It’s a sign of how divergent these books are that Gingrich’s name does not appear anywhere in Sabin’s book, and Nader’s name does not appear in Fried and Harris’s. “Blaming conservatives for the end of the New Deal era is far too simplistic,” he says, explaining that the attack on the New Deal state was also driven by “an ascendant liberal public interest movement.” His principal actor is Ralph Nader. In “ Public Citizens” (Norton), the historian Paul Sabin suggests that much of the blame lies with liberal reformers. They say that “the intentional cultivation and weaponization of distrust represent the fundamental strategy of conservative Republican politics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump.” The principal actors in their account are Reagan and Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House during Bill Clinton’s second term as President. In “ At War with Government” (Columbia), the political scientists Amy Fried and Douglas B. It is a convenience to reviewers, although not an aid to clarity, that two recent books devoted to the subject assign responsibility to completely different perpetrators. It doesn’t explain why over all, no matter the President, the public’s level of trust in government has been dropping. But partisanship accounts only for changes in the distribution of responses. These ideas don’t refer to Democrats or Republicans in particular, but just to the government in general.” Still, when there is a Democratic President Republicans tend to have less faith in “government in general,” and Democrats tend to have more. A typical preamble to the trust question reads, “People have different ideas about the government in Washington. survey is designed to correct for partisanship. In the past fourteen years, in good times and bad, the index has never exceeded thirty per cent. And since Reagan left office, aside from intermittent spikes, including one after September 11th, it has declined steadily. Yet, during those eight years, the trust index never rose above forty-five per cent. For all his talk about reducing the size and the role of government, Reagan did not eliminate a single major program in his eight years in office. Popular programs like Medicare and Social Security remained intact. Watergate and Vietnam receded in the rearview mirror. Inflation was checked the economy recovered. “In this present crisis,” Reagan said in his Inaugural Address, “government is not the solution to our problem. He defeated the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, by almost ten percentage points in the popular vote. “the welfare state”-was elected President. By March, 1980, trust in government was down to twenty-seven per cent.Įight months later, Ronald Reagan, a man who opposed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare, which he called an attempt to impose socialism, and who wanted to make Social Security voluntary-a man who essentially ran against the New Deal and the Great Society, a.k.a. Americans might reasonably have felt that things had spun out of control. Then came the growing intensity of the civil-rights movement, the war in Vietnam, urban unrest, the women’s-liberation movement, the gay-liberation movement, Watergate, the oil embargo, runaway inflation, the hostage crisis in Iran. In 1958, the United States was in the middle of an economic boom and was not engaged in foreign wars for many Americans, there was domestic tranquillity. One answer might be that no one is to blame it’s just that circumstances have changed.
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