Barney Frank, the former Democratic congressman, was fond of saying “‘government’ is the word for the things we do together.”

It’s a perverse notion, historically ignorant, eerily authoritarian and socially insidious. Conservatives too often lend credence to this view, however, by granting Frank’s premise, and trying to counter the Left’s “collectivism” with fierce individualism. But the individual, the man standing alone, is not the counterweight to the Leviathan state.