Not What It Seems To Be

It looks like I'm getting stuck with this theme. Oh well. Glenn Harlan Reynolds has written an interesting piece about the loss of trust in government and how that bodes ill for our country. It seems a recent Rasmussen poll reported that only 21% of those questioned believe our federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. "Consent of the governed"!? Holy smokes! To my mind, that's more telling even than the simpler low "trust the government" number. Reynolds, half tongue-in-cheek, I'm sure, begins his observations by comparing that low trust measure with the demise of Schlitz beer. As I'm no beer expert, I can't comment on that side of the comparison, but the stuff about the loss of trust in government is grist for the mill.

Why, indeed, is trust so low and apparently falling lower still? Tough economic times doubtless explains a large part of the small number. War weariness, I suspect contributes its share to it as well. And while the current partisan rancor is for many (me included) a fight worth having, it cannot help but be yet another source for the low poll numbers.

But these things can all change and, much as it may be hard to believe just now, in relatively short order. And when they do, we can expect the trust number to rise again. But will it climb as high as it was before this current decline? While these measures of government trust can, and do, wax and wane, there is evidently a trend that began in the 1960s (them again) showing a residual low trust number that seems to inch always upwards with every passing year regardless of the circumstances. Why?

I once had a teacher who would harp on what the eighteenth-century politicos meant when they used the word corruption. He wanted us to know that it was different from the way we use it now. We tend to use the word to describe a politician who unethically, if not illegally, uses his position of power and influence to improve his life's standing, i.e., taking gifts from constituents, receiving sweetheart deals from lobbyists, accepting the attention and favors of attractive women, or men, etc. In effect, political corruption means using one's public position to move to the front of the line in otherwise private endeavors.

But, as I say, my teacher pointed out that the word was used differently during our founding period. When the Founders complained about the corrupt British government, what they meant was that the system was not working as it should, as it was intended and expected to work. It may have been corrupted slowly or quickly, through superior wits or through guile, but it was nonetheless a departure from form and was recognized as such.

I think the corruption of our government in that older sense helps explain a great part of the loss of trust in it. However sophisticated one's understanding of the Constitution and the system of government it established, most people nevertheless know that we have strayed far from it and in some quite serious ways. That we acknowledge straying from it, but persist in pretending otherwise, troubles the soul. And what's more, I think it is troubling even to those who are happy with the corruption. Why? Because we are, in effect, living a lie. So, when the pollster asks us to what degree we trust the government, more and more answer less and less because whatever else it is, good or bad, it's not what it seems to be.

Put simply, it is impossible to square the steady pursuit of an omnicompetent state with a government of constitutionally limited and enumerated powers. Our acceptance of this all-purpose leviathan, either deliberately and enthusiastically, or merely by default, signals that we are now ruled by a corrupt, in that antique sense, government. In extreme cases like world wars and economic disasters, prudence may have demanded the corruption, and for those reasons it was permitted, embraced even. But the fact that it was indeed a corruption was nonetheless widely understood and never completely forgotten.

Since those national emergencies of the 1930s and 40s, the grasp of the national government has expanded steadily, and since the 60s, aggressively. I won't bore you with the long and growing list of federal interventions that now touch virtually every aspect of our lives. It seems we've arrived at a place where we no longer need emergencies to justify the expansion of government, and if we do, we'll simply call anything and everything an emergency, including even, for example, the current national plague of truck driver texting. (See an earlier post of mine on this vexing problem.)

But these increases in federal reach have come at a cost. And by cost, I'm not referring here to the obvious financial impositions, nor to the restrictions of our liberty. Real though those costs are. If my argument is sound, then there is yet another, and perhaps more serious cost: A persistent and growing cynicism about our government, a cynicism that is a direct result of corruption, a corruption, that is, from the constitutional order that once defined it.