I think everyone does see that there is good government and bad government. They just disagree about which one is the good one and which is the bad one.

The real problem is when people demand heavy government involvement but don’t think about what could go wrong if an administration decided to misuse the regulation. They just assume it’s going to be used perfectly as they imagined it, usually to punish the companies they dislike while completely sparing the companies they like.

A good example is the usual chorus of people demanding heavy regulations or bans of social media, who always imagine that the regulator won’t touch their websites. They imagine surgical laws hitting Facebook and TikTok because they don’t use those websites, but they imagine the law won’t touch their Discords or require them to do any age verification on their phone or PC for the sites they use. Then we get the intrusive age and ID checking law proposals that everyone hates.

> I think everyone does see that there is good government and bad government.

I only know the time and place I've lived in (United States, born in 1977), but I feel like the trope of "all government is bad" has been the rallying cry of conservatives since the Reagan era.

I'm convinced enough people have grown up hearing that trope that your assumption is incorrect. I think a ton of people believe there can only be bad government because they've never had to think about it-- they've been told that from birth.

I'm not a student of history. Maybe this isn't a new thing and this "all government bad" trope has been a consistent feature of US politics. It doesn't feel like it, though.

If that is the case, then its no skin off of anyone’s back to state it.

As long as I have paid attention to American politics, it’s always had a major undercurrent of “all government bad”, with a subtext of “this thing I know about is an exception”.