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"Palin and Biden Stake Their Claims on Change," rang the lead headline in the Times after the vice-presidential debate. Who could blame them? With several wars, Great Depression II, a blistering civil conflict in Pakistan, and European economic collapse, change would be welcome.
But there's something else going on with this "change" business, the reason why "change" is such an appealing message to Americans. It's not that an overwhelming number of voters want a change in particular policy. What Americans want universally is a change in the way government works.
Political writers say voters don't give a rip about governmental process. But these two campaigns are mostly about process, about how government works rather than what government does. Maybe that's because we care more about process than results, more about the way government operates rather than the policies government enacts.
That's the argument of two political scientists from the University of Nebraska, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. Policy doesn't drive people's vote, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse. People want good schools, peace, and a strong economy, certainly. But they don't have overwhelming concern about how these ends are achieved.
"What do people care about if they don't care about policy?" the two ask, and then answer. "We argue that people care deeply about process." (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse lay out their argument in their 2002 book, Stealth Democracy: Americans' Beliefs about How Government Should Work.)
People "despise pointless political conflict and they believe pointless political conflict is rampant in American politics today." And they overwhelmingly see a "political system in which decision makers—for no reason other than the fact that they are in a position to make decisions—accrue benefits at the expense of non-decision makers. Just as children are often less concerned with acquiring a privilege than with preventing their siblings from acquiring a privilege, citizens are usually less concerned with obtaining a policy outcome than with preventing others from using the process to feather their own nests."
OK, I'm like many of you. This sounds wrong, belittling. (The "children" reference is over the top.) Hibbing and Theiss-Morse aren't exactly thrilled about what they've found as they've polled and focus-grouped voters. But the Nebraska professors' thesis does explain why outsiders (governors from Georgia, California, Arkansas, and Texas) have won the presidency based largely on their outsiderness, that they didn't live "inside the Beltway."
Now we have the "maverick" (plus his Alaskan sidekick) and the guy who will deliver the "change we need/can believe in." Both candidates have promoted themselves as outsiders who promise to sweep out a government rotten with partisanship and corruption.
Hibbing and Theiss-Morse don't think people want to get rid of "insiders" so "the people" can take more direct control of government. They argue Americans have little interest in most policy proposals and even less interest in the day-to-day work of government. (Largely that's because people shy away from conflict, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse write, and politics is all about conflict.) What they want is for government to be open, accountable, and representative. Their perception is that government is none of those things, and so dissatisfaction with government "usually stems from perceptions of how government goes about its business, not what the government does."
Therefore, people's "main political goal is often limited to nothing more than achieving a process that will prevent decision makers from benefiting themselves."
The Nebraskans contend that the great power vested in government inevitably leads to this sense that politicians are "overpaid lackeys of special interests."
"[P]eople are amazingly sensitive to being played for suckers," they write. "Politicans are often in a position to do this, and as a result the people love to hate them." We are psychologically wired this way. It's not the policy positions politicians take that lead to our distrust, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse write; it is the power they hold.
Most people don't care about politics or policy. They just don't want to be ripped off. And so they vote, time and again, for the outsider, the maverick, the man from Hope, the peanut farmer, the Perot phenomenon in '92, the uniter not a divider, the guy who will deliver change from the bottom up.
This isn't the way I like to think about politics. And given the remarkable failures of the last eight years, it's hard to believe policy isn't a primary concern right now. But eight out of the last nine elections (including this one) have been shaped by the sense among voters that Washington is corrupt, politicians are crooks, and it will take a newcomer to get rid of the corruption and the partisanship.
I can't think of a single policy proposal that has had a similar impact.
(Top) Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images; (Bottom) Photo by Peter Tompson/Getty Images
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Over the past few decades, Congress hasn't done a very good job of solving problems. (Congressional scholar Nelson Polsby once described Congress as being in a 30-year period of stalemate.) Now we expect these guys to rejigger the world's financial system six weeks before a presidential election? Holy smokes!
If we step back, we might be able to see why Congress has been so unproductive over the past 30 years -- and why Americans will undoubtedly be skeptical of whatever solution comes out over the next few days.
We don't trust government. Republicans, Democrats, or Ron-Paulians, none of us trusts government to do what's best, and we haven't for some time now.
In the late 1950s, eight out of 10 Americans said they could trust government to do the right thing most of the time. That level of faith in government remained high through 1964 and provided the foundation for LBJ's Great Society. In 1965, Johnson was able to pass the Voting Rights Act and Medicare (with the support of half the Republicans in the Senate). He created the Appalachian Regional Commission and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. The first class of children enrolled in Head Start.
That's what a president and Congress could do when voters trusted government.
Beginning in the mid-'60s, however, there was a "virtual explosion in anti-government feelings," wrote Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider. (Yep, CNN's Bill Schneider began life as a top-notch academic.) The decline in trust was "among the largest ever recorded in opinion surveys," one scholar wrote, and within a few years only one out of four Americans trusted government to do the right thing. Democrats lost the 1966 midterm elections, the Great Society was kaput, and Congress' dormant period had begun.
The decline in trust in government has been permanent, and it has permanently changed the terms of national debate. Vanderbilt political scientist Marc Hetherington argues that the decline of trust put Democrats at a perpetual disadvantage. Democrats found themselves proposing government solutions to problems that not even Democrats trusted government to carry out.
(Hetherington found the perfect example of the Democrats' dilemma: In 1964, only 41 percent of Americans wanted the federal government to integrate schools. Although sentiment for integrated schools was nearly universal by the early 1990s, support for federal intervention had dropped to 34 percent.)
As trust declined, the reach of government shortened. Americans found it harder to reach a consensus. Johnson and Bill Clinton were two poor boys from the rural South. The first planned the Great Society; 30 years later, the other declared that the "era of big government is over." The difference, Hetherington contends, is that in the early 1960s, people trusted government in its ambitions.
By 1995, most of those answering a Washington Post poll said they opposed more federal spending to help the poor. Some people had an ideological objection. Most didn't. Most people were against more Great Society-type programs because "the federal government (could) not do the job right."
By the 1990s, Americans didn't trust government to do much of anything at all.
Journalists have blamed this "crisis in confidence" on a "crisis in competence." Who could expect a public to trust a government that had brought us Vietnam, Watergate, WMDs, and, now, a multibillion-dollar financial implosion? Government got what it deserved.
The trouble with that argument is that it ignores the scope of the problem. At the same time Americans lost confidence in their government, so did the English. And the Aussies, French, Italians, Japanese, and Germans. The decline in confidence wasn't something special to the United States, a homegrown product of our politicians' failures. It was common to all industrialized countries. The lack of trust is a function of modern prosperity.
So, we've muddled along, putting off problems (health care, immigration, whatever). We've made it through, patching together solutions and spackling over the gaps with Game Boys, wine-tastings, and the wonders of HDTV. Mostly, we've looked for private solutions to public problems.
Now we need government again. We can't do without it. But we've forgotten what it was like to trust government to take on exactly the kind of big job it was created to do.
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