The Government You Love to Hate

Rumor has it that night crawlers al dente will be featured in the congressional cafeteria this month. This comes on the heels of a new Pew Research Center poll showing that fewer people than ever trust their government. I’d like to feign surprise in the interest of a good headline, but this isn’t exactly shocking or new. The first elections I ever took part in came on the heels of Watergate, so I’ve seen mistrust of beltway denizens spiking and receding more than a few times over the ensuing decades.

But to find examples of Americans questioning their elected leaders we don’t need to dig through the history books as far back as Tricky Dick, Iran-Contra, or Monica Lewinski. As Amy Walter points out in the National Journal, Pew found an almost identical trend only four years ago.

In the Pew poll, respondents who described themselves as angry with government jumped from 13 percent in 2004 to 20 percent in 2006. What fueled that increase? Democrats. Some 28 percent of the angry respondents four years ago were Democrats, 21 percent were independents and just 7 percent were Republicans. Today, the overall percentage of people who say they’re angry is basically the same, but it’s Republicans who are the angry ones.

It would be easy — not to mention lazy — to make the leap from those numbers to a claim that this is nothing more than partisan party hackery infesting the homeland. Democrats are angry when a Republican is in the White House and vice versa. But when you mix the reaction of the independents and unregistered voters into the mix, that argument begins to sag around the edges.

So, to borrow a page from the vice president, what’s the big effing deal with all these people grabbing their pitchforks and questioning their betters in Washington? Over at the American Thinker, Neil Braithwaite thinks he’s nailed down the answer. Put simply, we’re seeing a perfect storm as America plunges headlong toward socialism.

The current economic and social conditions of not only our country, but also the world, have culminated in a perfect storm for seeding a European style socialist government here in America. In the midst of these unprecedented conditions, many citizens, businesses and political leaders are being overtaken by this powerful storm, leading them to sometimes abandon rational thought and accept the unimaginable — a socialist style government in America.

A socialist government here at home? Well … that certainly does sound bad. But the alarm bells you hear ringing have been chimed by others, and fairly recently. Some on the very, very, very far left now find themselves looking back sadly at the anti-war efforts of 2003–2004, bemoaning the fact that all their efforts failed to change anything when George W. Bush ran against that guy from Massachusetts.

This seems to bring them some comfort, though, as they observe the “relentless efforts” of the tea party movement to (and this is a direct quote) “demolish the images on Mount Rushmore — Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington, the top dogs, the final four, the veritable crème-de-la-crème super-duper stars of American presidents.”

Allow me to serve up a nickel’s worth of free advice to all the media analysts struggling to define and explain the unrest, along with the rise of the tea party movement. People are angry and unhappy because they currently have reasons to be angry and unhappy. Unemployment is high. We’re fighting two wars. And every plan that gets cooked up in Washington seems to dump another load of debt onto the steaming pile we already have. This is a formula for revolt which breeds anger and resentment. And, as Amy Walter pointed out, the problem for Democrats now is that angry people vote.

We like it when we have a robust economy which is chugging along and providing jobs for most of the people who want one. While the majority of us recognize the unfortunate necessity of war on occasion, we prefer peace whenever we can find an excuse to avoid sending our soldiers into harm’s way. And when those conditions cease to exist, we vote out the people currently in power. This isn’t rocket science.

The current crop of angry masses taking to the streets don’t “hate” this particular government any more than their predecessors. They just tend to dislike government in general when it rushes about trying to do too much. The explanation for this is likely found in the fact that our government has historically been so incredibly bad at doing things.

Early in Bill Clinton’s tenure he also attempted a huge push at health care legislation and it nearly cost him his job. Once he turned his attention more to matters involving the pizza delivery girl, his approval ratings soared. You do the math.

Is America angry right now? You betcha. But the smartest elected officials will find a way to hang on to a life preserver and wait for the markets to take their normal course and life to return to some semblance of stability and normality. The ones who insist on having Washington “fix” everything will be dining on worms until they head home into retirement.