Anyone see the PEW poll on trust in the Government?

Seems like republicans trust the government when they are in power (high trust under raygun and w) and distrust the government when the Dems are in power.

On the other hand, dems distrust the government when the GOP is in power, but their trust is not much better when the dems have power.

back to the Vietnam War. Watergate saw further erosion, and we've been a pretty darned polarized society ever since.

begins around 2000.

Look closely, not just at numbers that end in -00. The tables and the graphs say the same thing (which isn't so odd, since they encode the same data): The decline started not during the campaign, nor immediately following SCOTUS' December surprise. It started the summer/fall 2001...

The peak trust levels occurred *after* 2000 ended, which is strange--it rather implies that personal attitudes have momentum, so that even as you are actually coming to distrust people rather sharply still your overt trust levels continue. Perhaps the factors started in 2000; but it seems to me that this kind of thing can, at the individual level, operate rather quickly.

On the one hand, that's when there was a recession, immediately after a boom; one point to PEW. On the other, it's interesting that it was only then that the partisan wrangling that seemed to really get out of hand in the 1990s became a bipartisan game. I also think that Bush II had a lot to do with it--while dems hated him from the get-go, a lot of conservatives also disliked him--some rather intensely--even if they voted for him. They hoped he would be a conservative, instead of showing no signs of ratcheting down government spending and government. (The "starve the beast" metaphor seems highly inappropriate when applied to Bush II.)

Granted, the biggest decline in trust was from Johnson through Carter. It's in the late '60s that I really put the fracturing of US society--there were faultlines before, but apart from some loons none of the widespread, self-centered, absolutist messianism that you see from the late '60s onward.

I think it's an interesting, although non-PEW, insight that social capital and large non-governmental organization (in the abstract, not "NGOs" sensu stricto) is related to the amount of social trust and social capital. That in the absence of this capital, since you obviously can't trust anybody else, you need everybody else to be monitored--so you go for a lot more regulation and a lot more laws. You turn against other groups because you simply distrust them--they're not like you and yours, they are as cutthroat as you suspect (and this justifies being cutthroat), and the only way to control them (because, after all, you need to control them) is to win, to beat them, to impose regulation on them. At that point society is just a collection of people living at once on a stretch of land.

Tito, Saddam, Stalin, and quite a few people today all have had the same insight: Promote social distrust in their societies to make every more vested in a strong, central government to keep all the others in line. You give up "stuff" in order to keep the others from making your life even worse.

Dems are like my family - an unruly bunch with lots of ideas and the right to express them. :D