There are few thinkers of the mid-20th century who generate more controversy (and misunderstanding) that the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. But in his most famous book, The Concept of the Political, his description of the absorption of more and more social (by which we’d understand as largely private) domains sounds an awful lot like progressive government in the U.S. today:

One seldom finds a clear definition of the political. . . The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state—as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains—religion, culture, education, the economy—then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics. As a polemical concept against such neutralizations and depoliticalizations of important domains appears the total state, which potentially embraces every domain. This results in the identity of state and society. In such a state, therefore, everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the state it is no longer possible to assert for it a specifically political characteristic. . . The state’s form thus becomes increasingly questionable and its radius of power ever broader.