It is amazing to think after all that has happened in this country in the last few years, the last few decades, that so many people have this blind faith that government is our friend and therefore, so we don’t need protections against it.

Bovard’s remark targets a recurring civic temptation: to treat the state as inherently benevolent and thus to view constitutional limits, civil liberties, and skepticism of official power as unnecessary or even obstructive. By invoking “all that has happened…in the last few years, the last few decades,” he gestures to a pattern of government overreach and failure that, in his view, should have disabused citizens of naïve trust. The quote frames protections against government not as anti-social hostility but as prudential safeguards—checks and balances, due process, and rights—needed precisely because power can be abused even when exercised in the name of public good.