What Is The Proper Role of Government?

I go with the US Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

That's it.  The role of government is to secure your natural rights.

Lefties don't quite see it that way, according to the former US Attorney General:

“Under liberal democracy,” he writes, “it is not the role of the state to use its coercive power to remake man and society according to some abstract conception of perfection.” 

The modern left, the former attorney general concludes, has an “incipient totalitarian style” that is “poisoning America’s political life.” The left has adopted “the same kind of revolutionary and totalitarian ideas that propelled the French Revolution, the Communists of the Russian Revolution, and the Fascists of twentieth-century Europe.”

He's right on both points.