I think it's wholly unrealistic to expect that humans can organize themselves without playing dominance games. Those memes go back so far they're really genes.

It's impossible to create a powerless government that will persist longer than a mayfly. Weak government is the highway to feudalism.

The Founders recognized that they couldn't simply include an article in the Consitution saying "Government shall be small and powerless over us"; brute force prohibition wasn't the answer. Prefiguring Bucky Fuller's "tensigrity", they built a system whose individual parts are a strong as they need to be (e.g. an executive capable of executing), and arranged in opposition to form an immensely strong structure based on dynamic tension.

It really doesn't matter how powerful the executive branch gets, in absolute terms, as long as the legislative and judicial branches scale proportionally to preserve the balance. We get into trouble when one branch gets too big for its britches.

It's hard to say whether they looked outside government to consider government as the counterbalance to the accretion of private power through concentration of wealth. But if they held to the belief that you expressed as "Keep ANYONE from getting too much power", then they must have understood that government would end up protecting us from economic tyrants with gold as well as aristocratic tyrants with armies.

It's necessary to include government in the balance of power equations across all of society, and that's why I'm so skeptical of the right's radical support of laissez-faire capitalism coupled with a mania for "strangling government in the bathtub": To the extent that it succeeds, it shifts power from the large majority of ordinary people right into the hands of a wealthy few.

You can't talk credibly of power in a society if you turn a blind eye to the biggest power center outside of government.