Well, keep seceding from things and you'll get there.
Back in the 1990s, a lot of technoutopians thought that in the future, polities would tend to break into smaller pieces naturally. Computers would tend to reduce the scales necessary to make services work, by lowering the number of administrative personnel needed. Big government has had a pretty good run in the past 20 years and people forgot about the idea, but maybe that was just a big government bubble.
Silicon Valley makes a lot of money on disintermediation. Who's to say government itself isn't something that can and should be disintermediated?
I think people subconsciously assume that if the system holds together, their side will naturally win out, due to sheer rightness. (And won't it be fun to rub your power in the loser's face?) One of the things Brexit ought to be doing to a lot of HN posters here is reminding them quite concretely that that is not true. You may just bind everything and everybody into one big polity, only for it at the last moment to be taken over by the very people you didn't like. It's all fun and games to increase Federal power and jurisdiction over a lot of life to show those racist everything-phobic bumpkins in the flyover states how they are supposed to live life... then you wake up one day and the entire apparatus is at Trump's fingertips. Maybe building that big apparatus wasn't as good an idea as it seemed at the time. Maybe we'd all be better off leaving each other alone a bit more.