Don't Worry About The Government (Oh Wait, Yeah, Do)

News that nearly 80% of Americans don’t trust the government to solve their problems is troubling, but not exactly a surprise. Beyond the economic uncertainty most of the country is currently experiencing, we live in changing times, where the soothing verities we once pretended to believe in are no longer operative. But that’s not even the main reason we don’t trust Washington: It’s because of a thirty year show-and-tell (and yell) presentation that we’ve all been forced to endure.

Ronald Reagan rode into office in 1980 ago proclaiming that government was not the solution, it was the problem. He proceeded to prove this by racking up massive deficits to finance tax cuts for the rich, which seemed great at the time because nobody worried that the bill would ever come due and figured that even when it did they would already be rich themselves, because that’s how America works. We continued to be lectured about the evils of government even when the Democrats were finally back in the White House, with Bill Clinton, who had just suffered a massive loss in the midterm elections-a loss based in part upon the dire predictions of the Republican party that his first budget would ruin the country (predictions that proved so hysterically wrong that Republicans were punished by, uh, retaining complete control of Congress for the next 12 years)-famously declaring that the era of big government was over.

Still, this wasn’t enough. Republicans worried that if they kept screwing things up and letting the Democrats bail out the country, eventually voters might realize that government could work, but only in the right (i.e., left) hands. So when Clinton turned over the White House keys (and a budget surplus) to a Republican party which controlled all three branches of government for the first time in nearly fifty years, the party resolved to fuck things up on such an epic scale that even the most competent of administrators would find it nearly impossible to dig out from under. More tax cuts, disastrous and unfinanced military operations, a lack of regulation and oversight leading to the near-destruction of the economy: The Republicans decided to pound the country in every available orifice, and slice open some new ones for additional pounding, just to be on the safe side. And in case the country managed to find someone who might actually show the talent and resolve to ameliorate some of the major problems, they resolved to spend their spell out of office thwarting any attempt at recovery, often blaming the problems for which they were so recently responsible on the very people who had won two sweeping election victories as agents of change and sanity.

It shouldn’t be a shock that people don’t trust the American system of government; one of its two major parties has spent three decades doing everything in its power to show that government doesn’t work. In fact, the only people it actually does seem to work for are Republicans. You’d think they’d have a little more faith in the institution.