Are Liberals to Blame for Our Crisis of Faith in Government? – The New Yorker

Do you trust the federal government? When voters were asked that question in December, 1958, by pollsters from a center now called the American National Election Studies, at the University of Michigan, seventy-three per cent said yes, they had confidence in the government to do the right thing either almost all the time or most of the time. Six years later, they were asked basically the same question, and seventy-seven per cent said yes.

Pollsters ask the question regularly. In a Pew survey from April, 2021, only twenty-four per cent of respondents said yes. And that represented an uptick. During Obamas and Trumps Presidencies, the figure was sometimes as low as seventeen per cent. Sixty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Americans said they had faith in the government. Today, an overwhelming majority say they dont. Who is to blame?

One answer might be that no one is to blame; its just that circumstances have changed. In 1958, the United States was in the middle of an economic boom and was not engaged in foreign wars; for many Americans, there was domestic tranquillity. Then came the growing intensity of the civil-rights movement, the war in Vietnam, urban unrest, the womens-liberation movement, the gay-liberation movement, Watergate, the oil embargo, runaway inflation, the hostage crisis in Iran. Americans might reasonably have felt that things had spun out of control. By March, 1980, trust in government was down to twenty-seven per cent.

Eight months later, Ronald Reagan, a man who opposed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare, which he called an attempt to impose socialism, and who wanted to make Social Security voluntarya man who essentially ran against the New Deal and the Great Society, a.k.a. the welfare statewas elected President. He defeated the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, by almost ten percentage points in the popular vote. In this present crisis, Reagan said in his Inaugural Address, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

Meanwhile, government swung into action. Inflation was checked; the economy recovered. Watergate and Vietnam receded in the rearview mirror. Popular programs like Medicare and Social Security remained intact. For all his talk about reducing the size and the role of government, Reagan did not eliminate a single major program in his eight years in office.

Yet, during those eight years, the trust index never rose above forty-five per cent. And since Reagan left office, aside from intermittent spikes, including one after September 11th, it has declined steadily. In the past fourteen years, in good times and bad, the index has never exceeded thirty per cent.

The questionnaire used in the A.N.E.S. survey is designed to correct for partisanship. A typical preamble to the trust question reads, People have different ideas about the government in Washington. These ideas dont refer to Democrats or Republicans in particular, but just to the government in general. Still, when there is a Democratic President Republicans tend to have less faith in government in general, and Democrats tend to have more. But partisanship accounts only for changes in the distribution of responses. It doesnt explain why over all, no matter the President, the publics level of trust in government has been dropping.

So maybe someone is to blame. It is a convenience to reviewers, although not an aid to clarity, that two recent books devoted to the subject assign responsibility to completely different perpetrators. In At War with Government (Columbia), the political scientists Amy Fried and DouglasB. Harris blame the Republican Party. They say that the intentional cultivation and weaponization of distrust represent the fundamental strategy of conservative Republican politics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump. The principal actors in their account are Reagan and Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House during Bill Clintons second term as President.

In Public Citizens (Norton), the historian Paul Sabin suggests that much of the blame lies with liberal reformers. Blaming conservatives for the end of the New Deal era is far too simplistic, he says, explaining that the attack on the New Deal state was also driven by an ascendant liberal public interest movement. His principal actor is Ralph Nader. Its a sign of how divergent these books are that Gingrichs name does not appear anywhere in Sabins book, and Naders name does not appear in Fried and Harriss.

Nader became a public figure in 1965, when he published Unsafe at Any Speed, a book about automobile safety, a subject that had interested him since he was a law student at Harvard, in the nineteen-fifties. The book got a lot of attention when it was revealed that General Motors had tapped Naders phone and hired a detective to follow him. He sued, and won a settlement, which he used to establish the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. In 1966, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which empowered the federal government to set safety standards for automobiles, a matter heretofore left largely to the states. Operating with a steady stream of ambitious students from lite law schools, known as Naders Raiders, he then took on, among other causes, meat inspection; air and water pollution; and coal-mining, radiation, and natural-gas-pipeline regulation. Sabin credits these efforts with helping to pass the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act (1968), the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (1969), the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), which created osha.

The key to all these successes, Sabin thinks, is that a new player arose in government policymaking: the public. People like Nader argued that government officials and regulatory agencies werent an effective check on malign business interests, because they were in bed with the industries they were supposed to regulate. There was no seat at the table for the consumer, or for the people obliged to live with air and water pollution. The solution was the nonprofit public-interest law firm, an organization independent of the government but sufficiently well funded to sue corporations and government agencies on behalf of the public. The power of groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club grew. By the nineteen-seventies, the environmental movement had acquired political clout. It helped that courts were willing to grant these groups legal standing.

You would think that congressional acts addressing workplace safety and pollution would have raised the level of trust in the federal government. The government was taking over from the states and looking out for peoples health and welfare. And here is where Sabins argument gets tricky. He says that liberal reformers assailed not only the industries responsible for pollution, unsafe working conditions, and so on but also the government agencies assigned to oversee them. The reformers essentially accused groups like the Federal Trade Commission of corruption. It was not enough for them to mobilize public opinion on behalf of laws that a Democratic Congress was more than willing to pass. They sought to expose and condemn the compromises that government agencies were making with industry.

The reformers had the effrontery of the righteous. One of the leading environmentalists in the Senate was Edmund Muskie. This wasnt an easy position. Muskie was from Maine, a state that was dependent on the paper-mill industry. But Nader and his allies attacked Muskie for giving out a business-as-usual license to pollute. At a 1970 press conference to launch a book on pollution, Vanishing Air, a Nader ally said that Muskie did not deserve the credit he has been given. Sabin thinks that rhetoric like this made the public suspicious of government in general.

It is certainly true that distrust has been promoted from the left as well as from the right. Although distrust is higher among Republicans than among Democrats, the antiwar and the Black Power movements, in the nineteen-sixties, were dont trust the government movements. So are the defund the police movements of today.

But those were not the political causes of public-interest groups. Sabin, who plainly is sympathetic to these causes, thinks that the new breed of liberal reformers, with their hatred for compromise, made government look, at best, like a sclerotic and indifferent bureaucracy, and, at worst, like an enabler of irresponsible corporate practices at the expense of public health and welfare. The liberal reformers cast the federal government as an impediment to the public interest, Sabin concludes, and the political right ran with their critique, even if that was never their desire or intention.

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Are Liberals to Blame for Our Crisis of Faith in Government? - The New Yorker