People may like the idea of small government, but that's probably the top issue of only a handful of Connor Roy types and college libertarians, and tangible iss

People may like the idea of small government, but that's probably the top issue of only a handful of Connor Roy types and college libertarians, and tangible issues like "property values" or "safety" probably matter a lot more to real people, and that cuts across party lines. For example, look at the racial segregation of every city in the US [0]. Nearly every city solidly votes for Democratic candidates (I personally am solidly liberal), but our cities are still brutally segregated. There are systemic reasons for this (namely in the Jim Crow era, the govt's FHA started a program that underwrote home loans and its criteria explicitly penalized areas where Black people lived, attended schools, or could easily access [1], and by backing home loans only to white people, the consistent, dramatic increase in home values created a massive racial wealth gap [2] that preserves segregation and trapped millions of Black Americans into clusters that could then be denied equal resources) and the side effects of asymmetrically depriving millions of people of many good choices is that a disproportionately large of that subpopulation (yet still extremely small percent of the entire subpopulation) will make bad choices (eg to rob or engage in violent crime). Hence the divergence between a cities political values on a national level and on a local level (ie quiet acceptance of segregation and the corresponding enforcement mechanisms). This isn't to say Dems are worse than Republicans; a far larger percent of Republicans are explicitly opposed to even hearing about these grotesque racial injustices, let alone attempting to correct these injustices. TL,DR: people don't form their beliefs from grand principles; we've evolved to pick positions that help us satisfy needs (ie from Maslow's hierarchy of needs). If we want less police brutality, we should endure the cost needed to repair the injustices of the past, rather than what we are doing (ie perpetuating that injustice). [0] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/us/census-race-ethnicity-map/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/us/census-race-ethnicit... [1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Federal-Housing-Administration-Underwriting-Manual.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Feder... [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-and-income-concentration-in-the-scf-20200928.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/weal...