"...is it about fear of 'the government' or the abuses by those in positions of governmental power?"
To which the only accurate and useful answer is.... yes.
My own way of interpreting powers of 'the government' and how they affect my own life is to discard outright the notion that there is any such thing as THE government.
Under the (on paper) labyrinthine and (in practice) largely improvised system of American interagency federalism, one could credibly assert that in the USA there is not one government but literally thousands of them: federal, state, municipal, county, tribal, military, each with its own codified jurisdiction and specified powers and resources with which to enforce and adjudicate laws, administer programs and personnel, procure supplies, retain contractors, and manage fiscal assets both incoming from whatever source and outgoing by whatever means.
And, each of these forms of absolutely lawful government has its own rules and by-laws and charters, its own subdivisions of agencies and offices, its own network of contractors, consultants and retained legal counsel, as well as its own less formal internal history, traditions, habits and unwritten policies.
Which is all more or less fine, day in and day out, until something happens which requires more than one, or dozens or hundreds, of these entirely separate 'governments' to work together. Then it gets a lot more complicated. If you were to interview any county sheriff or fire chief or any other official who deals with administrative requirements at an interagency level, whether in terms of planned and routine business or emergency management scenarios, any of them qualified to do their jobs will tell you that interagency relations are everything, and perhaps even more so in rural environs.
If you take the example of a 'major project fire' having broken out and begun to spread far from any city, there is a good chance that not only state, municipal and county personnel will be called out, but also federal, or even military and tribal, depending not only on where the fire is burning plus what lines of jurisdiction it has already crossed, but also on what lines it may come to cross given the fire's current behavior.
And as you point out, somebody needs to be in charge. In the case of major fires, there has been a system in place for generations called the 'Incident Command System', which is a masterpiece of interagency liaison, communications, chains of command and coordination of effort. The moment the first volunteer fire truck or county sheriff's deputy arrives at the scene of the fire before anyone else does, the highest-ranking officer present thereby becomes the Incident Commander, until other agencies and their assets arrive whose COs are rated as of higher rank whereupon that ranking official becomes the IC, and so forth, until a full-scale firefighting team is established by means of combining the assets of these multiple agencies, and overall incident-command is assigned to a ranking officer usually of the US Forest Service, Park Service or Bureau of Land Management. At which point everyone on the fire works for that guy in theory, but still every single unit of every jurisdiction retains its own command and regulatory structures as they go about the business of addressing the fire.
Other examples might include major emergency situations such as storms, earthquakes, airplane crashes or shipwrecks, in each of which both the likelihood and the necessity of interagency coordination and cooperation is not only crucial, but has been worked out in detail and written down in law with all agencies having signed on to binding agreements, far in advance.
The problem with all this is that this method of official management works quite well in emergencies, but the same administrative problems or worse ones exist in every detail of American governance.
Imagine someone placed highly enough at a federal department (but not too high to forfeit plausible deniability) sends out a letter to every college or university in the nation which receives federal Title IX funding, saying, "Dear Colleague, there is an emergency of women being assaulted on campus because the Department of Education says there is, and if you want to keep getting all that cushy T9 funding we usually never ask any questions about, here's what we now require you to do....'
The rest, of course, being history, and you can interpret the eventual outcomes any way you like.
But what goes to my point about interagency relations, in other words how official powers in the USA are anything BUT 'centralized' and by prior deign and lengthy precedent, is that as soon as anyone affected by the letter has read the letter, it becomes up to each campus police commander, dean of students, health services administrator or other muckity-muck on that campus (times thousands of them, all over the USA) to decide under their own official banner what it is the feds are demanding, when their demands had come in the form of vague and nonsensical suggestions wrapped in much urgent rhetoric about how bad the emergency must be on ideological grounds, and then each one of these officials has to decide what to do about it. As all the while, the only emergency on the ground outside each of these offices is not that women are being abused, but that they might lose their funding if they don't do what the feds are.... strongly but not very specifically suggesting they do.
Another example, of course, is about things I learned about abuses of power and corrupt applications of federal grant funds, while researching the Violence Against Women Act in terms of how the grants are distributed, what is required of grantees, and what happens to the money in the real world instead.
