The Malevolent Leaders

Popular Discontent In America

Stephen C Craig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367293727
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000303186
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Trust in government dropped to a near-record low during the 1992 election as Ross Perot's startling campaign illustrated all too graphically. Stephen Craig shows the trajectory of this popular discontent over the years and predicts that the "confidence gap" is not likely to close until citizens adjust their perceptions and expectations of government—a shift that would represent a major change in our political culture. Blending survey data and interviews with both elites and nonelites, Craig gives us a nuanced view of how people assess their leaders, how leaders see themselves, and how opinions converge and diverge on the issues that matter most: the economy, the environment, and, above all, the quality of our democracy.

Chapter 1
A Crisis of Confidence?

I wanna grow up to be a politician and take over this beautiful land.

—the Byrds, “I Wanna Grow Up to Be a Politician,”
by R. McGuinn and J. Levy

Only thing worse than a politician is a child molester.

—from the movie Extreme Prejudice

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter spoke to the American public about a growing “crisis of confidence” that, in his view, threatened “to destroy the social and political fabric” of our nation. There was widespread disrespect not only for government but also for “churches and for schools, the news media and other institutions.” According to the president, the gap between citizens and their leaders had “never been so wide” and the political system in general was virtually “incapable of action” to solve the country’s problems. Carter predictably criticized Congress for contributing to this tendency toward “paralysis and stagnation and drift” by allowing itself to be “twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.” Yet he also portrayed the people alternately as victims (for understandably having lost faith in their ability “to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy”) and as obstacles to needed change (for worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption” rather than making sacrifices on behalf of the common good).

All in all, it was an extraordinary speech. Originally planned as an address on energy policy, the president’s remarks ended up sounding more like a “sermon” than anything else.¹ Historian and journalist Theodore White remarked that “[n]o president since Abraham Lincoln had spoken to the American people with such sincerity about matters of spirit. What Carter… said was true, and long overdue in the saying” (White 1982, pp. 268–269). For David Broder (cited in Strong 1986, pp. 646–647) of the Washington Post, it was a speech “that only Jimmy Carter could have given. … It dealt with what he believes are the fundamentals. The character and spirit of the American people. The values that built the nation. The trust that must exist between the government and the governed.” Initial public reaction was generally quite favorable, with polls showing a substantial jump in the president’s job approval ratings over the next several days (Strong 1986; Caddell 1979).

This effect was short-lived, however, as Carter’s subsequent firing of three cabinet members conveyed the impression of an administration in serious disarray. Over the long term, the president’s standing was further eroded by events occurring both at home and abroad during the remainder of 1979 and throughout the election year of 1980 (continued economic stagflation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, American hostages in Iran). These developments played into the hands of critics, who from the beginning naturally tended to see Carter’s speech as a self-serving justification for his own incompetent leadership and policy failures; some attempted to trivialize the overall message by reducing it to a single word, malaise, that the president had not even used that night.

Such judgments were not entirely fair. The “crisis of confidence” speech may have been bad politics and, in retrospect, probably should never have been given. Yet the plain truth is that, whatever his motives, Carter was describing a phenomenon that has troubled political observers and social analysts for more than a quarter century. By the late 1970s, citizens were indeed more likely than not to express feelings of mistrust toward government and to doubt the integrity and capabilities of its leaders. There was also a widespread belief that the affairs of state, and perhaps even of one’s own life, were beyond the scope of individual influence and control. When asked, for example, whether the government was run “by a few big interests looking out for themselves” or “for the benefit of all the people,” 70 percent of a 1980 national sample (compared with 28 percent in 1964) chose the former. In the same group, 73 percent felt that the government in Washington could be trusted to do what is right “only some (or none) of the time”; the figure sixteen years earlier was a mere 22 percent.²

Of course, the political culture of the United States has always contained a strong commitment to individualism and a corresponding aversion to the unrestricted exercise of state power. Popular suspicion of government and politics has, therefore, been the norm since the nation’s founding.³ The evidence to be reviewed in this book, however, suggests that our traditional ambivalence toward politics gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to a deeper and more pervasive negativism. Even the modest rise in public trust observed during the era of Ronald Reagan (an apparent response to improved economic conditions and to the president’s leadership style) did little to produce a genuine turnaround in the long-term trend; especially after the Iran-contra revelations began to unfold in 1986–1987, opinion polls indicated that the so-called confidence gap was alive and well in American politics (Lipset and Schneider 1987; Miller and Borrelli 1991).

