Will the rule of law doom us to mistrust of government?

Whom do you trust?

Your answer to that question might include numerous people and institutions, but if you are like most Americans it isn't likely that your government will be anywhere near the top of that list.  Public opinion surveys over the last several years report that Americans either don't trust their government, or--when they are feeling generous--they trust it only with qualifications.  Some of these qualifications are apparently the result of rigorous analysis on the part of the respondent, such as "I trust that #!%& only as far as I can throw him!"  Others are usually less precise, but perhaps more poetic.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently published a report entitled "Majority Says the Federal Government Threatens Their Personal Rights."  The report says many things, but to me one of the most indicative statements is:  "About a quarter of Americans (26%) trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. . ."  That's not a very big portion of the population.

Similar sentiments come my way in conversations with friends and acquaintances about things political and governmental.  So, too, in news articles about touchstone issues of the day, such as taxes and gun control.  Put it all together, and it sure seems like Americans have a real hard time trusting their government.

It's enough to make us ask "why?"

That's such a simple question.  Without doubt, there are many answers, most of which will not be so simple.

Take me, for example.  There's no way I'm going to come up with a simple answer to a question like that.

To begin with, contemporary surveys on this subject seem to use similar surveys from the 1950s as a baseline.  By comparison, public trust in government has been on a gradual and persistent decline since that time.  The Pew Research report mentioned above includes a graphic that illustrates this.  It's interactive, so check it out and have some fun with it.

I don't know about you, but to me this doesn't seem surprising.  In the mid-20th Century we were happy to be looking at two former existential threats--the Great Depression and World War II--in the rear-view mirror.  Government provided the leadership, management, organization and resources to overcome those threats.  People felt good about the results.  Add in some other rallying points--such as the Cold War on the international front, and interstate highway construction on the domestic front--and there was the recipe for a real "Go Team!" atmosphere.

Then, along came the Vietnam War and all the conflicted feelings that arose from that experience.  The Pew graphic doesn't specifically call it out, but to me there seems to be a dramatic fall in trust that coincides with the war.  Other related indicators appear to be the levels of unemployment, consumer sentiment and something that is called "satisfaction with the state of the nation."  It seems reasonable to think that a case could be made for some sort of cause-and-effect relationship among those characteristics.

Let's go farther back in time.  For example, consider what public opinion surveys during the 1770s might have shown about trust in government.  Trust in government was pretty hard to come by then, too.  About one third of Americans living in the thirteen British colonies actively supported independence and the revolution, so my guess is that most or all of that portion of the population didn't trust the established government of the day.  Another third of the population didn't care one way or the other and just wanted to be left alone, so--if anybody had bothered to survey them at the time--most of them probably would have said "No, I don't trust the government!"

Are we less trusting of our government now than were our predecessors when they were separating themselves from the government of their time?

We formed our own independent government then, and had our Revolution.  As it turned out, even our government didn't trust the government:  there were times during the Revolutionary War when the national government--the Continental Congress--failed to appropriate funding for conducting the war, largely because there was a lack of trust in the methods of acquiring the monies and then in spending them in a responsible way.

This lack of trust in government permeated American society so much during the 1780s that there was a general feeling at that time in Great Britain that eventually the former colonies would seek forgiveness from the Mother Country and return to the safety and comfort of the imperial fold.  Adoption of the Constitution changed all that, but the Bill of Rights--the first ten Amendments to the Constitution--is also, in large part, an American statement of fundamental distrust in government.

We take pride in saying that ours is "a government of laws, not of men." (I suppose it could also be ". . .not of men, or of women, or of any kind of people.")  Apparently, we will trust the laws, but not the people who make or implement those laws.

That seems odd.

Perhaps distrust of government is an American heritage.  Maybe it's a part of our national DNA.  It's there, it's a part of us, and we just have to accept it.

It's not just government that people don't trust.  (State and local government doesn't seem to do much, if any, better than does the national government.)  Big business doesn't get high marks for trustworthiness, either.  Probably big labor unions take some hits, too, although with the nation's workforce being only about 12% unionized--a percentage that is apparently declining--it's more difficult now than it used to be to know what "big labor" is.

For that matter, do we as individuals place any great amount of trust in the fairness of all the legal gibberish of the many and various "Terms of Service" agreements that seem to permeate the most mundane aspects of our daily lives?  Perhaps we do, if only because so much commerce is accomplished in such a way, and as a society we have chosen to measure our success, at least in part, by the size and growth of our commerce.

If so, and if that type of imposed legalism is what is needed to confirm trust in a nation that prides itself in being subject to the rule of law, then are we headed in the direction of putting trust in our government only if it is accompanied by a written "Terms of Service" agreement that must be accepted by each elected representative?

I hope not.

That's what elections are for.  But, despite the fact that we have so many elections in this country that we turn over our government more often than most people clean out their sock drawers, we still can't seem to garner enough satisfaction with the electoral results that we can accord to that fundamental institution one of the most viscerally-needed conditions for human congregation; namely, trust.

Either this is a problem, or it's just a part of the background noise and is to be accepted as "business as usual."

If it's a problem, it deserves a solution.  Does anybody have one?

If it's background noise, then like DNA we just have to accept it.

Which makes me want to ask:  who among us has a working knowledge of techniques for genetic modification?