DETROIT — I got an unusual phone call from a voter on Election Day, 1988, back when I was the politics editor of a newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee. The man was puzzled because he had just voted and didn’t recognize the names of the candidates for the senate.
“I thought our senators were Al Gore and Jim Sasser,” he said. “Well, yes sir, they are,” I said. “But those names are the candidates for the state senate.” “What?” he said. “They are the ones who go to Nashville to make laws for Tennessee,” said I.
There was a long pause.
“You mean to tell me that we are paying for two whole sets of the sons of bitches?” he said, incredulously.
I answered that well, yes, that was right. “Well, that must be what’s wrong with the country,” he said, before hanging up.
For years, I thought he was an extreme example of an uninformed voter, and mentally shook my head at the thought of someone so ignorant they didn’t know there was a state legislature.
Guess what: I was, in my own way, out of touch. That man was not a dysfunctional loser; he owned a small tool-and-die shop which, I believe, was doing rather well.
I spent much of my time with other reporters, editors and government officials, and lived in a space where I unconsciously took it for granted that everyone knew which party had majorities in various legislative bodies and when budgets had to be passed, etc.
Guess what: They don’t.
Many people, maybe most, have very little idea how their government works, or even, below the level of President, who their elected officials are. That isn’t limited to blue-collar workers. A few months ago, I had dinner with a lawyer who does some work for the American Civil Liberties Union.
I asked him who his congressman was, and he said Bill Broomfield. I was stunned, mostly because Broomfield, who was indeed in Congress for a long time, had retired in 1993, and is now dead.
And if people have a hard time grasping the two legislative branches of government, their understanding of the court system is probably even weaker. Years ago, a friend of mine was appointed a state district judge in Michigan. Some of her family and friends congratulated her on having a job for life. They knew a federal judge and thought state district courts are like federal courts, where appointments are indeed for life.
“They were surprised when they found out I had to run for reelection every six years, and couldn’t run again once I turned 70,” she said. These stories are, while amusing, also illustrate something very troubling, even scary:
When people have no real idea of how government works, they are more likely to see it as a huge array of mysterious and alien forces arrayed against them. The reality is very different.
“Government,” is indeed President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. But government is also your local county commissioner, whose name you probably don’t know, as well as the police and firemen and those who clean up your leaves in the fall and fix the potholes in the road.
We live, of course, under many different governments, and the ones we interact with the most — local and state — are the ones we have the most power to affect – if we bother to vote.
While people may not have a great deal of knowledge about the court system, the good news is that a survey by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver found that 70 percent of people generally trust it.
However, the survey also found that more than two-thirds of African-Americans don’t trust it to dispense equal justice, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone familiar with history.
But when it comes to the federal government, the picture is beyond dismal, according to a survey by the respected Pew Research Center – only about 20 percent of adults and a mere nine percent of all Republicans say they can trust the government to do what’s right.
Back when Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat John Kennedy were in the White House, about three-quarters of both parties said they trusted the government.
A recent Gallup poll found considerably higher levels of trust in state government (57 percent) and local government (66 percent), but Michigan polls have shown far lesser confidence in both Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Republican legislature.
If Americans don’t trust their governments, that doesn’t bode well for what might happen in a crisis. To some extent, the decline of trust in the national government from the Eisenhower era is probably due to traumatic events like Vietnam, Watergate, and the vulgar chaos and constant lying that marked the Trump presidency.
But more of it may be due to the divided media. When I had that call from the confused voter in 1988, the fairness doctrine had just been repealed, and there was no Rush Limbaugh, nor hyperpartisan Fox or MSNBC television networks.
That gentleman still relied on his local paper to accurately explain reality to him, and I’m sure that if he was disappointed in a national election’s outcome, it would never have occurred to him that the election was a fraud and that the loser really won.
How we fix this, I don’t know. Suggestions range from better teaching in high school civics classes to media literacy courses.
What I do know, however, that if we continue to be a nation where four-fifths of us don’t trust our government, we’re in trouble.
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