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This item, which is the fourth essay in the Demos/TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by David Callahan, Senior Fellow and Director of the International Program at Demos.
Attacks on government find resonance with the public not just because of claims that bureaucrats can’t do anything right or wield too much power, but also because of a widespread belief that public officials have selfish motives. That’s a big problem. As Bill Galston points out elsewhere in this forum, Americans need to see public leaders as competent and responsive in order to trust them – but also as having integrity. While making government work better may be the most important step in rebuilding trust, it is also crucial that progressives mount a new attack on corruption in government – and get credit for the successes we have already had in this area.
None of this will be easy.
Political corruption has loomed large in the news over the past few years, with a seemingly unending string of scandals – from Jack Abramoff to Charles Rangel. These high-profile scandals, along with an avalanche of smaller cases around the country, reinforce some of the public’s worst fears about government officials.
While politics is less corrupt than in most past eras, when political machines filled the public sector with cronies, there is still plenty of corruption and, at times, this issue can drive political outcomes. Public concerns about corruption following the Abramoff affair played a decisive role in helping the Democrats retake Congress in 2006 and this issue strongly influenced several recent governor races. In some states, corruption has been a ubiquitous topic in recent years, including Alabama (where four state legislators were recently arrested for taking bribes and where a former governor was convicted on corruption charges in 2006); Alaska (where six state legislators have been sentenced in felonies in the past three years); California (where a cabal of public officials looted the city of Bell); Connecticut (where a former governor, John Rowland, recently served prison time); Florida (which leads the nation in public corruption cases and where scandals have roiled Palm Beach County); Illinois (where one former governor, George Ryan, is serving prison time and another, Rod Blagojevich, is trying to stay out of prison); Louisiana (where former governor Edward Edwards recently completed a nine-year prison sentence for a host of crimes); Michigan (where former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been charged with dozens of felonies); New Jersey (where 44 people, including three mayors and two state legislators, were arrested for corruption in 2009); New York (where a number of top political leaders including a former state comptroller and former Senate Majority Leader have faced federal charges); and Tennessee,(where four state legislators were nailed on federal charges of accepting bribes). Corruption has also shaken Capitol Hill, as a slew of legislators have faced serious charges or been destroyed by scandal – Rangel, Tom DeLay, Ted Stevens, Duke Cunningham, Maxine Waters, John Ensign, and more. In 2009 alone, federal authorities charged 1,082 individuals across the nation in corruption cases involving the public sector and convicted another 1,061.
The constant stream of corruption stories over the past few years comes on top of decades of high-profile political corruption cases including Watergate, Abscam (which sent six members of Congress to prison), the Keating Five, the House banking scandal (which led to charges against six members of Congress), the Congressional Post Office scandal and conviction of Dan Rostenkowski, the fall of House Speakers Jim Wright and then Newt Gingrich for ethical transgressions, and the appointment of six Independent Counsels during the 1990s who investigated not just Bill and Hillary Clinton, but also Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and others. Did I miss anything? Oh, yes: The conviction of numerous lesser known federal officials of serious crimes, like Congressional members David Durenberger, Jim Traficant, Charles Diggs, and William Jefferson. There was also the Iran-Contra scandal, which kept Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh busy for seven years and resulted in charges against a number of high-level government officials.
We live in an age of political scandal and it has taken a toll. When Gallup asked respondents in a poll last October to use one word to describe government, “corrupt” was one of the top three words used. Incompetence at the proverbial DMV office is one sure way to turn Americans off to government. The recurrent spectacle of public officials heading off to prison is surely another.
Progressives are schizophrenic when it comes to corruption. At one level, we are fierce opponents of corruption and since the 1960s liberal reformers have sought to ferret out all kinds of abuses in the public sector. It is liberals who have led efforts to crack down on the poisonous effects of campaign money and insidious “revolving door” ties with industry. It is liberals who tend to blow the whistle most loudly about cronyism or the abuses of private contractors working for government. And it is progressive watchdog groups – like the PIRGS or the Center for Responsive Government – that have led the charge for stronger ethics rules, at both the national and state level, that limit the gifts and perks that public officials can receive. Looking back to earlier eras, it was progressive reformers who promoted modern civil service systems to professionalize government and insulate it from political patronage.
But there is another, less flattering side to the story. Progressives have often been inconsistent or opportunistic when it comes to spotlighting corruption and, worse, tolerant of corrupt practices and leaders. We are happy to expose wrongdoing by Republicans – think of the glee about the recent conviction of Tom DeLay – but tend to be ambivalent about cases within our own ranks. One reason that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t force Charles Rangel from his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee early on was because there was no strong demand that she do so from either the party’s base or the liberal commentariat. If a Republican chair of Ways and Means had been accused of the same gross violations of ethics, progressive bloggers would have eaten him or her alive. Thanks to Pelosi’s passivity, the drawn-out Rangel saga no doubt reinforced the view of many Americans that public officials lack integrity – and just in time for the mid-term election.
Beyond a partisan reflex to defend our own leaders, progressives can go easy on corruption because we don’t like beating up on government, which has enough powerful enemies already. That may seem to make sense, except that it often renders us mute on issues that concern the public and should concern progressive reformers. Earmarks are one example. You might think that a movement ostensibly committed to accountable government would go after secret and often wasteful pet projects of powerful legislators. Instead, progressives have tended to pooh-pooh earmarks as small change in a huge budget and have let the Tea Party frame this issue as part of a broader argument about why public officials can’t be trusted.
Another example is the flagrant abuse of pension rules that have allowed some public servants to retire with outsized pensions based on inflated salary histories. This is an inexcusable practice that drains resources away from other public priorities. Also disturbing are the deceptive accounting practices that state officials have used to play down pension obligations or the “pay-for-play” deals these officials have struck with investment funds. But you won’t find much mention of these abuses on say, the DailyKos or in a Bob Herbert column. We are, it seems, happy to let Fox News monopolize such issues and cast them in the worst possible light.
