Per the Washington Post:
Buried in a massive Pew study on the public’s feelings about data and open government is this amazing nugget: Just 23 percent trust the federal government to do the right thing “at least most of the time.”
Twenty three percent! That’s unpopularity-of-Congress territory. Journalist-trust territory! Donald Trump’s approval ratings look down on those numbers!
I am always banging on about federalism. Occasionally, people who hear my pitch will say to me, “well of course you want fractured government, you’re a conservative. Sure, you think it’ll work better in a country this divided and this diverse. Sure, you think that technology is rendering our homogenizing government rather absurd. But you also want it because it prevents centralization, encourages competition, and ensures that the state is ultimately less powerful. Admit it!”
Sure, I’m happy to admit that. Questions of political structure, I think, are often inextricable from questions of political outcomes. And, generally speaking, the federal ideal does fit in better with the small government ideal. But there’s another reason I’m so bullish on local government, and that is that Americans really have fallen out of love with Washington D.C. in the last ten years. From my book:
“Ten years ago,” the Pew Research Center discovered in 2012, “roughly two thirds of Americans offered favorable assessments of all three levels of government: federal, state and local.” Now, though, “the favorable rating for the federal government has fallen to just 33%; nearly twice as many (62%) have an unfavorable view. By contrast, ratings of state governments remain in positive territory, with 52% offering a favorable and 42% an unfavorable opinion of their state government. And local governments are viewed even more positively. By roughly two-to-one (61% to 31%) most Americans offer a favorable assessment of their local government.”
This admiration is not limited to those whose political philosophies tend toward localism. While there is a slight discrepancy between Republicans and everybody else, Americans as a whole seem increasingly to be more satisfied with their representation the closer it is to them. Just 20 percent of Republicans are happy with the federal government, while 62 percent like their state government and 65 percent like their local government.
Democrats have almost identical views of the federal government and their state government (51 and 50 percent approval respectively), but like their local government the most, 66 percent of respondents rating it favorably.
Independents, too, rank the institutions contingent upon their propinquity: the federal government gets 27 percent approval, their state government 49 percent, and their local apparatus 56 percent. Is this not a clear mandate for more local involvement?
The political pendulum has a role to play here. One of the reasons that Republicans are so dissatisfied with the federal government is that it currently offers a Democratic president. It is notable that when George W. Bush was in office, Democrats rated the federal government at 29 percent approval, while Republicans registered 53 percent satisfaction. But therein lies a key point. The reason that the makeup of the federal government matters so much is that it is so big.
Something’s gotta give.