How Americans Perceive the American Political System and Their Roles Within It

Independent thinking has always been a trait Americans have seen and prized in themselves, whether or not it’s always been the complete truth. Cynicism and mistrust, and their jaded godchild, apathy, often follow when our independent thinkers are disappointed by the realities of political life in the United States.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his Democracy in America, “The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it.”

And it’s true! The constitutional framers who built our political system decades before de Tocqueville’s early 19th century visit did so with healthy doses of mistrust - of kings and centralized authority, of factions, of political minorities, and even of the great multitudes of unwashed commonfolk who would make up “the majority” in our democratic republic. This is how we ended up with a system of “filtered,” representative democracy in the first place.

So, it’s relatively safe to say that we’ve ALWAYS been at least a bit cynical about our governmental handlers. Since the early 1970s, however, American politics, as seen through the lens of the media, has at times deepened our collective sense of mistrust.

The Watergate scandal back in the early 70s is a logical place to begin, as it started a bit of a trend on a number of levels, particularly as one of the first major government scandals to be extensively contextualized within the post-1960 televised-everything era of news. Coming off a thirty-some year period of World War II era “GO WESTERN DEMOCRACY!” high, we learned from this situation that perhaps our political system wasn’t immune to the same sort of hypocrisies we were so used to pinning on the Nazi fascists and Russian communists. We were forced to remember that elected officials lie, and their administrations and campaign apparati are in no way immune to propagating not-so-happy secrets. The era instigated several pieces of legislation aimed to clean up our government, create more transparency between government and the people/the media, and more closely monitor our elections, including the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act amendments intended to clarify campaign contribution sources and limit who could contribute, and how much. Since the Watergate incident, hints of scandal seem to be hauled out whenever possible as a political tool to try to discredit presidents and other high level political players. And fortunately or unfortunately, that’s easy to do in our current 24/7 tv news culture. Over the past few years, the Valerie Plame leak probe, furor over firings in the Dept. of Justice and subsequent coverups, questions regarding the honesty of administration assurances in 2002 and 2003 regarding the status of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and other scandallish situations involving the president’s partisan compatriots - Republicans - in Congress have clouded the news in recent years. And during the Clinton administration, the Whitewater investment allegations and the president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky ignited firestorms of accusation. The president’s attempt to deny the Lewinsky affair (lying under oath) even instigated a presidential impeachment...a procedure we had not seen implemented since Andrew Johnson in the 1860s!

Mudslinging campaigns and spindoctor commentary aren’t exactly unique to postmodern American politics, but since the advent of television as the core of mass-media; Telstar 1’s enablance of live, politically-oriented telecasts (like the 1960 presidential debates); and the internet’s introduction of widescale “alternative” political reporting and blogging, the number of wide-reaching voices on the subjects of government and politics have multiplied exponentially. And with more audible voices comes the necessity for these voices to become louder and shriller in order to be heard, which often, unfortunately, means nastier, meaner, rawer, and less “professional” discourse. Oddly enough, even the so called ‘weakest’ of the three federal branches of government, the judiciary, has come under fire for being too political and too activist! Last year, the Supreme Court got an earful of abuse from all sorts of people, including state and congressional legislators, regarding their decision in the Kelo v New London Connecticut case, in which they refused to rule unconstitutional an imminent domain policy involving a local government’s taking of several residential properties for sale and conversion into a waterfront complex anchored by private business interests. The resulting uproar accused the supreme court majority of failing to protect Americans from “takings” that did not fulfill a constitutional public purpose, and instigated a number of state level attempts to redefine ‘legal’ eminent domain takings to exclude those taken for private purposes (Prop 90, California’s 2006 version of the backlash to the Kelo decision, didn’t pass).

Today, incredibly low approval ratings for the president indicate not only distrust of the current administration, but a general lack of faith in the system as a whole. In one recent poll (Harris Interactive, in January, 2007), 77% of Americans questioned reported that they mistrusted American political parties. 55% of Americans reported that they mistrusted the U.S. government as a whole, and 56% reported that they did NOT trust Congress - their own elected representatives and senators! When compared to exiting approval ratings of presidents since Nixon, ONLY Nixon’s end-of-office approval rating (24%, according to ABC) is lower than Bush’s April 2007 rating, which dwelled in the low 30 percent range depending on the poll source you used.

