We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

Robin Wright, in an excellent yet disturbing article in The New Yorker, laments the precipitous decline of trust among Americans. That confidence in the legitimacy of American institutions has eroded is not exactly news: Vietnam and Watergate started the slide in the 1960s and 1970s. But something else is in play, according to Wright, something far more ominous:

American experience is in real trouble — more than at any time in at least a half century — and that there’s no one out there to help us. Reflecting on . . . [Barack Obama’s] Facebook comment, Paul Waldman, of the Washington Post, wrote, “This country is not in the mood for reconciliation and healing, and hasn’t been for some time.”… The unsettling sense that America is going wrong, even unwinding, is reflected in a poll released two weeks ago by the Pew Research Center: seventy-five per cent of Americans now say that trust in the federal government is shrinking. The numbers reflect both frustration with the nation’s polarization and anger over Washington’s dysfunction. But something bigger is happening. Even more striking in the Pew poll: two-thirds of Americans have significantly less trust in one another, too.

The core of the problem, however, is contained in Wright’s phrase “there’s no one out there to help us.” In a liberal republican democracy, government rests on the continued consent of the governed. There’s no one “out there” other than the citizenry: government, however one might take it to be some disinterested oligarchic “other”, ultimately is what it is…