Republic of Distrust

Don’t Panic: Distrusting Government Is an American Tradition

In an election year, there’s plenty of hand-wringing about our lack of faith in Washington. But it’s all part of the messy reality of American democracy.

By Stephen Mihm September 12, 2024

This column is a part of Republic of Distrust, a series about the loss of trust in American institutions and what can be done to restore it.

Americans, it would seem, no longer trust the government. That’s the takeaway from opinion polls conducted by Pew Research Center; last year, only 22% of respondents reported that they trust the federal government to do what’s right “most of the time” or “just about always.”

That’s a far cry from 1958, when researchers at the National Election Study first began asking this question. Back then, a remarkable 73% of Americans affirmed their trust in government, with the number reaching an all-time high of 77% in 1964. Then came a long, halting decline, despite momentary rebounds in the 1980s and early 2000s.

Gallup’s polling data on confidence in the executive and legislative branches have followed suit, with Congress earning the dubious distinction of instilling the least confidence overall.

Our lack of faith in the federal government has led to no end of hand-wringing. It has also spawned an academic cottage industry dedicated to explaining it, with blame placed on everything, including frayed social ties, negative media coverage and rising economic inequality. Other analysts have pointed to key historical moments that left Americans skeptical of government — the Vietnam War and Watergate, most prominently.

These explanations all have merit but suffer from historical myopia. The United States has been around for nearly two and a half centuries, and while we lack opinion polls from earlier eras, we do have some sense of what Americans thought of their government in the more distant past. That longer record suggests that while the federal government enjoyed high levels of trust from the 1930s through the mid-1960s, this was an aberration, not the norm.

Republic of Distrust

Read more from Republic of Distrust, a series about the loss of trust in American institutions and what can be done to restore it.

Moreover, the very forces that make such high levels of trust possible in the mid-20th century did not come without a cost. Trust in the federal government went hand in hand with the suppression of dissent and an often suffocating culture of conformity. It also depended on the disenfranchisement of large swaths of the population in the American South.

In short, we should view with deep skepticism claims that trust in the federal government has been a longstanding norm, much less an unalloyed good. If anything, one could argue that the current level of distrust is simply the price tag of living in a highly pluralistic society. While that lack of trust can abate in times of crisis, it remains as American as apple pie.

A Long History of Distrust

Distrust of centralized authority has deep roots in the US. After all, the American Revolution was, first and foremost, a revolt against government. As a consequence, when the revolutionaries began to build a new political order, they constructed governments that reflected this deep-seated suspicion.

For example, when each of the former colonies became independent states, they drafted constitutions that significantly circumscribed the power of government, particularly centralized, executive power. In fact, the closest thing the US had to a central government at this time — the Continental Congress — lacked even the power to tax and spend.

After independence, the shortcomings of this system begat the Constitution — but that didn’t mean ordinary Americans were happy with the new blueprint hammered out in secret by members of the nation’s elite. In fact, large swaths of the population considered the document an abomination. In a typical essay published during the battle over the Constitution’s ratification, one writer darkly warned that if adopted, it would impose on “posterity a government which will raise a few to the height of human greatness and wealth, while it will depress the many to the extreme of poverty and wretchedness.”

These naysayers, known as the Anti-Federalists, ultimately forced key concessions aimed at limiting government power, most notably the Bill of Rights. After ratification, the group coalesced into a new political party, the Democratic-Republicans, to counter the Federalists, who favored a strong central government.

Thomas Jefferson, the standard bearer of the resistance, counseled one of his supporters that “we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its proper principles.” Until that happened, though, one presumes that the answer given by a Democratic-Republican voter to the question, “Do you trust the federal government?” would have been a resounding “no.”

It wouldn’t be the last time. In A Necessary Evil, the historian and essayist Gary Wills chronicled the curious tradition of distrusting government in the United States. Fear of government, he observed, has been a “constant in American history … sometimes sensible, sometimes hysterical, but always pronounced.” Strikingly, Wills noted that this recurrent fear has rarely been the exclusive province of one side of the political spectrum for very long.

Indeed, after Jefferson’s election to the presidency, many Federalist voters — encouraged by New England ministers — concluded that the federal government had been captured by Satan himself. A typical cartoon from 1801 depicts Jefferson as the devil, working with Tom Paine to pull down the edifice of the federal government. It’s reasonable to assume that “trust” was not the first word that the average Federalist thought of when imagining the national government in such diabolical hands.

