HOW IT STARTED:
Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.
—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.
How it’s going: Public’s view of politics slipping, now ‘unrelentingly negative.’
None other than the Pew Research Center sums up the alarming state of politics in and around the nation at this time. It is “dismal,” the pollster advised.
“Americans have long been critical of politicians and skeptical of the federal government. But today, Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative, with little hope of improvement on the horizon,” noted the wide-reaching survey, which was released Tuesday.
“Majorities say the political process is dominated by special interests, flooded with campaign cash and mired in partisan warfare. Elected officials are widely viewed as self-serving and ineffective,” the survey analysis advised, noting that there was no single “focal point” in politics that is troubling the public.
Anger and exhaustion permeate the entire political process.
“There is widespread criticism of the three branches of government, both political parties, as well as political leaders and candidates for office. Notably, Americans’ unhappiness with politics comes at a time of historically high levels of voter turnout in national elections. The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades,” the poll analysis advised.
“But voting in elections is very different from being satisfied with the state of politics — and the public is deeply dissatisfied,” it said.
—Jennifer Harper, the Washington Times, today.