A final reason that the progressive coalition isn’t great about calling out corruption is that Democrats are too closely linked to interests involved in corruption. In an earlier era, the alleged monkey business around the government bailout of Wall Street might have been seized on by Democratic leaders. But today Democrats are so closely tied to Wall Street that it is hard for them to take on political corruption involving the financial sector and so this issue was left to Tea Party activists. (Andrew Cuomo’s prosecution of New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi for receiving kickbacks from investment funds is a notable exception.) A similar story holds around wrongdoing by public sector employees. Quite apart from the liberal reflex to defend career public servants, many Democrats are hesitant to cross public sector unions, who rank as the largest and most loyal contributors to party committees and candidates, as well to 527s that work for Democratic victories. Sure, padded pensions may be outrageous, but is saying that publicly worth ticking off AFSCME? Maybe not.
Liberals may have largely invented modern oversight of the public sector and may have led efforts to get money out of politics, but we only episodically get credit for fostering good government. Worse, we are routinely caricatured as the defenders of public servants who are more interested in serving their own interests than the public interest.
The Democratic Strategist
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This item, which is the third essay in the Demos/TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by Patrick Bresette, Associate Program Director of the Public Works program at Demos.
[T]rust is probably the moral orientation that most needs to be diffused among the people if republican society is to be maintained.” – Gianfranco Poggi, Images of Society
2011 began with a dramatically altered political landscape in which the question of trust in government hangs heavy in the air. We have just experienced an electoral cycle where anti-government rhetoric was at an all time high and public trust in government at historical lows. But puzzling contradictions roil beneath the surface of this seemingly anti-government moment. How can it be that dramatic failures in the private sector – from the Wall Street collapse to the BP oil spill – have not highlighted the essential protective and public interest roles of government? How can polls show historically low levels of trust in government AND deep support for many of the actual programs of government? How does an Election Day that saw numerous anti-government, anti-tax zealots swept into office also witness convincing defeats of tax cut proposals in Massachusetts and Colorado, and broad support for tax increases to protect public services in dozens of localities?
Do these contradictions reveal complexities in what “trust in government” actually means, and therefore what “rebuilding trust” entails?
What if the root causes of public distrust in government, and thus the clues to its rebuilding – do not exist in government per se but are more directly related to trust itself, to its fragility in the complex world in which we live, and to the damaging consequences of cynicism in our current political culture?
The notion that trust is a foundational value in a democratic society informs one of the core goals at Dēmos – to rebuild public trust and support for government and its role. We believe that without a reasonable level of faith and trust in government, our ability as a country to address the whole range of challenges and opportunities of this new century will be hamstrung. We further believe that this task must be taken on directly.
How then do we rebuild trust? And what kind of trust are we trying to restore? For trust is multifaceted; it can be based in practical and functional experiences, but it can also spring from values-based judgments that underpin a kind of trust more akin to “faith.” This latter type of trust is essentially optimistic, it springs from a worldview that believes that a fundamental trust in the goodwill of others is essential to a functioning society. Any successful effort to rebuild trust in government must address both of these kinds of trust – trust in the functions of public institutions and trust in shared purposes – trust in “how” and trust in “why.” To date, most of our approaches to rebuilding trust have focused on the practical kind–attempting only to fix the “how” of government.
In his paper “Trust as a Moral Value,” Eric Uslaner talks about this kind of practical and strategic trust: “trust is mostly conceived as a “rational” response to behavior by others. This standard account of trust presumes that trust depends on information and experience – call it ‘knowledge-based trust.’ [Thus], the decision to trust another person is essentially strategic.”
This knowledge-based notion of trust – “functional trust” if you will – underpins efforts to rebuild trust in government that focus on governmental competence. Such efforts seek to improve and modernize public programs and services as the avenue for rebuilding confidence in the functions of government and therefore, trust. It is also the motivating factor for many of the governmental transparency and accountability initiatives currently underway.
Make it Work and Trust will Follow
“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works–whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”
– President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009
This perspective – articulated well by the incoming president – accepts that much of the current distrust in government stems from people’s lived experiences with government. It suggests that we have a government that is outdated and outmoded and needs to be improved in order to rebuild trust. This approach informed the Clinton/Gore “Reinventing Government” initiative whose mission was to “create a government that works better, costs less, and gets results Americans care about.” It is also at the core of the “Doing What Works” project of the Campaign for American Progress, as their website asserts:
Opinion research shows the public does not believe government is capable of effectively and efficiently executing its responsibilities. This mistrust is a significant barrier to advancing policies to address even the most popular goals. For attitudes to change, the public first and foremost will have to see government acting responsibly and working to deliver maximum bang for the buck.
Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer raise similar themes in a recent essay titled “The ‘More What, Less How’ Government” published in the journal Democracy:
The current dissatisfaction with government is not a mere perception or marketing problem, as too many on the left still believe. It is a product problem. Government has for too many people become unresponsive, dehumanizing, and inefficient. Only when we improve government itself will our satisfaction with it improve. Unfortunately, the American discourse on government has long been frozen in two dimensions: more vs. less, big vs. small.
There is much to support this “knowledge-based” approach to rebuilding trust in government. Our own investigations point to the essential need to reconnect Americans to the actual work of government – the systems and structures that underpin the functioning of our communities and our quality of life. Perhaps a focus on competency and modernization is necessary. But it is worth reflecting on what this approach to trust-building does not address; and, with the Reinventing Government initiative as an example, whether it actually can improve trust in government.
Rebuilding trust in government through improving competency is focused on answering “how” questions – how does government function and how can it be improved. It leaves hanging in the air the “why” questions. Why government at all? Why is any particular public sector activity uniquely “public” in purpose and responsibility? These are value-based questions that ask us to consider the fundamental mission of government and its embodiment of our collective goals, objectives and even aspirations. It is hard to answer “how” and “what” questions about government if you have not answered the “why” questions as well.
