On Politics and Trust

...o Notes 2 "Trust and Political Agency," in Diego Gambetta (ed...

...It is emphatically not that earlier in the century politicians were trusted and now they are distrusted, or that the domination of the political machines represents a lost Golden Age of urban politics...

...Those about whom we know little or nothing are strangers and cannot be trusted...

...3 When it was necessary to have some contact with the wider world, aid was sought at the local party clubhouse...

...For as recent history has reminded us, the character of leaders is not a secondary consideration when making decisions that influence our political fate...

...In the past this was mostly an implicit question that assumed that a satisfactory answer could be found...

...Ordinarily, trust in persons is an organic development of social relationships...

...In socialist groups "what often held members was the trust they could feel in the integrity, honesty, selflessness of leaders with whom they might on occasion disagree or even take to be inadequate...

...Television, with its visual clues—that is, "body language" as a guide to "sincerity"—makes it easy to bring this tacit knowledge to bear in situations where face-to-face interaction is impossible...

...The political campaign becomes focused less on the candidate as an advocate of a party's programs than on the character of the candidate as a person...

...Its peculiar power becomes apparent when we recall how we make up our minds about strangers...

...Where formerly a common party identification was sufficient to provide grounds for "natural" trust, now party endorsement is less meaningful in providing a connection between voter and candidate...

...Irving Howe, "A Mixed Response," Dissent, Summer 1988, 264-67 I heard ads for one judge bad-mouthing the other...

...Most people do not have the information needed for assessing trustworthiness...

...The party with which one identified was not some abstract, detached entity...

...But knowing this is not sufficient...

...Here a paradox becomes apparent...

...whom to trust is his problem...

...At the heart of Marxism is the view that political behavior is determined by impersonal social and economic forces...

...Such changes mean that the political experience has been severed from daily life...

...The blurring of party identification and the "personalization" of politics is illustrated by Ronald Reagan and his assertion that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman were his political models...

...To say that persons are friends is to say that they trust one another...

...This fabled America gave way in the latter part of the century to a more urbanized society in which parties dominated politics, with local political elites or party machines controlling towns and cities...

...New York: Praeger, 1982), p. 46...

...But it is not so much not knowing whom to trust that is at the root of the anxiety as it is of losing confidence in one's ability to make such judgments...

...460 DISSENT...

...Most such assessments are made intuitively, based on unexamined beliefs governing expectations of what is appropriate...

...Parties, however, were to a significant extent still locally embedded...

...There can be no easy escape, however, especially in an election year when politics becomes difficult to avoid...

...Local aldermen regularly appeared at the clubhouse, greeted constituents by name, and participated in a network of reciprocity in which all implicitly understood that a "favor" now was returned later at election time...

...The disengagement of politics from the everyday life of persons and communities lessens their control over their representatives...

...Only an infinitesimal part of the electorate maintains a continuing interest in politics or is motivated enough to track down, as Howe did, a candidate's record...

...Howe's response to his first problem raises its own questions...

...not knowing whom to trust makes one prey to a deep-seated anxiety...

...New York Times, November 6, 1990 These two rather different voters seem to be voicing a question every voter answers at some level of thought or intuition: Whom can I trust...

...Politics in many small towns of nineteenth-century America was embedded in the particularities of place and face-to-face interaction...

...2 Aside from the influence of Marxism, there is another reason why the left has ignored the question of trust...

...Their ignorance is an even greater burden because campaigns built around personal attacks — "negative advertising" —are encouraged by the loss of linkage between politics and everyday life...

...Following the war, there was also the movement from the central city to its suburbs...

...The decline of rural areas is partly responsible for the demise of the "Solid South," a historic base of the Democratic party...

...it was part of everyday life, and its endorsement seemed a credible reason for trusting a candidate...

...The housepainter takes his need to trust a candidate as a given...

...is as politically relevant as the analysis of political ideologies and party platforms...

...4 The problem now is not unlike the one we face in choosing a doctor when family doctors are an extinct species...

...Rather, it is that today cumulative social change makes the problem of whom one can trust a less easily answered question than it was in the past...

...Highly professional in the use of campaign skills, they are able to raise money on their own...

...In political agency what there is in the end for human beings to reckon with is only their judgement of how other human beings can be expected to act) Because it is impossible to be certain about how others will act, trust inevitably enters into any choice among candidates...

...We should by now have learned from hard experience that the quality and credibility of leaders is a crucial factor in politics...

...Thus, too, the success of Ronald Reagan, a good second-rate actor whose familiar face fostered the illusion that he was someone we knew and could trust...

...We may also have confidence in the reliability of "abstract systems" of technical knowledge as, for example, when we board a plane and trust that the aeronautical science acquired by engineers allows them to build safe airplanes...

...I have to judge who comes across the best on radio or television...

...In elections for more distant offices it was less likely that one knew the party candidate "personally," but he was favored because the party was part of a local network whose members were bound by "thick trust...

