It was strong government for the time that established the Bill of Rights and abolished the Atlantic slave trade. The strongest government in the world (the United Kingdom at the time) was the first colonial empire to abolish slavery -- and it expanded its colonial empire in Africa in part to suppress the slave trade. It was strong government that decreed that small children need at the least basic schooling, and then that children attend school instead of working in mines and factories. It was big government that outlawed the infamous patent medicines typically concoctions of alcohol and laudanum that numbed people to the serious illnesses that they felt but did nothing to cure the disease. It was strong government that defeated the demonic Axis Powers and liberated the concentration and extermination camps of Nazi Germany. It was strong government that put up a meaningful defense against the Stalinist and Maoist designs for world domination. It was strong government that put an end to Jim Crow.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.