For example, achieving all of the major reforms and public investments that are proposed by Liu and Hanauer, as well as those outlined in the Doing What Works initiative, will require significant political and popular support. It is difficult to see how these can be accomplished without engaging Americans in a conversation about the value and purpose of government as the grounds upon which public will and trust can – or should – be reconstructed. Where will public will for such changes come from?
Are there lessons for a “knowledge-based” approach to trust-building from the Reinventing Government initiative? Yes, and they are not all that encouraging. As Donald Kettl wrote in his 1998 Brookings report Reinventing Government: A Fifth Year Report Card: despite its “important and lasting accomplishments . . . [t]he campaign had difficulty in penetrating the public’s confidence and rebuilding trust in government (grade: C).”
There is certainly more to explore here, but despite all of the initiative’s good work to weed out old practices and to reform and restructure public agencies, it did not dramatically alter the dominant “public” narrative about government. In fact, it could be argued that it inadvertently reinforced the story of waste and inefficiency that it sought to correct. The media’s attention to the efforts of the initiative – and thus the public’s attention – focused on all the most egregious examples of wasteful spending that were being uncovered – from outrageously overpriced ashtrays, toilet seats and hammers to overlapping and duplicative governmental agencies and processes. All of the headlines were about how much waste had been uncovered and how much money would be saved–thus begging the question, “if you found that much waste so readily, how much more must there be?”
“Knowledge-based” trust building may be important, but it will not succeed alone. In part this is because it still externalizes the problem: government is still the “other,” something “out there” that must be fixed in order for us to trust it. The deeper trust deficit we face is in a shared belief – faith, if you will – in the very notion of government as an embodiment of shared purpose – in “us”, in each other.
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This item, which is the second essay in the Demos/TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-director and creator of its Progressive Studies Program, and Ruy Teixeira, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and at The Century Foundation, and Co-Editor of The Democratic Strategist.
Many observers have remarked, perhaps most famously Hadley Cantril and Lloyd Free in their 1967 book, The Political Beliefs of Americans, on the disjuncture between the public’s positive agenda for government in many specific areas and its negative overall assessment of government’s performance. Cantril’s and Free’s well-know formulation is that the American public is “operationally liberal” but “ideologically conservative”. This may not be precisely the right way to put it but it does throw the paradox of American opinion on government into sharp relief.
This paradox would not matter much to advocates of active government if this operational liberalism could be easily channeled into support for worthy government programs. But it cannot. Jaundiced overall views of government consistently drag down support for government programs even in areas where the public says it wants more action. This makes it difficult to allocate sufficient resources to get the job done in these areas, which only reinforces public doubts about government effectiveness, stiffens resistance to taxation and increases sensitivity to the level of government debt. The first couple of years of the Obama administration have provided abundant evidence of this dynamic, where an underfunded stimulus, followed by a very sluggish recovery, has led to a flowering of anti-government sentiment.
For example, a May, 2010, Center for American Progress survey asked Americans “when the government in Washington decides to solve a problem, how much confidence do you have that the problem actually will be solved?” This question has been asked periodically by various news organizations over two decades, and the current results represent the lowest level of public confidence ever recorded. Just one-third (33 percent) of adults voice a lot or some confidence, 35 percent have “just a little confidence,” and another one-third (31 percent) have no confidence at all. The proportion saying “no confidence” has never before exceeded 23 percent. Simply put, Americans do not feel confident that their federal government can get the job done when it takes on a challenge. And that’s kind of a problem when government action is so urgently needed to build up our infrastructure, shepherd the transition to a clean energy economy, massively improve our educational system and much more.
The obvious solution is to bring the two aspects of Americans’ views on government more closely into alignment so that support for government action in specific areas is matched by a more positive view of government’s overall role. But how to do that?
What Is To Be Done?
Progressives generally agree that the duality of American public opinion on government is a serious problem. But that agreement does not extend to solutions.
On the broad center-left, there are three general approaches to solving the problem. First, and perhaps the most popular, is the idea that progressives must improve their communication about government. The recommended approach here is typically a combination of reminding people of all the good things that government already does and devising different language (or “framing”) to talk about proposed new initiatives. There is, however, no evidence that this approached has worked, or can work. People’s views on government are not produced mostly by the way conservatives talk about government and they will not be substantially changed by the way progressives talk about government. Their views are far more solidly based, reflecting their experience with government and their assessment of government’s output. In short, their views are rooted in the real world, not talk, and, even if unfair or mistaken in interpretation, these views cannot be dismissed as some form of false consciousness.
The second approach focuses on one aspect of the government (the deficit) and asserts that solving this problem is the key to turning around public views of government. It is true that public concern about the deficit is currently high. But enhanced concern about the budget deficit and government spending is properly understood as a symptom of the underlying failure of government to function effectively, particularly in terms of improving the economy. It is the latter that is of fundamental concern to the public, not the former.
Just how low the deficit ranks as a stand-alone problem can be seen in a couple of recent polls by CBS/New York Times and Gallup. In the CBS/New York Times poll, a miniscule 4 percent thought Congress should concentrate first on the deficit/debt problem compared to 56 percent who thought economy/jobs should come first. In the Gallup poll, 9 percent thought the budget deficit was the most important problem facing the country, compared to 64 percent who selected jobs/unemployment/the economy as the key problem.
So focusing on the deficit seems an unlikely way to restore confidence in government. Moreover, by emphasizing an abstract concept like the deficit, it shares with the first approach a belief that the public’s animus toward government is not rooted in concrete experience with, and assessment of, government action.
This brings us to the third approach: improving people’s experience with government and improving the effectiveness of government action. This may be more difficult than changing the way we talk about government and more complicated than focusing on a single number like the size of the deficit, but it could actually succeed, whereas the other two approaches are bound to fail.
