In a strange place
BY GLORIA BORGER
Nation & World
U.S. News & World Report
9/16/02
There was a time, after September 11, when Americans decided there was something we had to do that we had not done for a very long time: trust our government. In many ways, it was an unnatural act. After all, a somewhat healthy mistrust of concentrated power has been hard-wired into the American political culture for generations. The last time we really placed a great deal of faith and trust in our government, in fact, had been from after World War II through the early 1960s. We felt great: We had won the war, licked the Depression, and invented the idea of disposable income. Then came the Kennedy and King assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate. We became skeptics again.
But for that brief post-9/11 moment, we had Rudy calming fearful New Yorkers, and the president with his megaphone at ground zero, and the attorney general rounding up the bad guys. All of those firefighters and cops became our new heroes, the ultimate public servants who sacrificed their lives. So it wasn't a surprise that 57 percent of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing, up from 29 percent just two months before the attacks. "The numbers said, 'Here's who we are as a nation,' " says pollster Peter Hart. "We felt good about the administration and about our generation." And maybe the new trust in government also had something to do with a new need for government: There were serious challenges ahead that only behemoth government could tackle. Besides, our leaders seemed on top of it.
Bickering. That was then. One year later, we're skeptics again. Americans are wary about the government's homeland security program. (Has anyone been to an airport lately?) The FBI and the CIA turned into bureaucratic nightmares. Even the Red Cross couldn't collect blood and donations without a controversy. And Congress is back to partisan bickering.
Sure, we won in Afghanistan, but the war isn't over. Al Qaeda is hiding out all over the world; Osama's probably on the run, too. Only a third of the public believes that the terrorists are now less able to launch an attack, according to a new Pew Research survey. Then there's Saddam Hussein to think about, and whether the United States should launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq. Americans want to get rid of Saddam, but the Pew poll makes it very clear that two thirds do not want to go it alone.
On top of all of this terrorism anxiety, consider the rest of the year: cheating at the Olympics, depravity in the Roman Catholic Church, theft in the corporate boardroom. "Now the crooks are running the corporations, and the pederasts are running the churches," says G. Calvin Mackenzie, coauthor of a Brookings Institution report on the fading faith in government. To make matters worse, 401(k) plans shrank as the stock market tanked. "The pillars of our society," says Hart, "turned out to be the pills." One of the only institutions left standing is the military--with an 80 percent approval rating.
Where does this leave us? In a strange place--still fighting a war, yet swamped by concerns about everything else. Consistency has not become our strong suit. While there is this declining trust in government, for instance, we've also decided that government is cool again. How so? More than half of the voters now believe that government regulation is necessary. As in: If big business is controlled by a bunch of bandits, only government can be the sheriff. Even an antiregulation Republican like George W. Bush has come around to that view.
There's a fine line, pollsters say, between healthy skepticism and cynicism--and no one quite knows how to identify it. Many Americans, even post 9/11, remain implicitly mistrustful of government; others want to trust government but have been disappointed. The problem, says Mackenzie, is that it's harder for leaders to lead and take bold action when the public views almost everything cynically. So far, at least, the voters still trust President Bush. If that evaporates, watch out.
There is an undeniable duality here: We Americans love our country. We respect many of our leaders. In fact, Americans rank the highest in the world when it comes to patriotism. Yet we're also the toughest when evaluating how the country is being run and who is running it. In other words, we strongly believe that we can love our country and criticize our government at any given time. All in all, that's a good thing. "We love our values, and we love our Constitution," says Mackenzie. And we can always feel good about that.
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Gloria Borger is also a CBS News special correspondent.
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