Americans Trust Government Less and Less Because We Know More and More About How It Operates

Fifty years ago,
FBI operatives sent Martin Luther King, Jr. was has come to be
known as the “suicide letter,” an anonymous note suggesting the
civil rights leader should off himself before his private sex life
was made public. The information about King’s extramarital
assignations was gathered with the approval not just of the FBI’s
J. Edgar Hoover but Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President
Lyndon Johnson.

“There is but one way out for you,” reads the note, which
appeared in unredacted form for the first time just last week. “You
better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the
nation.”

Thus is revealed one of the most despicable acts of domestic
surveillance in memory. These days, we worry less about
the government outing our sex lives than in it tracking every move
we move online. It turns out that President Obama, who said he
would roll back the unconstitutional powers exercised by his
predecessor, had a secret “kill list” over which he was sole
authority. Jesus, we’ve just learned that small planes
are
using so-called dirtboxes to pick up cell phone traffic.
One of the architects of Obamacare publicly states that Americans
are stupid and that the president’s healthcare reform was vague and
confusing on purpose. The former director of national intelligence,
along with the former head and current heads of the CIA, have lied
to Congress.

Is it surprising, then, that 72 percent Americans consider “big
government” the largest threat to the country’s future? That’s more
than twice the number in 1964, when the King letter was sent.

The thread—maybe it’s better called a piano wire—connecting the
present to the past is the subject of my latest Daily Best column.

Here’s part of it:

Fifty
years ago—again, right around the time that the FBI was about to
become the subject of a
hagiographic hit TV show and trying to goad Martin Luther
King, Jr. into killing himself—Richard Hofstadter was denouncing
the “paranoid
style in American politics,”. He lamented that, “American
politics has often been an arena for angry minds.”

But today’s lack of trust and confidence in the government
doesn’t seem all that angry. It’s more like we’re resigned to the
fact that our rulers think little of us—that is, when they think of
us at all. In gaining new knowledge about how people in power
almost always behave, we are wiser and sadder and, one hopes, much
less likely to put up with bullshit from the left, right, or
center.

There’s a real opportunity to the politicians, the parties, and
the causes that dare to embrace real transparency —about how
legislation is being crafted, about our surveillance programs at
home and abroad—as a core value and something other than a
throwaway slogan. But as an unbroken thread of mendacity and
mischief binds the present to the past, a future in which
government can be trusted seems farther off than ever.

Read the whole piece at
The Daily Beast.