This approach starts with directly reforming the way government operates, rather than shrinking it, a priority, it is worth noting, that the public shares. In the CAP survey mentioned above, Americans were asked what should be the higher priority for improving the federal government: reducing the cost and size of federal government, or improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government? By a decisive margin of 62 percent to 36 percent, people said their priority is making government more efficient and more effective, not reducing its size. In the political center, where concern about deficits supposedly resides, independents (62 percent) and moderates (69 percent) both cite a clear preference for more effective government.
The CAP survey tested reactions to a strong government reform agenda (“Doing What Works”) and found very high levels of support. This agenda had three core components:
• Eliminating inefficient programs and redirecting support to the most cost-effective programs
• Evaluating government program performance and making information available to the public
• Improving the management methods and information technologies of the government
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This item, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, who is also Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, is the first essay in the Demos/TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government.
In November 2008, right after the presidential election, Elaine Kamarck and I published what turned out to be a very unpopular essay, entitled “Change You Can Believe in Needs a Government You Can Trust.” We began this way:
As Barack Obama takes office in 2009, he will confront a paradox. On the one hand, the American people are demanding action in many areas–to improve the economy, to increase access to health care while restraining costs, and to reduce energy costs and our dependence on oil, among others. On the other hand, people are deeply mistrustful of the federal government as an honest and capable agent for achieving these goals. There is nothing new about this ambivalence, but how the next president deals with it may make the difference between success and failure, measured in sustainable public support as well as legislative accomplishment.
This reason is this: in our politics, trust is a cause as well as a consequence. While events affect public trust in government, trust shapes the limits of political possibilities. When trust is high, policy makers may reasonably hope to enact and implement federal solutions to our most pressing problems. When trust is low, as it is today, policy makers face more constraints. As leading scholar, Marc Hetherington, puts it, “Most Americans, whether conservative or liberal, do not trust the delivery vehicle for most progressive public policy. Even if people support progressive policy goals, they do not support the policies themselves because they do not believe that government is capable of bringing about desired outcomes.” In 1992, for example, public support for some form of national health insurance exceeded any level previously measured. When Bill Clinton took office, however, trust in the federal government had reached an historic low, a fact that contributed to the eventual defeat of his ambitious health care proposal. While it is risky to draw broad inferences from a single instance, however dramatic, it seems reasonable to assume that the people will tend to resist, and perhaps reject, policy proposals that are wildly inconsistent with prevailing levels of trust in government.
We ended our essay by cautioning that 2009 would be more like 1993 than 1933 or 1965, and by recommending that the new administration lead off with a series of modest but essential trust-building measures rather than with large new domestic policy initiatives, which would be politically viable only after public trust had been substantially restored.
The events of the past two years have not changed my mind about any of this. Today, trust in government stands near an historic low, well below where it stood the day Barack Obama was elected. To understand what this means for the future, we need to review briefly the political history of the past half-century.
Trust in Government: A Brief History
In the late 1950s, the federal government that fought the Great Depression, won the Second World War, avoided the anticipated post-war economic slump, built the interstate highway system, and encouraged the growth of a mass middle class could draw upon a huge reservoir of public support. In 1958, 73 percent of the American people reported that they trusted the government in Washington to do what was right “most of the time” or “just about always.” 76 percent of the electorate that gave Lyndon Johnson his 1964 landslide said the same thing. That turned out to be a post-war (and probably an all-time) high. By 1968, trust had declined to 61 percent; by 1972, to 53 percent. Scholars point to Vietnam, assassinations, and racial and cultural conflict as the major contributors to the 23-point drop in the eight years between 1964 and the 1972 Nixon landslide over McGovern.
Then came Watergate, which dealt a shattering blow to public trust. By the midterm election of 1974, it had plunged an additional 17 points, to 36 percent–less than half the peak attained just ten years earlier.
It never fully recovered. In effect, the decade 1964-1974 marked the transition between two distinct phases of the post-war era. In the first, the default setting was public trust in the federal government; in the second, it has been mistrust.
This is not to say that trust has remained constant over the past 36 years. It continued to decline during the Ford-Carter years, bottoming out at 25 percent in 1980. It rose through much of the 1980s, reaching 44 percent the day of the Reagan 1984 landslide. It still stood at 40 percent the day George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. Then it slid again, to 29 percent on election day 1992 and a woeful 21 percent in 1994 as Republicans ended the Democrats’ 40-year majority in the House of Representatives. In the ten years from the 1994 midterms to George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, trust rebounded. By the end of the Clinton administration, it had more than doubled from its low-point, to 44 percent, identical to the Reagan-era peak, and consistent with the proposition that trust in government often tracks the state of the economy. Consistent with another maxim–that people tend to rally around the government in the face of external threats–it spiked to 56 percent in the year after 9/11 and still stood at 47 percent in November of 2004.
Bush’s second term witnessed another sharp drop in public trust, in part because events did not confirm the central public justification for initiating the Iraq war, and also because the economy entered a deep recession after the near-collapse of the financial system. By election day 2008, it had declined 17 points, to only 30 percent.
Despite the hope that Barack Obama’s victorious campaign had inspired, there is no evidence that it changed the public’s attitude toward the federal government. In June of 2009, when Obama still enjoyed the approval of more than 60 percent of the American people, only 20 percent said they trusted the government, a number that has barely budged ever since.
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This is the introductory essay to a new online forum jointly sponsored by the progressive intellectual center Demos and The Democratic Strategist . It is authored by the forum’s co-editors, Demos Senior Fellow Lew Daly and TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore.
In the wake of the 2010 election and in the midst of current battles over the size, cost and purpose of government, it’s increasingly obvious that erosion of Americans’ trust in government has become a tangible political asset for conservatives and a source of great frustration for progressives. It’s ironic, of course, that Republican mismanagement during the Bush administration and a financial and economic crisis brought on by lax regulation has helped produced this atmosphere. But this reaction did not emerge from a vacuum, and distrust of government has a long pedigree in American politics and society.
