I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t the U. S. Civil War (at least for America). It seems to me that Lincoln preserved the Union and ended slavery (which needed ending, don’t misunderstand me) but at the expense of our form of government. Federalism and the office of the presidency was greatly empowered empowered afterwards. In a lot of ways Lincoln was a very mixed bag.
I concur.
The problems here in the US may have some origin point in the ACW, but can really be traced directly to the 16th and 17th Amendments, which really tore down the old Federal system by allowing the Federal Gvt to directly tax the incomes of citizens and removing the states from their formal role in the power equation.
Basically those two amendments allowed the Federal Gvt to expand massively, and vote itself the taxes necessary to do so. Obamacare, for instance, is an absolute product of those two amendments.
That’s my take too, it all started then in the west.
I do think it started earlier in Europe though.
Except that it wasn't. The presidents from Johnson to McKinley were not enormously more powerful than pre-war presidents. Most Americans today couldn't name more than one or two of them.
The immense expansion of the federal government started in earnest with TR, and has been nearly continuous since.
Blaming this on Lincoln appears to be a function of the extremely odd notion that if Lincoln had not resisted the dissolution of the Union there would have been no Progressive movement starting up in the 1890s.
That movement was in response to very real societal changes and problems. AFAIK they did not make a fetish of using Lincoln as a precedent.
IOW, the expansion of presidency and federal power started 30-some years after Lincoln died, and for causes quite unrelated to the Civil War.