Grouchy Americans need a trust rebuild

Partisan ambitions fuel a negative outlook of government, and cynical officials fulfill those expectations

Some of us are grouchy about everything. That’s a problem for democracy. (Photo by Cyrus Chew on Unsplash)

---

Folks have fretted for a long time that Americans are too fixated on what’s wrong with the country, a negative outlook that experts have for years warned could someday pose a risk to key institutions — including courts, police, the military and government generally. Forty years ago, the eminent political scientist Ben Wattenberg took aim at our grouchiness in a book, “The Good News Is The Bad News Is Wrong,” that documented precisely how much stronger, happier and healthier America was than we believed. People didn’t buy it — literally: Its bestseller rank among U.S.-published books was 2,865,390. It was no “Melania,” people.

Lately, though, our epic irascibility, unbowed by the worriers, has seemed to pop its top, as though we’re mad about nearly everything. And it offers a potential explanation for why half the electorate still seems willing to support Donald Trump’s presidential bid, despite the fact that Trump is so — well, so Trump: an immoral, unserious and often incoherent mess of a man, who during four years in office added $8.4 trillion to the national debt, weakened alliances formed to protect global peace, tried to take away health care from the poor, blocked progress on gun violence and climate change, and sparked a deadly insurrection aimed at overturning a fair election. At the end of the day, he’s a flagrant and relentless liar, a convicted felon and, according to a jury his own lawyers accepted, a sex offender.

It’s tempting to suggest that what’s wrong with America is simply that in three straight election cycles, one of our two major political parties has decided that it’s that guy, twice impeached and four times indicted, who is the best choice to lead the nation, following in the footsteps of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and a couple of Roosevelts.

But that’s getting ahead of the question here — which is, really, what our negative outlook on things generally is doing to us, and whether there’s a solution to be found in the way that democracies are expected to solve problems: at the ballot box.

You’ve got to wonder. Polls regularly show that big majorities of Americans aren’t lined up behind many elements of Trump’s agenda.¹ Most of us favor abortion rights, sensible gun control, more fairness in the tax code and stronger environmental protection — all of that contrary to the Trump record and to what the Senate and House do when they’re run by Republicans. Some of Trump’s proposals would actually harm his most ardent supporters (like the big tariffs he promises, which would drive up costs on most consumer goods). Others would align America with the authoritarian regimes that have long been our adversaries, and against the interests of what we used to call the Free World.

Which is why it’s hard to accept the fact that just now, in the homestretch before Election Day, it’s a coin toss/dead heat/tie game between Trump and Kamala Harris in the race for the presidency. It’s enough to make you wonder if our democracy actually works anymore, or if the political process has become, finally, disconnected from the goals it is expected to achieve — that is, as our Constitution’s preamble puts it, the promotion of justice, domestic tranquility and general welfare, and the “Blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”

And there I am, it seems: one of those grouchy people harping on how bad things are, suggesting that the system isn’t working for America if it can yield a president as unsuited for the job as Donald Trump. It’s not a far step from that point to conclude that we need to radically change things. After all, a process that produces a Trump presidency is clearly so sick that we might need to amputate a diseased limb or two.

But, but — wait a minute: That sounds an awful lot like some Trump supporters, who say America has strayed so far from its roots that only a radical remake will, you know, make America great again. Trump wants to upend the civil service to make the whole executive branch more easily malleable to the political will of the elected president, and turn back some of the protections now in place for unempowered Americans. He’s probably not kidding when he says he’d be a dictator for a day — in fact, that’s likely a rare Trumpian understatement.

The prospect is enough to leave you with little faith in American democracy. Which, to be clear, is how we got here. Bad faith breeds its posterity; trust must be practiced to be sustained. The loss of faith and trust, a phenomenon observed and tolerated for generations, now imperils what we cherish in this land we have loved.

Two decades ago, Americans had more confidence in their national government than citizens in any of the other major industrialized countries, according to a Gallup poll of the G7 nations. The latest poll, though, shows the U.S. at the bottom of that list: Only 30 percent say they have confidence in the government, compared to more than half of Germans and Canadians. More specific questions yield no different outcome: Americans’ confidence has also lagged in the judiciary, the military and the honesty of its elections, to the point that the United States is now at the bottom of the list of nations in its citizens’ confidence in what Gallup calls “key national institutions.”²

Those of us old enough to remember the upheavals of the 1960s and betrayals of the 1970s can understand the roots of this decline. The nation was rocked by assassinations, civil unrest, criminality at the highest levels of government, unjust wars abroad and economic malaise. Apparently aiming to capitalize on this unsettling reality, Republican politicians began to attack government as the culprit in what seemed to be going wrong, rather than offering governmental solutions.