And indeed, even as progressives battle unprecedented attacks on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society and vigorously debate strategy and tactics, there’s a growing hunger for a deeper understanding of distrust of government and its origins, and of possible paths for restoring sufficient public confidence to sustain future progressive policy initiatives.
That is why the prominent progressive intellectual center Demos and The Democratic Strategist are holding an online forum on this critical topic, drawing on diverse and distinguished voices from various corners of the progressive landscape.
Discussion of this topic is widespread but much of the debate up until now has focused (understandably) on analyzing the revival of harshly anti-government attitudes in the conservative movement and the Republican Party, as dramatized by the advent of the self-described Tea Party Movement, and less on the extent and the underlying causes of the decline in public trust, and on strategies for addressing and if possible reversing it. The basic trend lines are stark enough: Forty years ago, nearly 80% of the public trusted government to do the right thing nearly always or most of the time. By the spring of 2010, only 22% of Americans said they trusted government, the lowest level since 1994 (when the Democrats were swept from power in the House for the first time in 40 years), and lower than in the Watergate era
Earlier periods of extreme public distrust were driven by a mixture of public scandal (Watergate; the Keating Five and the House bank scandal; etc.) and economic stress (stagflation and energy shocks; the early 90s recession). Along similar lines, the circumstances behind today’s public distrust have been described as a “perfect storm” of public and private failure, aggravated by new factors such as intensifying political polarization and more powerful right-wing media.
It is not an exaggeration to say that public distrust of government, and the increasing political polarization caused by a libertarian Republicanism that plays well to this basic distrust, poses a fundamental threat to the future of our country. For any significant progressive legislation to pass in the future, the process will have to convince a substantial segment of the now reflexively oppositional electorate that there is a new, more honest system in place that will make the consideration, passage and implementation of legislation more genuinely reflect what “the people” really want. President Obama alluded to this in his post-election press conference when he suggested that a major failing of the health care reform effort was that it ignored popular distrust and dislike of the “process.” His statement implicitly recognized that no new major legislation could be passed until this basic problem is overcome.
No one living outside the conservative media cocoon and the Republican Party’s energized but small base can fail to see that solving the collective problems we have–from unemployment and the lack of good paying jobs, to educational decline, to global warming, to the public debt–will require strong and active government and quite possibly much higher levels of public revenue. Thus, assessing and understanding the causes and dynamics of public distrust in government, and finding remedies for this problem in our politics and public debates, are important challenges requiring much more attention from analysts over the next two critical election cycles and beyond. Demos and TDS have organized this forum to launch a new critical dialogue on this problem.
There are several key questions that we hoped forum participants would
help answer:
1. Has the collapse of public trust in government been a cumulative process over a long time, or primarily the result of recent events?
2. Is the source of distrust in government its perceived incompetence to achieve generally supported public goals, or its failure to engage effectively with citizens in setting priorities and pursuing them?
3. Are we experiencing class, generational or racial/ethnic divides over the role of government in which Americans are being pitted against each other in a zero-sum competition for public resources?
4. Should progressives focus on the perception or reality of special-interest control of government, incidents of public corruption, and the ongoing scandal of campaign financing, to improve public trust in government and the political process?
While we hope this forum will eventually engage an array of thinkers and writers, we will publish as a first and foundational round essay from the following distinguished progressives:
William Galston will write about the immediate challenge of meeting the crisis of public confidence in government created by the 2010 elections and the fiscal battles already underway in Washington.
John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira will discuss their public research findings on distrust in government, and a possible agenda for restoring faith in the competence and publicspiritedness of public institutions.
Patrick Bresette will examine different types of “distrust in government,” and the different agendas they demand.
David Callahan will focus on how to increase faith in the integrity of government, with particular emphasis on the need for progressives to take seriously allegations of corruption and special-interest influence.
Thomas Edsall will look at the effects of economic and fiscal austerity, and the likelihood of partisan polarization around the division of public resources.
Peter Levine will discuss direct citizen participation in government as a critical element in restoring faith in public institutions.
We will publish these essays serially, and will continue the forum as long as it takes to accommodate reactions, comment, and discussion.
Finally, as a separate companion piece to these essays, The Democratic Strategist is also releasing a special “TDS Strategy Memo” by Andrew Levison that presents a “common sense populist” communications strategy for overcoming public distrust of government. (A PDF version of the Strategy Memo is available here).
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Most economists believe that while the recovery remains fragile, it is likely to accelerate over the next year. As recently as a month ago, the American people agreed. But they don’t anymore. And there is a threat that these suddenly gloomy expectations could turn out to be perversely self-fulfilling–causing Americans to stop spending and investing, and thus hobbling the pace of economic growth to slow the already subpar job rebound.
Two recent surveys highlight the shift in popular sentiment. Drawing on data collected between February 24 and February 28, the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll documents a startling collapse of economic confidence. As recently as last month, 40 percent of American thought the economy would get better during the next year–the highest level of optimism since the spring of 2010–while only 17 percent expected it to get worse. Now, only 29 percent expect improvement; an equal share–29 percent–fear deterioration. And Gallup measures economic confidence on a weekly basis, using an index that combines perceptions of current conditions with assessments of economic trends. Two weeks ago, it had reached its highest level since January of 2008. Since then, the index has fallen by twelve percentage points, and nearly all the change comes from a plunge in expectations. Two weeks ago, 43 percent saw the economy as getting better; by last week, only 33 percent did.
There is a danger that, if households hunker down in response, the economy and job market would shift into lower gear. President Obama has a huge stake in avoiding this, from the perspectives of both policy and politics. It would be uncomfortable enough for Obama to run for reelection with unemployment around 8 percent, down from its peak but still higher than when he took office. But it would be much worse–possibly fatal–for him to wage that battle with unemployment anywhere near today’s level.