These early clashes point to an important corollary: Then, as now, shared faith in the federal government becomes impossible in times of political polarization. And much like our distrust of the federal government, our tendency to demonize our political opponents has long been the norm, not the exception, in the United States.

Nonetheless, even in this earlier period, there was a brief moment when political tempers cooled. The first such period arguably took place in the late 1810s, when the Federalist Party went extinct, ushering in a short-lived “Era of Good Feelings.” The rise of Andrew Jackson, which witnessed a resumption of partisan warfare, marked the return of the status quo.

Jackson’s no-holds-barred will to power cheered his supporters, but for much of the population, he quickly came to symbolize a despotic government. When Jackson’s political rival John C. Calhoun asserted South Carolina’s sovereignty by “nullifying” federal tariffs, all hell broke loose. George McDuffie, one of the key players in what would become known as the Nullification Crisis, described the federal government as “a foul monster, which those who worship, after seeing its deformity, are worthy of their chains.” This dim view probably didn’t improve after Jackson moved federal troops to quell the rebellion.

Trust Issues After the Civil War

Trust in government, then, was a fraught matter in the antebellum era. And these examples don’t even take into account the views of the many individuals banished from formal political participation: women, enslaved people, and Native Americans. Would members of the Cherokee and other tribes in the Southeast have “trusted” the federal government when Jackson engaged in a brutal campaign of “Indian Removal” at gunpoint? Unlikely.

As the sectional crisis worsened in the 1840s and 1850s, distrust of the federal government became even more pronounced on all sides. Antislavery forces alleged that the federal government had been taken over by the “Slave Power,” a conspiracy of elite enslavers hell-bent on dominating the country, expanding slavery both at home and abroad. Southerners, by contrast, believed a cabal of Northerners was hell-bent on seizing the national government and abolishing slavery.

When Lincoln — himself a believer in the “slave power” narrative — narrowly won the presidency in 1860, Southerners quickly concluded that slavery was under threat and seceded. The first to leave, South Carolina, justified the move by claiming that Lincoln’s election meant that “the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy ….”

Secession insured that the federal government did become their enemy. Yet many in the North who opposed the war felt much the same way after they fell victim to heavy-handed efforts at censorship, suppression and other violations of civil liberties. Those most likely to harbor positive feelings toward the federal government — the enslaved people emancipated by the war and protected in its aftermath — would soon see that trust violated. Violent White resistance in the South, combined with political indifference in the North, led to the abandonment of Reconstruction.

The Gilded Age, which stretched from the 1870s through the 1890s, didn’t do much to improve the reputation of the federal government, though for different reasons. For starters, corruption in this period reached mind-boggling levels, with bribes, graft and other malfeasance commonplace.

The Unifying Trauma of the Great Depression and WWII

While the idea that government could be a force for good gained favor during the Progressive Era, it was not until the trauma of the Great Depression — and President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal — that it came to occupy such unprecedented importance in the eyes of ordinary Americans, ushering in a sea change in the relationship between ordinary citizens and the federal government.

The economic historian Hugh Rockoff has described this shift — “from widespread skepticism about the ability of the central government to improve the functioning of the economy to widespread faith in the competence of government” — as transformative. The myriad agencies and programs beget by the New Deal may not always have worked as intended (or at all), but they collectively conveyed the sense that government was working on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

The Great Depression also saw levels of political polarization drop to unprecedented lows — a symptom of the ideological convergence generated by the crisis. Never before had so many forces conspired to elevate the power of the national government, while simultaneously marginalizing potential critics.

Then came World War II. Federal spending during the conflict dwarfed the so-called “big government” programs of the New Deal. Over four years, the US government oversaw the mobilization of millions of soldiers, the production of massive quantities of war materiel, military campaigns around the world and the development of the atomic bomb, which brought the war to a decisive end. At the same time, censorship and the demands of national unity ensured that criticism of government and the larger war effort was almost nonexistent.

Remarkably, this collectivist ethos carried over into the immediate postwar era, if for different reasons. In the culture of conformity that defined the early years of the Cold War, any criticism of the national government was deemed, quite literally, un-American. In some cases, it could even earn you time in prison. The fear of Communism made critique tantamount to treason.

