Decline of trust

David M. Kennedy is a Stanford professor emeritus of history, the author of well over fifteen books in his field (judging from my attempt to count the number on Goodreads) and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his study of the American people during the Great Depression and World War II. 

I discover that we were undergraduates in the same history department at the same time, he being a year younger than I was.  I feel that he has somehow out-excelled me!

I just finished watching his one-hour streamed lecture on "The History of the American Presidency."  It was a big subject for a short hour, but Kennedy is an excellent speaker and the lecture was well organized and well illustrated by photographs and copies of historical documents.  

I just apologized in my last post for publishing summaries of on-line lectures in my blog, and I don't want to try my readers' patience further.  I'll just say a few words about this interesting lecture.  

About half the lecture was devoted to the history of the office of the presidency, emphasizing how the power of the office has consistently increased.  The rise of mass media has permitted the president to appeal directly to the people, rather than to Congress.  And the rise of primary elections, beginning in 1910, and the resulting decline of political parties as the bodies which groom, vet, and select candidates has resulted -- and I would note, especially with Trump -- in the president's throwing off any ideological or philosophical shackles imposed by his membership in his political party, with his party's becoming merely one of his tools of governance.

His overall thesis was that "chronic frustration" is built into the American system of government.  The Constitution provides so many checks and balances that it is usually impossible for the winning party to get a program through Congress.  For this reason, and others, there has been a steady decline in confidence and trust in government.  But this is a decline that also applies to all institutions -- to the mainstream press and other media, and to experts of all kinds.  And a decline that applies most alarmingly to people's distrust of each other.  

This loss of trust exists at all levels of society, but is increasingly strong as we examine those less educated, those younger, and those with less financial stability.  It applies to distrust of the election process itself.  In a recent poll, 52 percent of voters believe that Trump will cheat in this year's election, and 39 percent believe that Biden will cheat.

Kennedy paraphrased a quotation from Alexis de Toqueville, in which that French student of American politics said that a despot doesn't mind if his subjects don't trust him; his concern is to prevent them from trusting each other.  (I note that Communist governments strongly discouraged development of any charitable or educational societies not directly controlled by the party.)  He noted that a recent survey of historians showed that, in their opinion, the worst president ever had been Nixon.  Not necessarily because of Nixon's policies, but because by his conduct he had weakened the structures of American government, and the people's trust in their government and the individuals holding political positions.  

Professor Kennedy offered no easy solution to America's decline in trust -- in their government, in their institutions, in each other.  He noted that a parliamentary system resulted in less of the "frustration" that has hurt American government, but neither urged nor foresaw any such revolutionary change in our own Constitution.