Only recent events could account for such an abrupt shift, which Gallup attributes to rapidly increasing gas prices and growing public concern about government finances at every level. If Gallup is right, Obama should try to reach an ironclad agreement with major oil-producing countries to increase production and compensate for any fallout from the Libyan civil war, so that market psychology might shift in a favorable direction and push crude oil prices down. Whether the Saudis, who are still seething at what they see as his abandonment of Hosni Mubarak, would be willing to help out, is another question altogether.
On the fiscal front, Obama has a growing incentive to strike a multi-year deal that shifts the focus away from short-term budget cuts and instead brings long-term deficits down to a sustainable level. Here again, public opinion is flashing warning signs: According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, 62 percent of people are concerned that the president won’t go far enough in cutting programs and reducing spending to deal with the budget deficit; only 26 percent fear that he’ll go too far. Unless he gets more involved, the public predisposition to see him as fiscally fainted-hearted could harden into the judgment that he’s part of the problem, not the solution.
This approach would be more popular than the Republican alternative. The American people favor cuts in programs such as energy subsidies and unnecessary weapons systems as well as an outright five-year freeze in domestic spending. They strongly support imposing an income surtax on millionaires and phasing out the Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year. They even profess themselves willing to reduce Medicare and Social Security benefits for wealthier retirees and to gradually raise the retirement age. But more drastic changes, such as turning Medicare into a voucher system, which House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan proposed last year, would run into a buzz-saw of public opposition.
It’s hard to say how all this will sort itself out. But one thing seems clear: The longer the uncertainty persists about the course of gas prices, state and local finances, and the federal budget, the harder it will become for the economy to get up a head of steam. If a president who prides himself on his ability to take the long view actually does so now, he will get himself off the ropes and into the center of the ring.
This item by TDS Contributor Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from Huffington Post.
Yesterday, ABC News leaked a confidential report from investment bank Goldman Sachs warning that the spending cuts proposed by the Republicans to take effect this year would slow the economy by 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. It also found that even compromise cuts of $25 billion would cut growth by 1 percent.
This report would not be surprising if it came from the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI) — or even someone at the Brookings Institution. Instead it comes from Wall Street — which is, after all — the principal base of the GOP.
Of course, their conclusions are not surprising. Virtually everyone with an ounce of economic literacy understands that cutting federal spending right now — just as the economy is clawing its way out of the worst recession in 60 years — will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Right now, the government projects about a 2.7 percent rate of growth in the economy this year. So according to Goldman Sachs, if the Republicans have their way, most of that growth would be wiped out and we would be perilously close to a double-dip recession.
It’s time to stop treating proposals for immediate cuts in spending as “reasonable” policy alternatives. These proposals are dangerous to the economy and the welfare of everyday Americans.
You have to ask yourself, why would the Republicans propose a policy that even Wall Street thinks would be suicidal for the economy? Here are two options:
Reason 1: To Damage the Economy for Political Purposes
Mitch McConnell — the Republican Senate Leader — made it very clear at the end of last year that their major goal for this session of Congress is to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 and take over both Houses of Congress. And there is no question that the most important key to President Obama’s reelection is an improving economy.
The Republicans have absolutely no political interest in the creation of jobs in the American economy. The more unemployed Americans there are next November, the better for them. The more incomes have stagnated, the better for them.
As much as they blather on about how they will create jobs in the private sector by cutting government spending, even most Republicans understand that as you recover from a recession, that is simply not true.
As much as they wish it were not so, recessions are never caused by too much government spending, they are caused by an deficit of demand in the economy for goods and services that could be produced if the economy were operating at full capacity. The virtuous cycle that is behind economic growth requires that demand be jumpstarted by government — that enough people be put back to work with incomes to buy new products, that the private sector is enticed to invest and hire.
Right now private corporations are sitting on almost two trillion dollars in cash. The fact that they are not hiring or investing heavily in new plant and equipment has nothing to do with a need for more tax breaks or a shortage of capital. It has everything to do (as they will tell you) with the fact that they aren’t confident there will be enough demand in the economy — enough people with money to buy their products and services.
The time to cut deficits is not as you are recovering from a recession, but in periods of long-term economic growth — in the same way that President Clinton did during the 1990’s. Some people act like the deficit is an intractable problem of many generations. It was just over 10 years ago that we had no deficit. The way to deal with the deficit in the future is essentially the way it was eliminated in the 1990’s — tax increases on the wealthiest taxpayers and robust economic growth.
If you cut $61 billion of spending out of the economy over the next six months, you make the “demand deficit” larger, not smaller. In the process you destroy jobs. It’s that simple. Or as Republican Leader John Boehner might say, “So be it.”
Most thoughtful Republicans actually understand that. But one reason they continue to support these cuts is that by hurting the economy, it will benefit them politically.
Reason 2: Because the Inmates Have Taken Over the Asylum
A second reason that the Republicans are supporting these damaging policies is that the crazy relatives they used to try to keep out of sight have burst into the living room.
For many years, the interests of Wall Street and the biggest corporations have completely dominated the economic policymaking of the Republican Party. While this wing of the party pays appropriate tribute to “restraining spending” and “smaller government,” their ideology is not really about principle. They adhere to only one core ideological premise: They favor whatever is in their own economic interest.
Wall Street and big corporations are generally advocates of “smaller government” because they want to cut their taxes and reduce government regulations that prevent them from injuring consumers, fouling the air or engaging in the kind of reckless speculation that sunk the economy in 2008 and cost 8 million Americans their jobs.
But the Wall Street crowd is perfectly capable of abandoning any talk of “small government” when it comes to huge government contracts. And you don’t hear much about the deficit when it comes time to ask for tax breaks for the rich or oil company subsidies. Remember it was former Vice President Dick Cheney who famously said: “deficits don’t matter” — a view that he used to justify the fact that he and President Bush rolled up more deficits in their eight years than all of the previous presidents in American history combined.
