Politics & Power Quote by Ronald Reagan

Reagan frames the state as a necessary referee, not a parent: its legitimate job is to keep citizens from harming each other, not to manage the risks they choose for themselves. The sentence works because it narrows “government” to a single, morally intuitive function (protection from violence, fraud, coercion) and then casts everything else as an overreach. It’s a tidy division that turns a sprawling policy argument into a gut-level boundary: defend me from you, don’t save me from me.

The subtext is pure Reagan-era individualism, with a prosecutorial edge. “Protect us from ourselves” smuggles in a whole catalogue of 20th-century liberal governance - consumer safety rules, public health measures, welfare programs, drug policy, even seat-belt laws - and recasts them as infantilizing. It implies the citizen is competent until bureaucrats decide otherwise, and that the cost of being “protected” is autonomy. The rhetorical trick is that it treats paternalism as a kind of soft tyranny: not jackboots, but guardrails that quietly become cages.

Context matters: Reagan is speaking from the late-1970s/1980s backlash to the Great Society, post-Watergate distrust, and stagflation-era frustration with institutions that seemed expensive, intrusive, and ineffective. The line also strategically sanitizes the coercive side of Reagan’s own governance (policing, national security, the carceral state) by implying those are the “correct” uses of power. It’s less a neutral philosophy than a political sorting mechanism: state force is acceptable when it disciplines “each other,” suspect when it regulates markets or private behavior.