...Howe's reflections do not provide us with much more than a common-sense rationale for worrying about "the quality and credibility" of candidates...

...Trust of this kind—Bernard Williams calls it "thick trust" —is taken for granted in friendship and family networks...

...I could not give him the sort of trust that one should feel about the person one wants to have as president...

...People experiencing this bind cope with their anxiety by joining the housepainter in turning their attention away from politics altogether...

...but perhaps it should have been...

...Trust (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 84f...

...And 1 don't know enough to figure out what is the truth...

...His cry that he does "not know enough" may be understood as a statement of a felt inability to decode the clues...

...3 Paul Kleppner, Who Voted...

...The Jackson program seemed attractive, the Jackson movement vigorous, but I felt uneasy about Jackson the leader...

...The consequent enlargement of the latter's autonomy underscores the need for leaders who can be trusted...

...This means that candidates maintain only minimal links with their parties—they are, so to speak, in business for themselves...

...Trust, whether in specific persons or abstract systems, helps us deal with uncertainty and is a factor in the calculations of risk...

...The socialist groups Howe has in mind never were mass organizations, and the distance FALL • 1992 • 457 between members and their leaders was, relatively speaking, not very great...

...And so the housepainter, like millions of others, turns to it for help about whom to trust...

...To the extent that the machine was rooted in traditional neighborhoods ("urban villages"), the growth of the suburbs and the influx of new migrants to the city eliminated that base...

...If the first part of that principle is taken seriously, then the interaction of politicians and citizens cannot be ignored in political theory and practice, and trust becomes a politically relevant problem...

...Primary group involvements—those with family and friends—strongly reinforced partisan identification...

...Thick trust" is maintained by continuing personal relationships...

...Candidates for state and federal office brought their campaigns into local communities shepherded by local notables, and listening to stump speeches was part of the "leisure time" activities of rural America— politics was still woven into the fabric of everyday life...

...it is difficult to maintain any sense of "personal" connection to those whom we elect to represent us...

...This reliance is not unique: the New York Times reported that one 1990 pre-election poll found that 23 percent of the respondents said that television ads influenced their decisions about candidates, and pundits who comb through poll results agreed that this is "just the tip of the iceberg...

...It is no wonder, then, that large numbers of us throw up our hands in despair and retreat from the anxiety-producing burdens of political participation into the search for the promised pleasures of private life...

...Americans are not an unknowing audience...

...This fact has been insufficiently appreciated by Marxist politics, and that is one of the lessons of "hard experience...

...When the housepainter throws his hands up and says there is no hope, he is expressing a profound sense of insecurity...

...Housepainter, Rhinebeck, New York, in Robin Toner, "Turned off by Campaigns, or Just Too Busy to Vote...

...In these circumstances it was easy, again relatively speaking, to gain some sense of the leader as a person and to develop a sense of trust in the same way, although somewhat more thinly, than trust develops in friendship...

...in a bourgeois democracy the actions of politicians are, by definition, merely manifestations of those forces at a given historical moment...

...He depends uneasily on TV to help solve his problem...

...the trick is to know it and still divine who is worthy of trust...

...In a recent commentary, John Dunn says Locke believed that [s]ince any state as its subjects actually encounter it . . . behaves as it does merely because a particular set of human beings choose one course of action rather than another, the most important single point about a state's claim to authority always remains that they are claims of particular individuals to be obeyed...

...The "information" presented is tainted...

...It is especially crucial in the American political system, where enormous power resides in the hands of the president...

...they contradict his expectations about how judges ought to act...

...Nor are these idiosyncratic responses...

...At this point television enters...

...2 Marx's aphorism is one of the starting points of the theoretical work of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, whose analysis of trust in his recent book The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990) informs this essay...

...According to Paul Kleppner, writing about late nineteenth-century voting patterns, "the linkage between ethnoreligious subcultures and party identification was immensely significant...

...For there are more fundamental reasons than the power of the American presidency for thinking that trust is politically relevant...

...Similarly, "the system" is still composed of people, a fact brought home to us when we must choose among candidates...

...His despair— "I kind of throw up my hands" —is the result of FALL • 1992 • 459 losing hope that he can exercise some control over the people who influence so much of his life...

...To put it another way, in the sphere of politics, as with other institutions, we must believe that "the system works," since—like those unknown engineers and flight crews—our elected officials are strangers with whom we share few circumstances that would nurture a "natural" trust...

...Now, this isn't the sort of question that has been at the forefront of thinking among people on the left...

...I am also indebted to the comments of Nathan Joseph...

...I don't know who to trust...

...Here one of Howe's comments serves as a clue...

...To the extent that the political party was locally embedded, trust was less likely to be problematic...

...But it was Marx himself who asserted that "human beings make their own history but not always under conditions of their own choosing...

...He cites Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington as examples of such leaders...