As the 1980s drew to a close, there were hopes that the “kinder, gentler America” envisioned by George Bush would include policies and standards of official conduct aimed at resolving any lingering doubts about the competence, integrity, and public-spiritedness of political decisionmakers. Yet the generally nasty tone set in Bush’s 1988 presidential race against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis (Germond and Witcover 1989; Taylor 1990)—followed over the next twelve months by the Senate’s rejection of John Tower as secretary of defense, an acrimonious debate concerning alleged ethics violations by House Speaker James Wright, the savings-and-loan bailout, repeated efforts to pass a congressional pay raise, tales of fraud and political favoritism at Reagan’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, and continued inaction on the question of matching public revenues with social needs—provided early warning signals that the restoration of trust in government would be more elusive than many wanted to believe. A similar message was conveyed in 1990, when voters in three states (Oklahoma, Colorado, and California) gave voice to the antiincumbency feelings of Americans everywhere by passing ballot initiatives limiting the number of terms that various elected officials were permitted to serve;⁴ and was conveyed again in 1992, when fourteen additional states passed term-limitation measures, when an unusually large number of congressmen were persuaded (by the voters, by campaign advisers, or by their own desire to escape the rat race that a congressional career has come to represent) to retire, and when H. Ross Perot burst out of nowhere to pose the strongest independent or third-party challenge for the presidency in eighty years.

What, precisely, are the origins of this increasingly strained relationship between citizens and their leaders? In one sense, the answer is obvious: Government in general, and the national government in particular, simply has not done a very good job of dealing with the country’s most important problems. At first there was the anger and sense of betrayal felt on both sides of the civil rights struggle and the waging of a long and controversial foreign war, the resolution of which left a bitter taste among supporters and opponents alike. Subsequent years brought us Watergate and numerous other scandals (political, corporate, religious); gas shortages and higher energy costs; the polarizing debate over abortion; budget and trade deficits that seemed to grow exponentially; occasional periods of high inflation and/or unemployment; schools in which our children did not learn how to read or to do basic math; acid rain and the threat of global warming; the plights of the homeless and of the urban underclass; an avalanche of drugs flowing into the United States from abroad; the nightmare of AIDS; more crime and more criminals than ever before being shuffled through our already overburdened judicial system; the spectacle of an administration willing to negotiate with terrorists after having promised never to do so; and a new war in the Persian Gulf that stirred popular passions while at the same time evoking (at least in some quarters) unpleasant memories of Vietnam. With such a steady stream of bad news, it is understandable that many people began to lose confidence in their governmental leaders and institutions. Yet there is nothing to indicate that the erosion of trust has been accompanied by diminished feelings of national loyalty or national pride. In a 1987 survey more than 90 percent of all respondents agreed—either strongly or somewhat—with the statements that (1) “whatever its faults may be, the American form of government is still the best for us” and (2) “I would rather live under our system of government than any other that I can think of.” A similar proportion endorsed U.S. electoral arrangements by agreeing that “voting is an effective way for people to have a say about what the government does” (Craig et al. 1990). Such overwhelming numbers would appear to suggest that the crisis of confidence may not be much of a crisis after all, and they certainly belie the notion that discontent significantly boosts “the potential for revolutionary alteration of the political and social system” (Miller 1974b, p. 951).

Moreover, numerous studies show that the average American is relatively satisfied with most aspects of his or her private life (including marriage, family, job, friends, housing, neighborhood, and the like; e.g., Hamilton and Wright 1986; Inglehart 1988; but cf. Kanter and Mirvis 1989). This basic sense of satisfaction is important for at least two reasons. First, it helps to explain why political disaffection has not yet led to any sort of mass upheaval: Why should citizens jeopardize their private satisfactions in order to correct problems that they tend to see as fairly remote from their everyday concerns (Hamilton and Wright 1986; Wright 1981)? The simple fact is that politics and the affairs of government are of limited salience to many people. Except in rare instances, official malfeasance is therefore likely to arouse strong emotions or a sense of personal grievance—and to stimulate corrective action—only among a small segment of the general public.

Second, the cultural emphasis on individualism noted earlier means that there is little inclination to hold government responsible for solving whatever personal problems citizens do have (Sniderman and Brody 1977; Verba and Schlozman 1977). Just as political dissatisfactions do not usually spill over into the personal sphere, research indicates that personal hardships are infrequently politicized in the sense of generating specific demands on governmental decisionmakers. Despite the growth of the welfare state since the 1930s, most Americans continue to accept responsibility for handling personal problems (e.g., finding a job, seeing that the bills are paid, coping with illness or poor health) themselves. We might wonder, then, whether the policy failures of the past quarter century are really sufficient cause for the erosion of public trust. Without demands, the expectations people have concerning the performance of our leaders and institutions should be relatively modest; and without failed expectations, inadequate performance does not figure to tell us a great deal about the origins of popular discontent in the United States.

The limited involvement of the mass public in political affairs provides further reason to doubt that trust is a function of the correspondence between citizen demands (or expectations) and governmental performance. In an article challenging what he calls the traditional “policy-demand-input” model of democratic represen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1 A Crisis of Confidence?
• 2 Looking for Causes
• 3 An Ethos of Democracy
• 4 Citizens: Is Anybody Listening?
• 5 Leaders: Fingers on the Public Pulse?
• 6 Popular Discontent and the Future of American Politics
• Appendix 1: Wording of Survey Questions
• Appendix 2: Profiles of Alachua County Depth Interview Respondents
• Appendix 3: Description of Congressional Sample
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index