Historical Framework: The Decline in Faith in Government (Part 2)
Note: This is the final essay on the historical framework. Next essay will focus on Biden.
I remember my father hating Tip O’Neil, the Democrat Speaker of the House in the 80’s. It so frustrated my father that no matter what good thing President Reagan sought to do, O’Neil was always against it. Tip’s take was that he was the leader of the “opposition” and it was incumbent upon him to offer alternative perspectives. Ronald Reagan, the person that I most enjoyed having as my president, and the head of the federal government, identified “Big Government” as being bad. “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” Reagan did not, however, lay all the blame for big government on the Democrats. Afterall, two of the most hated arms of Big Government were OSHA and the EPA and both of those had been created by a Republican Administration.
Perhaps more than any other person, Newt Gingrich is responsible for the polarization that exists in America today. The Democrats controlled Congress, and he determined to take it from them by any means possible. Newt set about demonizing Democrats with hyperbole and outright lies. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/07/07/newt-gingrich-republican-party. He was aided and abetted by two very important forces: cable TV and Rush Limbaugh. These forces allowed him to connect with the American people without having to go through the mainstream media. One of Gingrich’s main themes was that Democrats were synonymous with Big Government and Big Government was evil. That was an easy sale in the South where many Whites remained resentful at Big Government, led by Democrat Lyndon Johnson, for destroying the racial caste system. Rush Limbaugh stoked anger at Big Government and Democrats and turned the Rush Limbaugh Show into the most popular Talk Radio program in modern American history with over 20 million listeners per week. Rush became more than just an entertainer who was able to “charge advertisers confiscatory advertising rates”; he became the voice of the right wing of the Republican Party. Rush could influence what issues and policies Republicans supported and opposed. (One bone of contention between my wife and me in the 90’s was my obsession with listening to his show.) President Trump would later give Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom, the highest award a civilian can receive, for his great contribution in exacerbating the political divide in America and thereby enabling him to become President.
Rush did his damage to our country’s cohesiveness using AM radio. Vladimir Putin discovered that he had a much more powerful and insidious tool at his disposal: social media. The United States with its huge economy and super-powerful military, defeated and destroyed the USSR in the Cold War. The USSR’s main remnant, Russia, could never muster the military might to challenge us on the battlefield. Putin recognized that he didn’t need to. From 10,000 miles away, he could use social media to cause us to defeat ourselves. Putin’s main game has been to divide us into roughly equal camps and simply make us hate each other. That way, we are constantly in political gridlock and unable to move in any one direction. So whatever accomplishments the US might achieve under one Administration, nearly all is undone when the opposing party has power. At some point, this gridlock so frustrates us that we are willing to tear down all the instituions and structures that have made us so great and opting for a strongman, the very thing the Founders most wanted to prevent.
Putin went a step further – he did something that no enemy before would have dared thought possible: he influenced who the American people would choose as their president. And wisely, he chose a man who was a malignant narcisist hoping he would undermine nearly every institution that has served to unite and sustain our form of government. Return to the Pew chart on American’s trust in their government to do the right thing. For the past 15 years, it has mostly been below 20%. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/. Vladimir, the Ayatollah, and the Chinese Premier are certainly thrilled by Americans’ lack of faith in their government.
What fools we will be if we continue to let them influence us to the point that we defeat ourselves!
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