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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.