However, there is another wing of the Republican Party that has traditionally talked a lot, but didn’t have a lot of power. They are the libertarian ideologues who actually believe that the economy would be better off with a tiny government. This gang mainly has appeal to the “non-Wall Street” base of the Republican Party — the Republican “foot soldiers.”
The “foot-soldier” wing has traditionally been concerned more with social issues and has been heavily populated with right-wing religious activists. But the Wall Street-induced economic disaster — and overall decline of the American middle class — has made this group a prime target for libertarian economic narratives that include a conviction that government spending is the root of all economic evil.
Libertarian economic nostrums infused the Tea Party Movement, and that helped propel many new Republicans into Congress last fall. Suddenly this wing of the party is no longer relegated to the role of campaign season political fodder. They actually have some power in the Republican Caucus.
This item by TDS Contributor and Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow and managing editor Lee Drutman is cross-posted from Progressive Fix.
Over at Third Way, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have published a new analysis about the role of moderates in American politics, “The Still-Vital Center: Moderates, Democrats, and the Renewal of American Politics.” It’s a keen paper, and I generally suspect they are right in their basic thesis: American government would work a whole lot better if there were more moderates running the place and that self-identified moderates have a more coherent worldview than many critics think.
Galston and Kamarck have pulled together some solid survey data on moderates, enough to conclude that, “moderates have mixed opinions about the overall stances of the two parties.” They’re more like Democrats on social issues, a little more like Republicans on foreign policy, and about split on economic policy.
But in general, moderates are more likely to support Democrats. Since 1980, the U.S. electorate has hovered around 20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, and 47 percent moderate. This means that Democrats need moderates more, since liberals make up only one-fifth of voters. Conservatives outnumber liberals by a substantial amount, so Republicans need fewer moderates to establish a winning coalition. This is the kind of simple math that liberals keep forgetting. Obama, like every Democrat before him, couldn’t have won without strong support among moderates.
But there’s also a puzzle here, and one that continues to frustrate centrists: If moderates consistently represent almost half of the electorate, why are there so few moderate representatives, and why is our politics so polarized?
Galston and Kamarck put a lot of emphasis on primary elections as a culprit, since they are generally low-turnout affairs, in which extremist candidates who are able to mobilize a small but loyal following can win. (Witness Christine O’Donnell winning Delaware’s Republican primary with 30,561 votes in a state of 900,000 people).
They advocate for open primaries so that voters from both parties can participate, which might, as they write, “open up the possibility that moderate and compromise might be rewarded rather than punished.” By all means! But already half of the states do this, and I’ve yet to see any systemic evidence that states with closed primaries turnout candidates any more extremist. Moreover, Alan Abramowitz has made the case that primary voters are actually not that different from general election across a number of ideological indicators.
But the ability of ideologues to triumph in primaries points to a larger problem: that moderate voters tend to be the least engaged and least educated part of the electorate. This extends as well to general campaign work, contributions, and even just talking to other people about politics.
In Abramowitz’s recent book The Disappearing Center (reviewed here by me), he shows that 56 percent of strong liberal or conservatives reported being politically engaged in 2004, as compared to 36 percent of those who “lean” liberal or conservative, and just 20 percent of those who say they are moderate, or of no ideology. And according to National Election Studies data, 43 percent of self-identified conservatives had a college degree, 32 percent of self-identified liberals had a college degree, but only 18 percent of moderates had a college degree. This is something centrists are going to have to grapple with.
In Abramowitz’s story, the plight of the moderates is mostly a story about less-educated, less-engaged citizens who don’t know or care enough about politics to pick a side. Were they to get wealthy and educated, like the partisans, they would presumably then know enough to pick one of the two distinct teams in American politics. But lacking the means or the will to pick a side, they call themselves moderate, feel disengaged and disenchanted by politics, and try to get on with the business of making a living.
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In some presidential cycles, an incumbent’s reelection strategy doesn’t matter all that much. When the economy is very strong (1984), the incumbent wins big; when it’s very weak (1932), he loses even bigger. And when a party chooses a nominee seen as outside the mainstream (1964, 1972), it suffers a crushing defeat. It’s possible that one or more of these circumstances could prevail next year. The economy could over- or under-perform current projections; the Republicans could choose a nominee who’s too conservative or lacks credibility as a potential president. But it’s more likely that both the economy and the presidential nomination contest will yield results in the zone where strategic choices could prove decisive. In that context, two recent events are alarming, because they offer clues to what may well become President Obama’s reelection strategy.
The first was a Ron Brownstein interview with David Axelrod, who said that he saw Michael Bennet’s 2010 senatorial victory in Colorado as “particularly instructive.” As Brownstein noted, Bennet prevailed by mobilizing “enough minorities, young people, and socially liberal, well-educated white women to overcome a sharp turn toward the GOP among most of the other white voters in his state.” The second event was DNC chair Tim Kaine’s selection of educated, new economy Charlotte, North Carolina, as the site for the 2012 Democratic convention. In the process, he rejected three Midwestern finalists: St. Louis, Minneapolis, and, most notably, Cleveland.
Taken together, these clues suggest that the Obama’s 2012 campaign will focus more on the Democratic periphery–territory newly won in 2008–than on the heartland, where elections have been won and lost for the past half-century. This could turn out to be a mistake of epic proportions. Why? Because the United States looks a lot more like Ohio than like Colorado.
Here’s a snapshot from the exit polls in the 2008 election, versus the 2010 Ohio and Colorado Senate elections, broken down by education level:
4% of the 2008 national electorate had less than a high school education; that’s true of 1% of the 2010 Colorado electorate, and 3% of Ohio’s.
20% of the 2008 electorate had a high-school diploma but nothing else; the number dropped to 12% in Colorado and rose to 25% in Ohio.
