Posted on 09/16/2011 11:10:17 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
According to the latest ABC New/Washington Post poll, 77 percent of Americans say they “feel things have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track” in this country. That’s the highest percentage since January, 2009.
No surprise. The economy is almost as rotten now as it was two years ago. And, yes, this poses a huge risk to President Obama’s reelection, as it does to congressional Democrats.
But the truly remarkable thing is how little faith Americans have in government to set things right. This cynicism poses an even bigger challenge to Obama and the Democrats – and perhaps to all of us.
When I worked in Robert Kennedy’s senate office in the summer of 1967, America also seemed off track. Our inner cities were burning. The Vietnam War was escalating.
Yet most Americans still held government in high regard. A whopping 66 percent of the public told pollsters that year that they trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time.
Now 30 percent of Americans say they trust government to do the right thing.
What’s responsible for this erosion? Not the Great Recession or the government’s response to it. Most of the decline in public trust occurred years before.
While 66 percent trusted government in 1967, by 1973 that percent had eroded to only 52 percent. By 1976, barely 32 percent of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing. By 1992, 28 percent. Trust bounced up during the Clinton administration (I’m happy to report) but cratered again during the George W. Bush’s presidency, ending at 30 percent, and hasn’t recovered since.
Call it the Republican Weapon of Mass Cynicism.
That weapon is now reaching full-throated fury in the form of Texas Governor Rick Perry. (It’s echoed by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, but Perry has emerged as the major spokesperson.)
Republicans didn’t accomplish this alone, of course. They had plenty of help from a Democratic Party too often insensitive to the importance of building public trust. But look at the history of the past four decades and you can’t help conclude that the overall decline in trust and concomitant rise in cynicism about government has been a Republican masterwork.
Decades of Republican rhetorical scorn – Reagan’s repeated admonition, for example, that government is the problem rather than the solution – have contributed. But the most powerful sources of cynicism have been actions rather than words.
One has been the misuse of public authority. Consider Nixon’s Watergate, the Reagan White House’s secret sale of arms to Iran while it was subject to an arms embargo and illegal slush fund for the Nicaraguan Contras, Tom DeLay’s extensive system of bribery, and the Republican House’s audacious impeachment of Bill Clinton. To the extent these abuses generated public scandal and outrage, so much the better for the Weapon. The scandals fueled even more public cynicism.
Another source has been a flood of money pouring into government from big corporations, Wall Street, and the super rich – in return for public subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, and a steady lowering of tax rates. Democrats aren’t innocent, but Republicans have been in the forefront. (As governor, Rick Perry has raised more money than any politician in Texas history, rewarding his major funders with generous grants, contracts, and appointments.)
The GOP has pioneered new ways to circumvent campaign finance laws, blocked all attempts at reform, and appointed and confirmed Supreme Court justices who believe corporations have First Amendment rights to spend whatever they want to corrupt our politics.
A third source has been regulatory agencies staffed by industry cronies more interested in protecting their industries than the public. Here again Republican administrations have led the way: the failure of financial regulators to prevent the Savings & Loans implosion; corporate looting at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia other big companies; and then the biggest speculative bubble since 1929, bursting in ways that hurt almost everyone except the financiers who created it. A Mineral’s Management Service that turned a blind eye to disastrous oil spills from the Exxon-Valdez to BP; mine Safety regulators whose nonfeasance lead to the Massey mine disaster; an FDA that allowed in tainted meds from China.
Democrats have had their share of political hacks and cronies, but Republicans have made an art of cashing in on government service through sweetheart deals for their former companies (think of Dick Cheney’s stock options with Halliburton), and cushy jobs and lobbying gigs when they leave office. And the GOP has taken the lead in resisting all attempts to prevent such conflicts of interest.
The cynicism has been fueled, finally, by repeated Republican threats to bring the whole government to a grinding halt – from Newt Gingrich and fellow House Republicans’ shutdowns in the 1990s to John Boehner and companies’ near assault on the full faith and credit of the United States government months ago. When the whole process of governing becomes bitterly partisan and rancorous – when common ground is unreachable because one side won’t budge – government looks like a cruel game.
By mid-August, 2011, the public’s view of Congress had reached an all-time low of barely 13 percent, and disapproval at an historic high of 84 percent. Viewed in narrow terms, this is bad news for all incumbents, Republican as well as Democrat. But viewed more broadly in terms of the larger Republican strategy of mass cynicism, it advances the right-wing agenda.
Back to that summer more than four decades ago when I worked in Robert Kennedy’s senate office. There was no doubt in my mind I’d devote part of my adult life to public service. It wasn’t so much that I trusted government – the Vietnam War had already tapped a cynical vein – as that I looked to government as the major instrument of positive social change in America.
I was not alone. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, Medicare, an American landing on the moon – and before that an interstate highway system, expansion of higher education, GI Bill – and before that, The New Deal and World War II – all had engraved in the public’s mind the sense that government was something to be proud of, an entity that we could rely on when times got tough.
Times are tough again, but the Weapon of Mass Cynicism has convinced most Americans they can’t rely on government to help them out now. The nation is even entertaining the possibility of cutting Medicare and Medicaid, college aid, food stamps, Head Start. Perry calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and many are ready to believe him.
But if we can’t trust government at a time like this, whom can we trust? Corporations? Wall Street? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?
Or is each of us now simply on our own?
