KEEPING THE FAITH
In Government We Trust (as Far as We Can Throw It)
By SAM ROBERTS New York Times
TO listen to pollsters, politicians and pundits, you might think "the public trust" in government has been urgently threatened at every juncture since the Enron scandal broke in 2001 - or, in the view of the Democratic presidential candidates, since the inauguration of George W. Bush.
The year just ended provided its own fodder for distrust. If the herbal supplement ephedra is so bad for you, why wasn't it banned years ago rather than just last week? What about mad cow disease? They said it couldn't happen here. Remember the budget surplus? Where did it go? Don't forget those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ("Nothing could be a more serious violation of public trust than to consciously make a case for war based on false claims," Gen. Wesley K. Clark said last fall.)
In the fall it was revealed that some mutual fund hotshots, apparently immune to regulation, were favoring fat cats and not ordinary investors. And yes, Parmalat is a foreign company, but its name is on American milk cartons. Nobody knew that a $5 billion - $5 billion - account was just a figment of the company's imagination?
Finally, wasn't the nation just put on Orange Alert? Tell that to the pilot of a private plane who went joy riding around the Statue of Liberty last week, or to the guy who managed to hijack a bus from the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and drive it to Kennedy Airport. No alarm was raised for seven hours that the bus was even missing.
For all of this, it might not be surprising that public faith in government, in big business and in institutions in general appears to be dwindling.
A recent poll of New Yorkers commissioned by the state's chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, found that fully 83 percent believe that campaign contributions influence judges' decisions. In New Jersey, a majority of voters said state legislators place their personal financial concerns ahead of the public interest.
A poll of students found that 45 percent trusted government to tell the truth all of the time, but only 24 percent placed the same degree of trust in corporate America and just 18 percent in the news media.
But how much trust in government did most Americans have in the first place? And has it eroded any faster than faith in other public institutions, like the news media or the Roman Catholic Church?
The fact is, faith in most institutions has been declining for decades.
Trust in government peaked after the New Deal and World War II. It has declined since the war in Vietnam and Watergate. A New York Times/CBS News Poll has been asking Americans for a generation whether they think they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right. The portion who replied "always" or "most of the time" plunged to 18 percent in 1995, just about when the Gingrich Revolution deposed House Democrats, rebounded to a patriotic 55 percent after 9/11 and sunk back to 36 percent last summer.
The general decline raises the question of whether there is a tipping point to eroding trust - a point at which people get really fed up. What happens then? They don't form their own government. Do they vote for Ross Perot (as nearly 1 in 5 did in 1992, rejecting the two major party candidates)? Or Howard Dean? Or do they stay home?
Chuck Todd, editor in chief of The Hotline, a political newsletter, suggested on The Times's Op-Ed page last week that the most pivotal swing voters in 2004 may be the ones who swing between the faith implied by going to the polls and the fatalism of voting with their feet up on the couch - numbed by the preponderance of bad news.
But polling experts suggest that the public trust is more complicated. Although both voting rates and faith in government have declined, Dr. Thomas W. Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, says there is no empirical connection between the two. And Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, says there's a difference between general cynicism toward the government and an overt political response.
"It takes a lot to get people exercised," Mr. Kohut said. "They really have to feel threatened."
Of course, the numbers tell only part of the story. Some people trust their own congressman more than Congress. Others say they trust the system, but not the individuals running it. In some polls, Republicans now have more faith in the federal government - which is being run by Republicans - than Democrats do.
Still other respondents have more faith in the government's ability to defend them against foreign enemies than to solve domestic problems. And polls of younger people suggest they are more cynical about politics than about government, perhaps explaining why so few vote.
Maybe national expectations are skewed. After all, as Gregg Easterbrook writes in "The Progress Paradox," the typical American is much better off today than a half-century ago, but is typically discontented.
How happy are humans entitled to be, anyway? Imagine, given the debate over government regulation in general and the controversy decades ago about fluoride, if some public official suggested placing Prozac in the water supply.
Shy of that, reviewing Mr. Easterbrook's book in The Wall Street Journal, Darrin M. McMahon, a professor at Florida State University and author of the forthcoming "Happiness: A History," warned: "We will never completely resolve the paradoxes of progress by altering our genes or controlling their effects. As the pressure to do so mounts, it may be worth recalling an older paradox: Paradise was not enough to satisfy Adam and Eve."
Measured against nostalgic visions of paradise, the present is bound to pale. In New York, where many people begrudgingly acknowledge that things are generally better than they were a decade or two earlier, most will hasten to add that things were even better many years ago.
Edward I. Koch, the former mayor, recalled the elderly woman he encountered in Coney Island just after he was first inaugurated. "Mayor," she appealed, "make it like it was."
"It never was the way you think it was," Mr. Koch said he thought to himself.
Still, Americans tend to be people of faith, regardless of where they place it. Remember the tale of the child whose parents were worried that he was too optimistic. They took him to a psychiatrist who, trying to shock him back into stark reality, showed him into a room piled high with horse manure. Unfazed, the little boy climbed to the top and began digging.
"What do you think you're doing?" the stunned psychiatrist asked.
"With all this manure," the boy replied, "there must be a pony in here somewhere."
Speaking of faith in government, that was Ronald Reagan's favorite story.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