31% of the 2008 electorate had “some college;” the numbers were 20% for Colorado and 32% for Ohio
28% of the 2008 electorate were college graduates; 39% of 2010 Colorado voters achieved that level, and only 24% of Ohio’s.
And the number for post-graduates is 17% for national 2008 voters, 28% for Colorado’s 2010 voters, and 15% for Ohio’s 2010 voters.
In other words, the 2010 Colorado electorate was a total outlier (67 percent with a B.A. or more), while Ohio was a near-microcosm of the national presidential electorate. Every Midwestern state for which exit polls are available looked pretty much like Ohio.
Now let’s look at the new Gallup state-by-state survey released on February 21. It shows that between 2008 and 2010, Democratic identifiers and leaners have declined as a share of the electorate in every state. The median loss was 6.1 percent. And every Midwestern state was at or above the median, raning from 6.1 percent in Minnesota to 9.2 percent in Wisconsin.
No wonder that Democrats lost 2010 Senate races in Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, light blue Pennsylvania, and even dark blue Illinois, or that they lost gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Small consolation that Democratic gubernatorial candidates managed to scratch out victories in Illinois (by 20,000 votes out of 3.5 million cast) and Minnesota (by 9,000 out of 2 million).
The Midwest is home to large numbers of white working-class voters, who accounted for nearly 40 percent of all voters nationwide in 2008. Obama has never done very well with this group, losing them by 2 to 1 against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and by 58 percent to 40 percent against McCain in the general election. And they turned against Democratic candidates in the vast majority of 2010 House and Senate races.
As a recent Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey reveals, white working-class voters are even more disaffected today. They are gloomy about the present and think it will be a long time before the economy recovers. They fear that the job market of the future will have little use for workers with their level of education and skills. Only 14 percent say that the president’s economic policies are working, and a large majority think that his administration isn’t doing enough to look after their economic interests. Remarkably, when asked which party better understands the people’s economic priorities, they give the Republicans a 14-point edge. Moreover, white working-class voters have long tended toward conservatism on social issues, nationalism in foreign policy, and hawkishness on defense.
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama’s newly released budget avoids any offer to fix the long-term, structural deficits that his fiscal commission put on the table, and in doing so confronts his Republican critics with a choice: take the lead (and the heat) for proposing entitlement cuts or admit to your followers that you can’t meet your own long-term spending targets. After sending mixed signals for a few days, Republican leaders have decided to take the lead and hope for the best. In a joint statement, House Speaker John Boehner and Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan declared, “Our budget will lead where the president has failed, and it will include real entitlement reforms so that we can have a conversation with the American people about the challenges we face and the need to chart a new path to prosperity.”
Laying down such a clear marker makes it difficult to turn back. While Republicans have not decided on the details, it is now more likely that their FY2012 budget proposal will include substantial long-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. (Whether it embraces a Medicare voucher plan and the partial privatization of Social Security–two of many proposals that have made Ryan’s “roadmap” such a lightning rod–is another question.) The conventional wisdom is that the president has made a smart tactical choice and that Republicans will end up inflicting political pain on themselves, without even the solace of policy gain. And there’s certainly no shortage of data to support this proposition: In survey after survey in recent months, Americans say they want the government to spend less–without cutting anything of significance.
But now there are signs that attitudes may be shifting. A Pew survey out last week found that, for nearly every issue area where trend data are available, “either support for increased spending has fallen or support for spending cuts has grown (or both).” Elected officials seem to be responding. Serious bipartisan talks are underway in the Senate to follow up on the recommendations of the president’s fiscal commission. A shrewd political observer and senior Democratic leader, New York’s Senator Charles Schumer, remarked that “the feeling to do genuine deficit reduction is greater on both sides of the aisle than I’ve ever seen it.” He added that the task is “meeting in the middle and throwing away the ideological baggage.” And, in his February 15 press conference, President Obama offered his clearest indication so far that he is willing to enter into serious negotiations despite omitting entitlement reforms from his budget.
If there is indeed a shift taking place, it will be a long-overdue development. Our current approach to spending reflects many years of misrule by political leaders who have defaulted on their duty to speak directly and honestly to the people they represent. For too long, one party has pretended that we can stay on our current course without raising taxes, while the other has pretended that we can do so without touching anything people like. In the long run, we can’t have what we’re unwilling to pay for. If we want to continue on our current course, we’ll have to accept much higher levels of taxation. If not, we’ll have to cut spending for popular programs. It’s time for the pretense to end. And maybe–finally–it’s beginning to.
The issue isn’t just the budget; it’s self-government. To have confidence in democracy, we must believe that the people will, over time, respond affirmatively to official candor, even if the news is bleak. Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” The peroration of his great speech is less remembered: “I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail.” He understood that a democratic people will be willing to endure sacrifice, but only if it is necessary to attain a greater good. Granted, a budget deficit–even a massive one–is not the same as a prospective Nazi invasion of the homeland. There is no moral equivalent of war. Still, Americans are worried about the future, perhaps more deeply than the Obama administration understands. A recent Gallup survey found that 52 percent of Americans–up from 39 percent just two years ago–think that China has become the world’s leading economic power. Only 32 percent think that the United States still is. More and more Americans (pluralities in recent surveys) now doubt that their children will live as well as they themselves do now.
In his 2011 State of the Union, Obama spoke of “winning the future.” If the American people are told the truth, they may come to understand that such a victory will require a radical shift of our fiscal course. As soon as Republicans put entitlement reforms on the table, Obama will have to choose whether to defend the status quo or to counter with his own proposal. The superficially safe move would be to do the former, which is what the base of the Democratic Party is demanding. The question is whether a president who prides himself on taking the long view can look beyond the superficial: After all, Americans want their president to be a strong leader, not just a likeable human being. If Obama comes to be seen as someone who follows events rather than leading them, he could end up paying a larger price than his political tacticians now expect.
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