Democrats Unveil the Weapon of the Future ".............This is an extraordinary series of events, of a type that we haven't witnessed before. Even more singular is the legacy media's insistence on covering the story (with the exception of the siege of Madison, which got the standard "unions unbound" treatment) as if it were commonplace to the point of boredom. It is no such thing; it is an ideological campaign of a magnitude and breadth that we have not seen in quite some time, if ever.
What all this amounts to is the baptism of fire of what I have taken to calling the "liberal superstructure." This superstructure is the vast constellation of advocacy groups, think tanks, single-issue outfits, unions, and various other flotsam constructed by the left over the past half-century or so. There are literally thousands of these groups, ranging from the ACLU and the Sierra Club with their hundreds of thousands of members to the local "Friends of the People's Venezuela" outfit which amounts to a retired feminism professor and her six cats. These organizations are ubiquitous, universal, and networked to a fare-thee- well. They are also liberalism's last great hope of controlling politics in the United States.
It's scarcely arguable that, in the political sense, liberalism is on the ropes. Obama spent their last nickel. They have lost the House and will lose the Senate, with little chance of regaining them in the near future. The same is true of the White House once the messiah gets the bum's rush come 2012. Liberalism is on the skids, its programs uniform failures, its ideology barren, its slogans worn out, its long hold on the independents being relentlessly pared down by the Tea Parties.
So what is a political movement to do, particularly one as fanatic and apocalyptic as this one? Well, if you have an alternate system made up of outside organizations not subject to governmental oversight, a system populated with self-selected fanatics and true believers, a system poised and ready to march, you can do what was done in Wisconsin. You can turn the superstructure loose to threaten the public peace, smash things up, abuse the electoral process, create a media spectacle, and pressure the state to do things your way. You can use nonpolitical organizations (in the electoral sense) to get a political result.
All the groups involved in the Wisconsin campaign were superstructure groups. The unions, the very core organizations of the superstructure, without which it's no more than a pack of vegetarians and aging hippies. The media, which serves as its propaganda arm. And the judiciary, which is broadly infiltrated by leftist partisans whose allegiance has been awarded to something other than the law.
But it's when we review the Prosser accusations that the picture attains clarity........................."
I say realism.
I love this hysterical wailing from Robbie. “The country doesn’t trust govt anymore and it’s all due to Republicans!”
Too bad Robbie. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
It used to be that the more govt failed, the more people demanded that govt fix things. A growing number of voters now understand that citizens fix things, not govt.
Good.
The Texas state shortfall is projected to be $10 billion in 2012:
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/01/14/10-states-with-the-largest-budget-shortfalls
I wish the Perry cheerleadering (yell-leading) squad would stop trying to portray this charlatan as a conservative.
Our country was founded on distrust of government. It is woven into our fabric.
Save for a stretch from the 1940’s to the 1960’s, Americans have traditionally dubious of government, and for good reason.
Stand up, Bob.
Oh, wait. You already are.
The article included the following: But the truly remarkable thing is how little faith Americans have in government to set things right. This cynicism poses an even bigger challenge to Obama and the Democrats – and perhaps to all of us.
I wrote: “They say cynicism, I say realism”.
Please explain how that equates to “Perry cheerleading”?
Interestingly, just a few days ago, a very angry Rick Perry supporter on another thread repeatedly accused me of hating Rick Perry. He stated unequivocally that he KNEW I was a crazed supporter of Ron Paul — this despite the fact that the post I made to that thread made no mention of Ron Paul, and in fact virtually every post I've made for the last 8 years has been completely bereft of any mention of Ron Paul (similar to the way my post on this thread was bereft of any mention of Rick Perry).
It look like I'm managing to offend pretty much everyone. All in all, I'd say it's been a pretty successful week.
In doing so, the Obama defenders have noted three specific facts: (1) 9.2% of all hourly-paid jobs are being paid below the minimum wage when the national average is only 3%; and, (2) Texas has created more minimum wage jobs than anywhere else in the U.S.;and, (3) the average hourly wage is lower than the national average of all hourly wages across the country. All of those arguments are both specious and dishonest and take statistics out of context.
In terms of the "below minimum wage" argument, a significant fact isn't being told. That's the fact that Texas has the 3rd or 4th lowest cost of living (depending on the survey) of all 50 states (Click here to See Story). As a consequence, people making less than the minimum wage in Texas are quite better off than in a high cost of living state like California, where even a minimum wage might not be enough live on. As a result, only 1 in 10 Texans are on food stamp assistance. Compare that with the national average of 1 out every 7 people receiving food stamps; thanks to Obama's record on employment.
Then there's the "more minimum wage earners" argument. Well...dah...if you have a high job creation rate, it's only logical that you will, similarly, have a high creation of minimum wage jobs. But, as noted above, getting paid minimum wage in a low cost of living state is a helluva lot better than in much higher cost of living states; like the ones that most liberals seem to live in. ..........................."
"......The Texas Workforce Commission reports that Texas added 8,100 private sector jobs in August but lost 9,400 government jobs. Over the past 12 months, Texas has added 253,200 jobs but has lost 19,000 government jobs....Sept 16, 2011
LOL
Times are tough again, but the Weapon of Mass Cynicism has convinced most Americans they can’t rely on government to help them out now.
Able bodied people should not rely on the government. The government is not a money making entity, all they can do is take it from one person to give it to another.
“I wish the Perry cheerleadering (yell-leading) squad would stop trying to portray this charlatan as a conservative.”
How much did the population of the state grow at the same time? I wish his detractors would tell the whole truth instead of just the part that helps them tear him down..
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