Taken together, this 30-year period — covering the Great Depression, World War II and the early Cold War — stands out as an exceptional era in the nation’s history, one where the federal government played an outsized, powerful role in people’s lives. At the same time, the freedom to look critically at the government was significantly circumscribed, both by law and custom. Even the historical memory of the nation’s core conflicts abated in the postwar era. Scholars of the past belonged to something called the “Consensus School” of history, which emphasized unity over difference.

Likewise, the ways that Americans learned about the news and the actions of government underwent a related transformation. Until the 1930s, citizens got most of their information from highly partisan newspapers that tended to mirror their own beliefs. From the 1930s onward, though, the rise of national broadcast media — radio first, then television — increasingly shaped national conversations, promoting a far more homogenous, unified set of messages.

The Civil Rights Act and Immigration Upset the Balance

When pollsters began asking Americans whether they trusted government, then, they got answers conditioned by three decades of this environment. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the pendulum began to swing in the other direction, coming to a head with Ronald Reagan’s famous pronouncement in his first inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem.”

What happened in the intervening years? The conventional explanations — Watergate and Vietnam — ignore the obvious. Consider again that 1964 was the high-water mark. Up until that point, the Democratic Party did not directly challenge the system of racial segregation that defined the South. In return, White Southerners remained solidly Democratic. That year, though, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, upsetting this delicate détente.

This landmark legislation was a century overdue, but it had profound effects on how many White Americans viewed the federal government. As Washington took an increasingly visible role in policies designed to promote racial equality — desegregation, busing, affirmative action — faith in the government declined among Whites, particularly in the South. Black voters did not replace them: They remained deeply skeptical, mindful that the federal government’s promises did not always materialize. The upshot was a significant decline in trust across the board.

Reagan’s presidency witnessed a modest increase in trust, though as one scholar of the era has noted, this was likely due to “his implied reassurance that these movements” — the Civil Rights movement, as well as the movement for women’s rights and gay rights — “would be slowed or brought to an end.” Ironically, Reagan’s federal government, which was itself an attack on government, was one that many White voters could once again trust.

In retrospect, the mid-1960s was an important turning point in another, less obvious way. Although it has long been a truism that the United States is a nation of immigrants, there is one exception to that rule: the 40-year period between 1924, when Congress passed the Immigration Act, which largely ended immigration; and 1965, when another act of Congress effectively reversed that trend, opening the door to an influx of immigrants from areas outside of Europe. Put differently, the period with some of the highest levels of trust was also an era when the population became more homogenous and less pluralistic.

The TV and Internet Age Changed the Game

Even more important, perhaps, has been the transformation of the media from the 1970s onward. This began with the birth of cable television, ushering in alternatives to the “big three” networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) that would eventually create a far more segmented media environment that, for all its technological differences, more closely resembled the fractured world of the 19th century.

The rise of the internet and social media has accelerated these trends, further undermining the fragile consensus and trust in the federal government that prevailed in the mid-20th century. While there’s much to lament about the new reality, it’s also something of a regression to the mean and a return to the fractious pluralism that has long defined the United States.

Still, the dismal opinion that most voters have of the national government raises legitimate concerns. If this erosion went hand-in-hand with a loss of faith in all forms of democratic government, we might be in genuine trouble. But that’s not actually the case.

Survey data from a related question aimed at measuring trust in state and local government reveal something rather startling: Faith in this type of government has largely remained steady. Since 1972, Gallup has polled Americans about their trust in local government. The first year they asked the question, 63% of respondents expressed trust most or all of the time. The number in the past few years has hovered around 70%.

Such numbers should be reassuring. They demonstrate that Americans have not lost faith in government itself. Instead, they fear a distant federal government — which in an era of intense political polarization is easy to see as controlled by your opponents. It’s a lot harder to feel that way about reasonably competent local officials charged with building sewers and schools.

That Americans still have faith in the banal business of local government may be cold comfort to anyone hoping that we will once again trust Washington to rise to the challenges of the 21st century world. This does not mean it will never happen, but the historical record suggests that such a resurgence would require the challenges to become so big that only something with the scale of the federal government can contain them.

Given the dangers posed by climate change, to say nothing of growing geopolitical conflicts, that day may come sooner than we expect. Should such a sea change in attitudes happen, though, let us not succumb to the fiction that trust in the federal government is something baked into our national character, much less that it is purely positive. History suggests otherwise.