Why do Americans distrust government?

40 years of very efficient Koch Brothers propaganda together with Rupert Murdoch's Fox News started in 1996.

The Americans that distrust government are conservatives, which are currently represented by the Republican party.

Although many conservative ideals are not represented in the current version of the Republican party, the distrust of government is the key feature that remains.

Republican politicians will play on this distrust to ironically get elected to serve in the government for as long as they can.

They want to be there for power.

As long as they say the won't raise taxes, conservatives will vote for them.

Of course, government needs tax revenue to function and serve the people in broad programs that are more efficiently done by government like education and infrastructure.

Ronald Reagan is to blame for this massive distrust when he said "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Well, in a major crisis, we really do need the government to help.

When we are raising our children and need school really do need the government to help.

When we need roads to travel really do need the government to help.

When we need to protect the poor, the sick and the elderly really do need the government to help.

These conservatives are really big on being self sufficient but it really is amazing how many of them are on welfare programs and keep voting against their interests.

Or they make big money on Wall Street but want government intervention to save the markets every time something goes wrong.

Look at Donald Trump. He has press conferences with doctors urging social distance to mitigate the spread of this nasty virus.

Then he tweets support of people protesting those very actions against their state governments.

A Republican will say they will lower their taxes and don't trust the government and their people love them.

And who's paying trillions of dollars to help people right now? The federal government.

And who will be paying for that later? The tax payers. But when it's time to pay the bill, Republicans will refuse to help to bring in tax revenue.

King Tiger wrote:

The real question is: if americans distrust their goverment, why do they keep voting red or blue???

$$$$$

You know there are some much more recent examples. Shall I start?

serter wrote:

I have heard that Americans distrust government. Why is this exactly?

It is part of our zeitgeist / American mythology. We romanticize a ragtag group of people with muskets overthrowing government & restoring “liberty”. This individualistic heroism delusion shows up in all of our movies, tv shows etc. there isn’t a reason “why” per se. Americans only have a very superficial and stylized understanding of history. Their attitudes are more about mood affiliation and tribalism than reason. To trust in government is to mark yourself as a fool and a sucker.

They don't.

At least nowhere near as much as they should.

Zapruder film, Watergate

Setting aside the historical explanations (which include not only the revolution but also the very reasons that many colonists came to North America in the first place), I think a big part of it has to do with the size of the country and the strength of the federal government. Our constitution was initially designed so that states would be the primary form of government, with the federal government only handling truly national issues, which meant issues requiring national policy, not just issues that the entire country faced but for which diverse solutions were possible. Now, that structure is largely inverted. There are a lot of consequences of having a strong central government for a very large country. Individual voting power is diluted, which encourages rational voter ignorance (why research if your vote hardly counts?). The complexity of government becomes so great that people can't really keep track of everything that it's doing. You also see a constantly increasing ratio of voters to elected representatives, which makes people feel alienated from their government. To a lot of people, the federal government is a behemoth. It's impossible to really keep track of, it's located far away, it's staffed by pretty wealthy people who don't have anything in common with a lot of the country's population, and it has its fingers in everything.

In a lot of ways, democracy functions better on a smaller scale. People who vote straight party ticket for federal offices will often have less predictable voting patterns at the local level, driven by actual issues that they're educated about. I'm always amazed at the level of discourse that happens at town meetings over mundane things like a bond measure to fund sewer improvements. People know exactly where the money's coming from, exactly what it's going to do, and they have opinions about it that are not utterly connected to party politics. Even at the state level, lots of Democrats over the years have voted for moderate Republican governors who are pro-choice (or just generally interested in avoiding conflict about social issues) and whose platforms are often just being somewhat fiscally responsible.

The CIA is mad shady. Politicians get their campaigning money primarily from large corporations, making their main goal to serve said corporations. The NSA shouldn’t exist—it’s sole purpose is to spy on US citizens. Police are Law enforcement, not peace keepers. Implying their goal is to enforce laws, no matter if the law is unjust, not serve and protect the citizens. Need I say more?

Why are we just asking about the US? I can think of many countries where the government is also not trusted (Brexit, Vest Riots, HK Protests, to name a few).

So maybe the real question is: "Why don't people trust government?"

Likely because people think they know what is best for them and their neigbors, and they perhapse even do, meanwhile blanket changes and policies are made by people who have no idea what Jack in North Dakota needs relative to John in California. Or Jack in Marketing relative to John in Medicine. Or Jack in homelessness relative to John in mansion. The government really has an impossible job.

I think you will find people tend to trust their local governments a lot more. They know their representatives, they can be involved in policy changes, and the changes made are tailored towards their more specific population. Unfortunately (or maybe not if you are into it) the Federal government has tended to continuously take more control from local governments so depending on who is in office, more than half the population could potentially not have representation on the national level(aka someone of the other party is in office).

And don't even get me started on parties...

No, based on history the question should be "Why would ANYONE, in any country, trust government?"

Because we were founded based on fighting a government abusing it's authority. Because our citizens are descendants of immigrants who fled abusive authoritarian governments.

Look at how quick Europeans are to run to the security blanket of fascism during times of crisis. Because the free thinks all left hundreds of years ago and left behind on the weak and lazy cowards.

I live in Manhattan. Many governments permit or even support the deliberate slaughter of innocent human beings, whereas I believe that one of the few duties of government is to defend innocent human beings from harm, not every harm, but certainly from deliberate homicide such as from direct abortion.

serter wrote:

I have heard that Americans distrust government. Why is this exactly?

Sometime in the last two years Princeton University published research that showed pretty conclusively that laws are passed in accordance with the desires of big businesses and major campaign donors. When there is a conflict between what the general public wants and what those fat cats want the general public always loses. And the system is such that it's very. very. difficult to get elected without contributions from those fat cats so the obvious alternative of electing someone more responsive to the general public is not realistic. ("If voting changed anything they wouldn't let us do it." Mark Twain)

On top of that, you have a fairly long history of the government being caught lying. The biggest example in my lifetime was the Vietnam War where we were told for years that we just needed to send in a few more troops and we'd win that war when all four presidents who oversaw the war knew there was no way to win it but who didn't want to be the one to lose an election because the public believed he was the one who "lost" Vietnam like Truman did with China. Tens of thousands of people died so that some president wanted to keep his job, though we could possible exempt Kennedy given his shortened term and early stages of the war.

Look up operation northwoods

NeverAWMDRF2020 wrote:

Because Bush did 9/11.

So that the U.S. could build their trans-afghanistan pipeline and steal oil from the caspian sea.

No airplanes hit the towers on 9/11, those were holograms.

I always found it funny that the same people who thought Bush had lower intelligence than a chimp thought that he could pull of the greatest caper in the history of the world.

How is that pipeline coming BTW?

So are the towers still there then? I was in NYC a couple of years ago and did not see them. Heck I even went to the site and did not see them. I went up in a building that stands nearby. Are they being cloaked? Are the Klingons or Romulans in on this?

Our system of government is not a democracy. The majority does not have absolute ruling power. We have a constitution, and although I think things have been stretched, there is a check. The majority cannot enslave a minority for instance.

The FBI just attempted a coup d' etat on the president and you ask why? Stop watching fake news CNN.

Kennedy should get more blame. He knew it was a hopeless cause and could have nipped it in the bud. But he was worried about losing the next election (proven in declassified documents released several years ago). Who was the 4th president? Kind of a technicality to include Ike and he wasn’t running again.