Trust in Government
Today a new president takes office. Cool.
I’m just as excited as the next guy about the change. This country needs a breath of fresh air, but let’s say I’m not excited as I could be. Maybe this is a side effect of getting older, but I don’t trust the government as much as I used to. As much as I feel I should.
I’m not alone in this thought. Trust in the American government has essentially been in a freefall since Nixon, mainly due to his obsession with a certain Watergate office building. Outside of a few isolated jumps, the percentage of Americans that trust our government at least most of the time has fallen from the high 70s with Johnson to the low 20s with Trump. (Pew, 2019)*
This was before Covid-19, where somehow the wealthiest country on earth now accounts for 20% of the world’s deaths.
75% of people believe American’s trust in the federal government has been shrinking, and 64 percent believe faith in our fellow Americans has been shrinking as well. This is shown most starkly in younger generations and minority groups. (2019)
I’ve thought a lot about why this is the case, but like with everything in politics, there is no right answer.
It could be because the average member of the House of Representatives represents over 747,000 people-more than any other developed nation. That ratio is simply too large to consider that our population is fairly represented.
It could be that this country has gotten too big. Of course, there will be a difference in priorities between Alabama and Oregon; they’re thousands of miles apart and might as well be different countries for all the similarities they have.
Some blame the problem on our economic system, with more than half of those polled saying that capitalism, as it exists today, does more harm than good and 74% saying that there should be a change.
Whatever the reason or reasons you believe to be the cause, there is no doubt that trust is decreasing in the country. What follows, then, is whether or not this can be fixed.
I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if this is an actual problem or a problem of perception. If it’s something that actually can be fixed with our current system of doing things. I don’t have the answers, I only know that it is important.
That is enough of me rambling about politics, though. I might be exploring some ideas for fixing this problem in the future, but for the most part, this blog will go back to its regularly scheduled programming. I don’t know what that is yet, but I am pretty sure it won’t involve politics. At least not a lot of it.
*Note. I use a lot of polls here in this article. I used them because they fit my argument, but take them with however much salt you deem necessary. Polls are more often than not misleading. We all saw how well they did in the 2016 election.