When we look for government for answers, we all lose

The election of Donald Trump seemed, in many ways, to indicate a crisis of trust in the political establishment and its governing consensus.

Polling data gathered in the period leading up to the election confirms this general claim. The Pew Research Center’s 2015 study of public attitudes about government found that less than one in five Americans said that they “trust the government always or most of the time.”

Relatedly, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that most elected officials—whom they regard as much less honest than the general population—put their own interests before those of the country at large.

{mosads}Yet the survey also revealed that, despite this deep cynicism about government, “both Republicans and Democrats favor significant government involvement on an array of specific issues.”

Waning trust in government and its agents, then, is part of a rather puzzling paradox at the heart of modern American political life, a contradiction in which Americans both distrust the government and yet submit to—even endorse—most of its actions. 

That is, even while a significant majority of Americans see elected officials as morally unscrupulous, corrupt and driven by selfish opportunism, they nonetheless want to empower the government to make all kinds of important, personal decisions about their lives and those of their neighbors.

It would almost seem that Americans believe the government itself to be something separate and apart from the individual persons of whom it is composed. The economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard, noticing this strange phenomenon, said that to make this mistake is to “indulge in the fallacy of ‘conceptual realism.’”

The government doesn’t actually exist as “a real acting entity”—at least not apart from discrete individuals acting under its aegis. It is thus at least somewhat misleading to discuss government and its agents, as if to imply that the former could be abstracted from the latter. The government is only its agents and their behaviors.

This fact matters insofar as it can help us think more clearly about our obligations to those who happen to occupy positions of political power. If the government is just people—and, what’s more, people we hold to be less honest than most—then why does it enjoy such a powerful presumption in its favor? 

We want to believe authority figures, in large part because there is comfort in the belief that they really do have our best interests at heart, that our leaders are worthy of our trust and confidence. Giving authorities the benefit of the doubt is a kind of shortcut. Sometimes this shortcut is helpful, as when practical considerations counsel us to follow the orders of authority figures.

The bias in favor of authority, its symbols, and its representatives infects every aspect of debates, popular and academic, about politics and public policy.

As Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan writes, “Most of us have a pro-authority bias. We evolved to conform to social pressure.” Brennan cites the well-known obedience experiment of Stanley Milgram, in which an authority figure, an actor privy to the experiment, instructed an unwitting participant, called a “teacher,” to administer electric shocks to a “learner.” Quite unbeknownst to the teacher, the learner, of course, was also a confederate acting in the experiment. 

The results of Milgram’s most famous work revealed the weakness of our convictions and resolve once confronted with the insistent instructions of authorities. Eager to obey, to implement the directives of the scientist in charge, participants readily inflicted what they believed to be potentially life-threatening electrical currents on the “learners.”

Of his study, Milgram reflected that its “chief finding” was the “extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority,” their normal sensibilities subdued by the apparent moral force of dictates from on high.

We are, as philosopher Robert Paul Wolff has argued, “conditioned to respond to the visible signs of officiality,” overawed by those we perceive as our social betters. This psychology of undue deference and subservience leaves peaceful society exposed to the perils of power abuse.

Indeed, the experiment was in part an attempt to answer some of the troubling questions raised by the horrors of the holocaust and the crimes of Nazi soldiers, so many of whom defended themselves by stressing that they had no choice but to follow the orders of their superiors.

What does this say about human beings—specifically, our capacity to think clearly about the actions and decisions of our supposed leaders?

Our judgments clouded by pro-authority bias, we are likely to grant the politically powerful much more discretion than we ought to. We shouldn’t just take politicians at their word, blindly trusting them to act in accordance with the common good, however defined.

As critical-thinking, morally responsible adults in our own right, we should instead carefully scrutinize the rhetoric and promises of those in power, comparing them to real-world outcomes, measured empirically.

Individual politicians, regardless of party affiliation or ideological inclination, are not the problem; they merely act within a relatively fixed institutional framework, motivated by ordinary and rather straightforward incentives. It won’t do to simply insist on a utopia governed by altruistic philosopher kings, the proper functioning of which would require a refashioning of human nature to erase normal self-interestedness.

Rather, institutional designs should attempt, to the extent possible, to redirect existing incentives, turning them toward the common good by encouraging competition and decentralizing political power.

To accomplish this requires a principled return to the classical liberal program of a constitutionally limited government, with power divided between three separate branches.

David D’Amato, an adjunct law professor at DePaul University, is a policy advisor at the Heartland Institute.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.