David Brooks:
Well, first, I occasionally — we get to sit in off the record on government agency meetings, say, at HUD. I remember a HUD meeting I was at several years ago.
And I was amazed at the quality of the civil servants. And I’m always struck by that. These are people not paid a lot of money, lots of advanced degrees, vastly overqualified for some of this work, but they believe in it. They’re not particularly ideological, by the way. They believe maybe in housing policy, education policy, transportation, but it’s not like they’re flaming ideologues of left or right.
They just want to do the job. And so I have really come — living in the swamp here in D.C., I guess, I have come to really respect civil servants, because just because I have gotten to know and watched them operate.
As for the trust, to me, it’s the number one statistic if you want to understand politics in this country. If you ask people from, say, 1940 to 1967, say, do you trust government to do the right thing most of the time, you got 75 percent answers, yes, I do.
Then Vietnam comes along, then Watergate comes along, and it plummets in the ’70s. It ticks up a little under Clinton, a little under Reagan, a little under Obama. But it’s been pretty much low 20s. And it dumped down to 19.
And when no trusts government to do the right thing, it’s just hard to rally people to want to use government to do the right thing, because they just don’t trust it. And so that’s just a fundamental problem with our country, which is not universal.
In countries all across the West, they don’t see levels of distrust the way we have. Distrust just leads people to pull inward, to fear, to believe conspiracies, not want to get vaccinated. It leads to problem after problem after problem. And how we rebuild trust in this country is just a major challenge.