And every bit of the tens of millions in these funds I saw having been re-distributed unlawfully in plain sight with no one trying all that hard to deny it, went astray because of the extremely poor coordination of relevant agencies and administrations who stood to benefit from spending the money however they chose, plus the even worse oversight provided by 'the government' (if you insist that there is only one, even though this has never been true) when the USDOJ would send out the occasional auditing team to try and work out where the money they had sent had ended up.
On a scale ranging from selective and prejudicial hiring practices to outright bribery of high-ranking officials, with every form of graft, fraud, nepotism, creative accounting and outright theft from the cash box you can imagine in between, I assert that the most common, widespread, harmful, almost untraceable and almost absolutely unprosecuted form of 'corruption' that exists in all of government across the USA, has to do with FEDERAL GRANTS, because these systems from grantor to grantee have hardly any restrictive means beyond written regulations in order to truly regulate where all that money actually goes. Federal grants, in every form and for every purpose, are the ultimate free goods that have (as Tony Soprano might put it) fallen off a truck, and with a pretty good chance no one will come looking for them, or do anything about it but issue stern memos if they do.
And absolutely none of this free-for-all of money for the asking and everyone who can do the paperwork asking and receiving, has the least thing to do with power being 'centralized.' The money might come from centralized sources in some office in DC, and the allocations of it might come from a handful of legislators down the street reacting to poll numbers about one ideological emergency after another, but out here in the real USA, 'the government' is nothing but an ignorant nuisance and a handy cash-cow all at once... until there is a forest fire.
So in this sense the DC regime with all its agencies and operatives and task forces and bureaux up the wazoo, is in practical terms the LEAST powerful form of government in the USA. Most of the power is in the hands of local bosses thriving on federal handouts with the feds none the wiser, whether their feudal estate is a massive city or a thinly-populated rural county.
There is so much everyday corruption and abuse of power hiding in plain sight at every level of this interagency nightmare of American federalism, that damn near everybody knows about it, especially knowing there isn't a damn thing they can do about it other than get in line for some of the pay-dirt, and 'the government' in DC which hardly ever manages to actually govern much of anything other than handing out free money, doesn't have a goddamn clue, because it doesn't want to know.
"...is it about fear of 'the government' or the abuses by those in positions of governmental power?"
To which the only accurate and useful answer is.... yes.
My own way of interpreting powers of 'the government' and how they affect my own life is to discard outright the notion that there is any such thing as THE government.
Under the (on paper) labyrinthine and (in practice) largely improvised system of American interagency federalism, one could credibly assert that in the USA there is not one government but literally thousands of them: federal, state, municipal, county, tribal, military, each with its own codified jurisdiction and specified powers and resources with which to enforce and adjudicate laws, administer programs and personnel, procure supplies, retain contractors, and manage fiscal assets both incoming from whatever source and outgoing by whatever means.
And, each of these forms of absolutely lawful government has its own rules and by-laws and charters, its own subdivisions of agencies and offices, its own network of contractors, consultants and retained legal counsel, as well as its own less formal internal history, traditions, habits and unwritten policies.
Which is all more or less fine, day in and day out, until something happens which requires more than one, or dozens or hundreds, of these entirely separate 'governments' to work together. Then it gets a lot more complicated. If you were to interview any county sheriff or fire chief or any other official who deals with administrative requirements at an interagency level, whether in terms of planned and routine business or emergency management scenarios, any of them qualified to do their jobs will tell you that interagency relations are everything, and perhaps even more so in rural environs.
If you take the example of a 'major project fire' having broken out and begun to spread far from any city, there is a good chance that not only state, municipal and county personnel will be called out, but also federal, or even military and tribal, depending not only on where the fire is burning plus what lines of jurisdiction it has already crossed, but also on what lines it may come to cross given the fire's current behavior.
And as you point out, somebody needs to be in charge. In the case of major fires, there has been a system in place for generations called the 'Incident Command System', which is a masterpiece of interagency liaison, communications, chains of command and coordination of effort. The moment the first volunteer fire truck or county sheriff's deputy arrives at the scene of the fire before anyone else does, the highest-ranking officer present thereby becomes the Incident Commander, until other agencies and their assets arrive whose COs are rated as of higher rank whereupon that ranking official becomes the IC, and so forth, until a full-scale firefighting team is established by means of combining the assets of these multiple agencies, and overall incident-command is assigned to a ranking officer usually of the US Forest Service, Park Service or Bureau of Land Management. At which point everyone on the fire works for that guy in theory, but still every single unit of every jurisdiction retains its own command and regulatory structures as they go about the business of addressing the fire.