Today, there are more independent voters than ever before, and party loyalty has been waning since the fifties and sixties, particularly among Democrats. And since the 1990s in particular, third party and independent personalities have often captured our imaginations as voters AND, as a result, shaped election issues and agendas. in 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot garnered 20 million votes, yet, still managed not to attain a single electoral vote, one of many examples of how and why the electoral college - and the political system in general - seems predisposed to shut out fresh ideas and limit our options as voters (Think: is this automatically a bad thing? Did our constitutional framers want fast, unpredictable results?). Presidential election turnout is usually good (in the 80%s), but lower-level midterm and special election turnouts are not always so good (30%s even?), though Americans on the whole claim to be very interested in local politics. how can democracy and “majoritarian” principles withstand apathy? How can they withstand a voter dropout rate that challenges the validity of the claim that the majority rules in American democracy? And when people DO care enough to weigh in on ‘big elections,’ they may be incredibly disappointed by the results of their involvement. The 2000 presidential election results are a case in point; many students are confounded and impassioned by the fact that a person who wins the popular vote by a half-percent could still end up losing the election, particularly when the validity of election results had been called into question in the key state of Florida.

Voters, particularly young people, who as a group include a large proportion of independent voters, are often confused by the “differences” between the two major political parties, often insisting that politicians are really “all the same,” just out for power and notoriety for themselves. Who can you trust? Particularly when the policy process is SO slow, and much of Congress’ production appears to be pork barrel, and when entrenched incumbency seems to rule? How can fresh blood be infused when third parties and new ideas are in essence shut out of the two-party, winner-take all electoral system we’ve developed?

Slick, mass-media based campaigns costing thousands - and into the 200 millions for presidential campaigns - seem to have taken precedence over real issues...fundraising and hobnobbing with fat cats appears to be the norm for candidates, despite efforts to curb campaign contributions via FECA and the BCFRA. To system “outsiders,” i.e. normal people, it looks like whomever can provide the money can “buy” the ears of our elected officials, and those with the most formidable social and economic resources can afford the best “lobbying” apparati available. How can the rest of us be heard, even when our elected officials want to know how we feel?

People also perceive disappointing, unreliable sources of information from the media contributing to the malaise...sound bites, slick, sexy, high-impact, low-info media presentations on television confuse us, and dismay us when they seem to concentrate on shockfactor topics like scandals. Who has the time to wade through the talking heads, the gloss, the “media bias” to figure out what’s really going on? what’s really important? What really matters to me, and where in the world can I find resources that speak to the topics I want to learn about?

Lots of people are “giving up” on the system because they don’t have the time, interest, or confidence to get serious about their choices, and/or because they feel the system unresponsive and has nothing real to offer them in terms of participation.

But does hopelessness abound forever? Systemic renewal indicates that it won’t...things DO run in cycles.

The last 35 years or so haven’t been a constant downward spiral into negativity. The Reagan Era gave many Americans (though I was not among them) a resurgence of confidence. “His greatest service,” wrote Haynes Johnson, a journalist who was in fact often a forceful critic of President Reagan’s policies, “ was in restoring the respect of Americans for themselves and their own government after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, the frustration of the Iran hostage crisis and a succession of seemingly failed presidencies.” And during the mid-1990s, we seemed relatively happy with our growing national economy and the general job president Clinton seemed to be doing, despite the 1994 “Republican Revolution” in Congress and the 1999 Impeachment debacle. But even though were bristled by the personal scandal that surrounded his presidency, we could be generous with president Clinton regarding his work as president (we saw him out of office with an end-of-job approval rating of 65%, no doubt a result of the booming economy he oversaw as president, as well as his ability to successfully “triangulate” policy with Congress, i.e. negotiate legislation acceptable not only to himself, but to Congressional Democrats and Republicans as well).

As people become more aware of instances where their government has misappropriated their trust, they are often influenced to learn more about the political system, and how they can contribute to democratic discourse. When people at least attempt to get involved by contributing to pluralist political culture - joining or supporting interest groups, meeting likeminded people online for discussions and organization - it helps. More, we can revive majoritarian democratic principles through VOTING...when people are angry enough, they’ll take some ownership of their part in the democratic decisionmaking process. We can REFUSE to reinforce incumbent apathy by voting conscientiously. Congressional turnover in 2006 and new presidencies are a part of the natural cycle of american politics. American democracy was designed to be slow. It was designed to withstand evil factionalization. And, it was designed with safety valves to “throw the bums out,” more or less, when their usefulness was through, even though it didn’t come equipped with quick, neat little California-style term limits. Cases in point: November 1994 and November 2006.

We can’t really FORGET the past - and I think it’s best that we don’t forget it, rather learn from it and contextualize it - but the passage of time and the march of partisan turnover can provide us with the sense of renewal and reconnection we NEED to feel connected to our government, and to feel that our government is responsive to our needs. It can also provide us with the perspective we need to recategorize and move on from our national traumas. Though he was much-maligned during and just after his presidency, President Carter’s anti inflation and resource conservation policies, for example, are finding new respect today. And his moral coherence during the Iran hostage crisis and in boycotting the 1980 Olympics now commands respect, in retrospect. So there’s hope.

~ K. Pappas, April 2007
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