...Only after he satisfies himself on this score does he turn to Jackson's political record to explain his lack of trust in him...

...trust has become a major problem for American voters...

...Yet the recourse to TV is an uneasy one...

...I kind of throw my hands up in the air and say there's no hope...

...Although we are confident that "modern medicine" can help us, it can only do so through a physician, and it is this specific person we must trust...

...Here, as in friendship, the question, "Can I trust him or her...

...A choice among candidates of bourgeois parties, in the absence of a socialist party, is a tactical decision about which party will best serve the workers' class interests...

...Once elected they become more independent of the party...

...Marxism, like Freudian theory at a later date, tells us that appearances are deceptive, and both promise to reveal the invisible forces controlling human actions...

...With the decreasing ability of a party to 458 • DISSENT consistently deliver constituencies on election day, candidates become independent entrepreneurs...

...Even when not carried to an extreme, the Marxist perspective paid little or no attention to the fact that policies are carried out by human agents...

...Thus the housepainter's upset with candidates for a judicial office who "bad-mouth" one another...

...we trust their acquired knowledge and skills...

...For Irving Howe there is an unstated question of whether the trustworthiness of a candidate is politically relevant...

...Then, a little later, the other gets on with his spiel, knocking the first guy...

...This kind of entrepreneurship exacerbates the problems of trust...

...But here the question becomes explicit, perhaps because finding an answer may be more difficult than it used to be...

...like many others the housepainter has probably grown up with TV, and has been told repeatedly, often by those appearing on TV shows, that the images he sees are designed to influence him...

...For the rest, an election is a choice among strangers that is harder than making a choice of a doctor, since in the latter case one can ask others for information acquired from their experiences...

...In these circumstances it is necessary to recognize that the question, Whom to trust...

...Trust, to follow Anthony Giddens, is "confidence in the reliability of a person" with respect to some event or anticipated result of action because we attribute probity or love to the person...

...He writes that, while asking what kind of president Jackson would make was not at the "forefront" of leftist thinking, it was "very often at the center of conduct...

...Why have people on the left, priding themselves on being informed, taken so long to see "that the quality and credibility of leaders is a crucial factor in politics," and this only after "hard experience...

...Here the problems associated with "democracy as a system of representative government" are at best pseudoproblems...

...Taken to its extreme, this view totally ignores the influence of a society's social structure and institutions, the core idea of traditional Marxism...

...Thus, what matters is not who a candidate is but the class interests served...

...Now, with the decline of the party as a guarantor of trust, all voters are equally ignorant about the trustworthiness of candidates...

...By assailing one another's virtue, candidates enhance their claims to be persons of "good character...

...How much power is delegated to leaders can vary in democracies, but elected representatives always have some degree of autonomy...

...Population movements set in motion by the depression and accelerated by World War II hastened the decline of the machine and weakened the hold of political parties...

...It is not the engineers or the crew we trust, since we know nothing about them...

...4 Political entrepreneurship and the decline of the importance of the political party in election campaigns is detailed in Alan Ehrenhalt, The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office (New York: Times Books, 1991...

...The stock-in-trade of candidates as political entrepreneurs is not primarily advocacy of party programs but their ability to provide "services" for their constituents and their attractiveness as persons...

...In an election citizens delegate their power to others...

...In practice ("conduct"), trust was important in a socialist group, although it seldom became part of its conscious thought...

...The housepainter, who "doesn't know enough to figure out the truth" of the candidates' charges, cannot use this "rational" approach...

...As a result of continuous, face-to-face interaction among people each acquires knowledge of the others and each may develop affection for the others —they become friends...

...What was true of socialist groups was also true of many political communities...

...In the case of professionals we judge largely on what Giddens labels "demeanor": "The grave deliberations of the judge, solemn professionalism of the doctor . . . all fall into this category...

...Those who ran for office were part of a network of friends, neighbors, and kin, and so it was relatively easy to maintain a sense of personal linkage to office holders...

...More specifically, the present historical moment--after Watergate, the Irancontra affair, George Bush's scandalous presidential campaign and unconscionable behavior toward the Kurdish and Shiite rebels during the Gulf War--when the need for honorable people in high office is inescapably apparent, this time is the same historical moment when social and cultural conditions undermine our confidence that the people we elect can be trusted...

...The Great Depression along with World War II speeded changes that detached politics from a close connection with local life...

...never comes into consciousness...

...If the question of trust is experienced in a new way, there are different paths to an answer...

...but the same disengagement of politics increases the difficulties of deciding who can be trusted...

...One 456 • DISSENT view of this autonomy, deriving from John Locke, among others, emphasizes the role of human agency in government...

...Why this should have been so is related to the nature of trust and how it comes about "naturally...

...The growth of welfare-state programs begun by the New Deal increased the importance of impersonal bureaucracies that reached into the daily life of localities—the local clubhouse became less important as an intermediary in dealings with the larger political world...