And you're for huge big honking government if you agree with the war on drugs.
The War on Drugs and The War on Terrorism have concentrated more power and money in Washington than anything ever dreamed by FDR or LBJ.
The War on Drugs was a Reagan invention to beef up federal law enforcement, especially in the wake if the social upheavals of the 60s where State power was being routinely challenged and local law enforcement lacked the tools to effectively repress the citizenry. The Right, who traditionally sides with State Power, was on the side of Government in the 60s. They were also on the side of southern State Power against blacks during Jim Crow ... and then they were on the side of State Power during the denial of suffrage for woman (-they saw feminism as disrupting traditional family hierarchies). Wherever freedom has been limited for individual groups, the Right is usually on the side of state power, federal or local.
But the need for greater law enforcement after the turbulent 60s was apparent. Big Government needed a way to insulate its policies from public redress. After the Watts Riots and university disruptions from Berkeley all the way to Kent State and Cornell, Governor Reagan was among the rising crop of Republican Power Brokers who would one day create a Washington powerful enough to crush dissent. The War on Drugs became a crucial tool , giving the Fed massive new powers to watch, detain and incarcerate more Americans.
You need to understand the context. There was an entire generation of young people who were not buying into the steroidal globalism behind the growing interventions in places like southeast Asia and Latin America (regions that were eventually stripped of their economic freedom and forced into supplying western investors with ultra cheap labor and raw material). As usual, Republican voters believed Washington's Cold War freedom-narrative 100%; they wrapped themselves in flags and became dupes of the greatest expansion of government power in our lifetime (-the libertarian CATO institute created some great studies about how the Cold War actually grew Washington's power to the point where it could control not just the 50 states, but entire hemispheres. These studies were ultimately suppressed by Movement conservativism, a political force which otherwise supports libertarian policies fully).
America was using the soviet threat as a context to intervene in vital resource regions across the globe. Remember, capitalism is the most productive machine ever created by humankind. This makes it inherently expansionist. Meaning: once the oil runs out in Texas, you need to intervene in the Middle East. Both the Cold War and War on Terrorism were essential structures for building large military bases near the world's most important resources, oil chief among them.
As Reagan expanded Washington's power and budget so that it could be the primary protectorate of the newly formed global market system, he needed better tools for suppressing the dissent of people who stood in opposition to this radical expansion of government power. He needed massive federal agencies with very powerful law enforcement tools so that the nation didn't constantly replay the chaos of the 60s. He wanted something like the Patriot Act, which would give Washington Soviet-level surveillance over the domestic population. But he could not overcome the democratic opposition. The Republican dream of a Big Government Surveillance State would have to wait for Bush 43 - but the War in Drugs went a long way toward giving Washington the kind of concentrated law enforcement power that it sought.
