In the men’s locker room at the rather posh club just up the street from our state capitol, you’ll find everything a well-groomed male politician — or anybody who wants to look like one — might need after a workout and a shower: There’s anti-perspirant and hair gel, for example, and packages of single-use toothbrushes pre-treated with minty toothpaste. And there’s a big canister of 8-inch combs soaking in aqua-blue disinfectant. But one day a while back, there were no combs to be found, which I casually mentioned to a longtime lobbyist who was shaving at the next sink.
He said, “Yeah that’s because the Legislature is in town.”
Turns out it’s a longstanding joke at the club — that the comb inventory mysteriously shrinks during the half-year or so that legislators assemble in the capitol. Funny, huh?
It’s a mild libel, really, the notion that politicians can’t be trusted not to pilfer a plastic comb. I mean, it’s surely not as harsh a judgment as Mark Twain’s observation a century and a half ago, “No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.”
Disdain for politicians predates the American republic, and you’d have to agree that it’s often well-earned. You can’t blame people for harsh judgment when you encounter someone like George Santos, the notorious lying congressman from Long Island’s North Shore. Santos is an extravagantly bold scoundrel, certainly, but from the way people talk about politicians, you might conclude that our entire democracy is run by scalawags and scamps. And that’s kind of what people think: A Pew Research poll last year found that two-thirds of Americans say politicians run for office “to serve their own personal interests.” And another poll found that more than half of all Americans — and fully two-thirds of Republicans and rural residents — say they consider the government “corrupt and rigged against me.”
If that were truly the case, it’s hard to imagine how the nation could have survived so well for so long. Over the decades, I’ve known a lot of people who might be considered career politicians, at the federal, state and local level, as well as plenty who served for a while and then went on to other work — usually after voters decided to try out somebody else. Here’s what I’ve observed: Most public officials are not corrupt. They take their responsibility to citizens seriously, and they try to do the job they were elected to do effectively — partly because they want to get re-elected, yes, but also because they think it’s the right thing to do.
Recently, though, it has seemed as though there are a lot more fabulists and charlatans in public life. Or else I’ve just been gullible. You know, maybe I simply didn’t notice that the combs have been missing all along.
Either conclusion is troubling, though. It’s bad for our democracy whether there’s an actual swelling of the ranks of liars and phonies in public life or if disillusionment is setting in among folks like me, who have believed in the power of government to do good — to promote equity, protect public safety and sustain community life.
To those who figure that this is just the way things are – that Americans are going to distrust government, and we need to get used to it – I’d say that acquiescence is dangerous, and that it’s time to push back. The loss of trust can have disastrous effects.
Voters who lose trust in government can become disengaged or further polarized, or perhaps turn to extremists who promise a revolution to throw out a decayed system. There’s also the practical reality that a government without public support can’t deliver needed services and social progress. If citizens don’t trust the government’s certification that vaccines are safe, for example, will they get a potentially life-saving shot? If government loses credibility, will citizens honor its laws aimed at promoting the general well-being of us all?
And that’s why we need to combat the sense that government can’t be trusted -- because we can’t risk the consequences of doing nothing. So I suggest four steps that are a part of that fighting back.
First, of course, government needs to help people achieve the lives they imagine for themselves. That means, especially, that it must work to restore the economic health of the middle class, which has eroded over the past four decades. Stronger bonds of trust will follow if government gets better at delivering on promises.
Second, we must embrace political reform, so that citizens know that their voices matter. That means curbing the influence of big money in politics, which skews policy in favor of the wealthy. It means fighting the gerrymandering that diminishes the clout of under-represented groups, because our government must reflect the whole of the American people.
Third, we need to encourage civics education and news literacy training, so that young people grow up better able than their parents have been to discern truth from falsehood. It’s hardly coincidental that the fissures in American politics have widened during the quarter-century or so that Fox News and talk radio have been relentless voices of right-wing grievance, and the internet has been awash in incivility and distortion.
Finally, we need to strengthen our backbone, and hold politicians to a higher standard of truth-telling, even if it conflicts with our partisan leanings. For starters, we can’t accept that it’s OK for any member of Congress to echo Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, because everybody in politics knows it’s not true. Kowtowing to that model of mendacity, Donald Trump, reflects intolerably bad character that ought to be a disqualification from any public office.
Rebuilding trust in government is a big job, because government is everywhere. There are about a half-million elected officials in this country, and I still believe that the fibbers and the comb-swipers are a tiny minority. But when you see some of those, you know what the first step is? Put them where they belong: namely, out of office.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.