It worked with voters: Ronald Reagan, running against the government itself, was re-elected in a landslide in 1984, which convinced a lot of Democrats that their success hinged on sounding only slightly less dubious of government than their opponents. The presidency of Bill Clinton was a product of that strategy, but the trust gap widened when the president lied under oath about a sexual relationship with a White House intern.

Since then, there have been ups and downs in Americans’ apparent confidence in government and other key institutions, but the trajectory of trust has trended downward throughout this century. Government has sometimes been hobbled by increasingly cynical acts by key players — consider Mitch McConnell blocking any Supreme Court nomination during Barack Obama’s last year in office — and by the surging electoral success of hard-right lawmakers who delight in the idea of shutting down the government. Sometimes well-intentioned officials manage to forge bipartisan solutions to pressing problems, only to see their work squelched by flagrant partisanship — which is what happened both this year and a decade ago when bipartisan immigration legislation was ready for action.

It's as though those who are elected to government jobs on a platform that claims government doesn’t work are determined to make sure they’re proven right by blowing up anything government might do that might yield success for citizens. The only way to prove such people wrong is to defeat them.

Nobody would naively think that a presidential campaign against an incumbent officeholder, which is the race Trump is running against Vice President Kamala Harris, would easily acknowledge the administration’s successes. But it’s a fact that over the past four years, we have soared out of the ruins of the pandemic with the lowest average unemployment in 50 years and a huge investment in infrastructure, including a commitment to cutting-edge technology that will pay off a generation from now. Our government also has restored its push to fight climate change — “not our problem,” Trump said while campaigning in New York City this summer — and is doing what it can to support allies endangered by hostile tyrants, notably Ukraine. Crime is down and big steps have been taken aimed at cutting healthcare costs.

Yet the sense that government can’t do anything right, revealed in the Gallup confidence numbers, is what resonates on the campaign trail. It’s reinforced by Trump’s continual dark claims that the nation is becoming, as he said last year, a “lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.” His continued success stands as proof that bad news is more memorable than good news, and the latter a harder product to sell. In the memorable words of Sam Rayburn, the legendary House speaker from Texas, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”

This is not the first time that American voters have faced a choice between the sour vision of one side and the soaring hopes of the other. Memorably, Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 against the dour Herbert Hoover with bands striking up “Happy Days are Here Again,” a popular song from a 1930 Broadway musical. FDR lost only six states.

There’s more than an echo of that race this year. Democrats have been talking a lot about joy during this campaign season, even as Trump’s rhetoric has turned ever darker. The most memorable photo of the campaign, aside from Trump’s raised-fist exhortation after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, is surely his glowering Manhattan mugshot. Democrats may take heart from Japanese academic research a few years back revealing that voters prefer candidates who smile more; if that’s so, Harris might ask Biden for some drapery measurements.³

Regardless of who takes office in January, however, we’ll still have to rebuild the hope and confidence that used to characterize America’s view of our democracy. More than a single campaign and more than one four-year term of progressive success will be needed to reverse Americans’ sour disposition in looking at their government. Our distrust has become habitual, which makes the ground fertile for candidates who want to harvest votes from the stubborn vines of American grouchiness by assuring people that, as they suspected, government can’t do anything right.

Even if the results of this election end the political career of Donald Trump, the loudest voice of bitterness and negativity in the nation, his influence won’t soon fade. Regrowing trust will require years of cultivation by people of good will and hope, one campaign after another.

1. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48354-how-americans-feel-about-trumps-proposed-policies

2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/643598/leader-loser.aspx

3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23324199

---

---

DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN NOW: MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’RE A READER who wants to hear more of Rex Smith’s views, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay. 

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.” And it’s worth your time.

---

BONUS VIDEO

My great friend Niki Haynes, an artist who is best known for her brilliant collages, has created a short video with a message appropriate for this election season. You won’t want to miss it. Check it out here.

---

NOW, LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS

If you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live 90-minute class that Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.

Our next class is Thursday, Oct. 17, at 4 p.m. Join us!

Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too. 

---

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH