On the Appeal of Modern Liberalism:
The rise to power of the liberal agenda has resulted from a particular meaning that government has come to have for people in western societies, namely, that the state is a proper source from which to gratify the longings of the people for various forms of parental care.

The modern state has taken on the role of an apparently benign, generous, omnipotent and god-like parent, who serves as custodian, manager, provider and caretaker, all to the detriment of the people.  We have, in effect, parentified our governments in the belief that we will be better off if they take care of us than if we take care of ourselves.  We have shifted our assumptions about the human condition from an ethical and religious conception that we must earn a good life through individual and cooperative hard work and responsibility, to a secular and collectivist conception of life as a manipulative competition for the bounty of the state.  Rather than praying to a higher power to strengthen and guide us in our personal labors to serve others as we serve ourselves, we plead to our legislators for a place at the public trough and hope that they will do unto us at least as generously as they do unto others.  Big government revenue has become in effect the income of a very large family whose many children vie for indulgence, while ready at any moment to protest in the name of egalitarianism if one sibling seems to be getting more than another.
   
These longings to be taken care of, to be relieved of the responsibilities of adult life, have their origins in infancy.  They are properly satisfied in the dependent attachments of children to their parents.  They are not properly satisfied in the dependent attachment of adults to the state.   Instead, the gradual replacement of the dependency longings of the child with mature capacities for competent self-reliance and cooperation with others, as opposed to parasitism on the state, is a critical developmental goal.  Whether or not that goal is achieved has profound implications for the nature and extent of government in a given society