Yes, this really is what it boils down to.

Look at the history, the democrats used to protest by claiming the government was the problem and then joined the government and became the problem. DOGE's main purpose is rooting them out.

Essentially, yes; and that's because incompetence and corruption is synonymous with leftist controlled government.

But as to Democrats -- well the youth of the 1960s anyway -- proclaiming that government is the problem was already being flipped on its head by the mid to late 1970s when Reagan said the same thing; and they got ANGRY with him.

Similarly the 1960s hippies were against war -- if for no other reason than they did not want to be stuffed into uniforms and sent off to fight -- and yet now their ideological leftist inheritors are vigorously virtue-signaling war-hawks . . . but exclusively BECAUSE they do not personally have to go fight in the wars they generate and advocate for.

Good point, it is rare warriors want war, when they do it is almost always in self-defense not conquest.

Yes.