Other examples might include major emergency situations such as storms, earthquakes, airplane crashes or shipwrecks, in each of which both the likelihood and the necessity of interagency coordination and cooperation is not only crucial, but has been worked out in detail and written down in law with all agencies having signed on to binding agreements, far in advance.
The problem with all this is that this method of official management works quite well in emergencies, but the same administrative problems or worse ones exist in every detail of American governance.
Imagine someone placed highly enough at a federal department (but not too high to forfeit plausible deniability) sends out a letter to every college or university in the nation which receives federal Title IX funding, saying, "Dear Colleague, there is an emergency of women being assaulted on campus because the Department of Education says there is, and if you want to keep getting all that cushy T9 funding we usually never ask any questions about, here's what we now require you to do....'
The rest, of course, being history, and you can interpret the eventual outcomes any way you like.
But what goes to my point about interagency relations, in other words how official powers in the USA are anything BUT 'centralized' and by prior deign and lengthy precedent, is that as soon as anyone affected by the letter has read the letter, it becomes up to each campus police commander, dean of students, health services administrator or other muckity-muck on that campus (times thousands of them, all over the USA) to decide under their own official banner what it is the feds are demanding, when their demands had come in the form of vague and nonsensical suggestions wrapped in much urgent rhetoric about how bad the emergency must be on ideological grounds, and then each one of these officials has to decide what to do about it. As all the while, the only emergency on the ground outside each of these offices is not that women are being abused, but that they might lose their funding if they don't do what the feds are.... strongly but not very specifically suggesting they do.
Another example, of course, is about things I learned about abuses of power and corrupt applications of federal grant funds, while researching the Violence Against Women Act in terms of how the grants are distributed, what is required of grantees, and what happens to the money in the real world instead.
And every bit of the tens of millions in these funds I saw having been re-distributed unlawfully in plain sight with no one trying all that hard to deny it, went astray because of the extremely poor coordination of relevant agencies and administrations who stood to benefit from spending the money however they chose, plus the even worse oversight provided by 'the government' (if you insist that there is only one, even though this has never been true) when the USDOJ would send out the occasional auditing team to try and work out where the money they had sent had ended up.
On a scale ranging from selective and prejudicial hiring practices to outright bribery of high-ranking officials, with every form of graft, fraud, nepotism, creative accounting and outright theft from the cash box you can imagine in between, I assert that the most common, widespread, harmful, almost untraceable and almost absolutely unprosecuted form of 'corruption' that exists in all of government across the USA, has to do with FEDERAL GRANTS, because these systems from grantor to grantee have hardly any restrictive means beyond written regulations in order to truly regulate where all that money actually goes. Federal grants, in every form and for every purpose, are the ultimate free goods that have (as Tony Soprano might put it) fallen off a truck, and with a pretty good chance no one will come looking for them, or do anything about it but issue stern memos if they do.
And absolutely none of this free-for-all of money for the asking and everyone who can do the paperwork asking and receiving, has the least thing to do with power being 'centralized.' The money might come from centralized sources in some office in DC, and the allocations of it might come from a handful of legislators down the street reacting to poll numbers about one ideological emergency after another, but out here in the real USA, 'the government' is nothing but an ignorant nuisance and a handy cash-cow all at once... until there is a forest fire.
So in this sense the DC regime with all its agencies and operatives and task forces and bureaux up the wazoo, is in practical terms the LEAST powerful form of government in the USA. Most of the power is in the hands of local bosses thriving on federal handouts with the feds none the wiser, whether their feudal estate is a massive city or a thinly-populated rural county.
There is so much everyday corruption and abuse of power hiding in plain sight at every level of this interagency nightmare of American federalism, that damn near everybody knows about it, especially knowing there isn't a damn thing they can do about it other than get in line for some of the pay-dirt, and 'the government' in DC which hardly ever manages to actually govern much of anything other than handing out free money, doesn't have a goddamn clue, because it doesn't want to know.