What Caesar, Hitler, and Chavez can Teach Us About Trust
As we ramp up for 2020 elections, there’s an understandable sense of optimism in the air. For the past three years, the press has laid most of our societal and political ills at the feet of an unworthy leader, so it would be easy to think that many of our nation’s problems could be fixed by changing who’s in office. But I’d like to propose that the problem is more complex than simply choosing someone to replace Trump. While this may help, the real damage lies in what Trump’s ascendancy proves in the first place: that voters so desperately desired reform that they were willing to elect a scandal-ridden real estate mogul and Reality TV star into office.
No matter who becomes President next, we should pause to consider how this happened. A question we should be asking ourselves is what does Trump’s presidency say about how voters feel about the government in general? According to a study from Pew Research, American voters are becoming increasingly distrusting of the Federal government. The graph below shows how trust rates have been declining for the past fifty years:
This should worry us more than Trump’s latest tweets. A society that doesn’t trust it’s leaders is more likely to become unstable. Citizens may become less likely to abide by the rule of law. They may start avoiding taxes, dodging regulations, and become more prone to civic apathy and political non-participation. But the greater danger of sustained low trust is that as time wears on, the population becomes more desperate and more willing to take chances on a demagogue who promises dramatic reform.
Desperate citizens want a leader who’s willing to make necessary changes, but unfortunately, history teaches that the kind of leaders who respond to these situations tend to be authoritarians who exploit citizens’ cynicism towards government to win power for themselves. Consider ancient Rome as an example. Her shift from republic to empire unfolded because the Senate became corrupt and out of touch with citizens, fostering distrust and paving the way for Caesar’s dictatorship. Caesar offered citizens bread and circuses rather than actual political representation. Example two: Consider how Hitler rose to power. He displaced the Weimar Republic, which had first become a decrepit, untrustworthy government. It’s quite likely that Hitler would have remained a fringe character had the opulent and detached Weimar republic not neglected their responsibilities and made their people desperate for a change.
This is how a candidate promising to “drain the swamp” becomes enticing. First, people need to resonate with their government being called a swamp, and when it does, you have a serious problem. Politicians who wield messages like this (especially when combined with a brash and disrespectful behavior) become attractive because they embody our suspicion of government and give our distrust a voice. Of course, the danger is that our suspicion can become so focused on the current malfunctioning leadership that we forget to consider the possibility that the replacement leader may also be untrustworthy. But in a low trust society, this kind of consideration fades and the popular will to protect high offices from dangerous leaders simply isn’t there anymore.
The socialist experiment unfolding in Venezuela is a more recent example. Hugo Chavez was a political outsider when elected in 1998. Voters elected him because of their extreme lack of confidence in their nation’s two major parties, which had grossly mismanaged the economy leading to and IMF bailout and austerity. In response to this mismanagement, Chavez promised to take power from the elites and put it back into the hands of the people. In their desperation, the people elected him, giving him power to pass such sweeping reforms like replacing the congress with a national assembly that he controlled then rewriting the constitution to keep himself in power. Chavez’s socialist reforms were an obvious risk but the government he was displacing was already deeply corrupt. Citizens voting for him may have shrugged on their way to the polls, asking themselves “how much worse can it get?” Much worse, it turned out.
In the U.S., there are many reasons we find ourselves in low-trust climate. I won’t delve into them now, but one of the most pressing reasons is how our government has become less responsive to citizens, and more responsive to moneyed interests as captured in this TED talk by Larry Lessig. This has lead to the average citizen’s influence on policy making being near zero.
Citizens living in a low-trust situation have two main options. The first is to radically alter the system. That’s what Rome did. That’s what Germany and Venezuela did. And this is what opportunistic politicians on both sides are usually selling because they sense the potential for a new order and they want to control it. But if history teaches us anything, it’s that leaders who promise sweeping change are often a risky, if not catastrophic bet. It’s usually tempting to bet on a candidate that promises grand reform. But often, we should resist the urge to take their promises at face value.
Option two is to support those that want to reform the system while respecting its history and traditions. A good example of this would be Represent Us whose mission is to fight corruption. The challenge of this option is that it’s, well, hard. Rather than marketing a utopian vision, we would have to grapple with the ways in which the system has failed in matters of effectiveness, justice, and representation. Instead of pushing for dramatic revolutionary overhaul, we would have to rediscover core principles, seek to understand where they have been neglected, and explore how can we could put them into practice in the 21st century.
The latter is a much slower, more conservative approach to reform. It’s less fun than revolution, but the quality of our democracy and the question of whether or not we will thrive in the 21st century or decline, will depend on how we citizens engage in this dialogue. In an environment of increasing distrust, there is no third option of “wait and see.”
