Harry Targ
In my foreign policy class I talk about one measure, “trust
in government,” based on public opinion data from 1964 to 1976 and beyond. In
1964 when LBJ won a massive election victory, public trust in government
reached abut 85 percent. By 1976, after Vietnam and Watergate, it had declined
to less than forty percent. Trust increased a bit during the Reagan period and
declined during the Clinton years. This article surveys data indicating that
trust in government has reached an all-time low.
While there is more to political change than “mass
consciousness,” a radical decline in respect for or pride in government may be
a predictor of and stimulus for radical change of one sort or another. It may
be assumed that people went out in the streets in Eastern Europe in 1989, and
later gave little support for maintaining the former Soviet Union, because of
declining legitimacy of government.
What this means is we on the left need to confront declining
trust in government both in systematically articulating why this distrust is
justified and at the same time presenting a credible alternative to the
present. If we do not confront this danger and opportunity creatively, the
alternative may not be an humane democratic socialism but rather a cruel
fascism.
