is institutional, almost clinical. Government is sticky because constituencies form around benefits; agencies defend their missions; lawmakers enjoy the credit for creating programs and dread the blame for cutting them. Even when politicians trumpet deregulation or austerity, they tend to preserve the popular parts of the state and outsource growth into less visible forms: tax expenditures, contracting, security apparatus, emergency authorities. “Reducing” also quietly raises the question of what counts as government. When functions move from public payrolls to private vendors, power hasn’t vanished; it’s just changed clothes.

Contextually, Wilson’s career as a major political scientist (more than a “politician”) steeped him in the realities of bureaucracy and incentives. Read that way, the line isn’t cynical for sport; it’s a warning about the asymmetry of politics: expansion has organized beneficiaries, contraction has diffuse champions. If you want shrinkage, he suggests, you’ll need more than slogans-you’ll need a governing coalition willing to absorb pain and sustain it past the next news cycle.