It is a commonplace today that trust between the world’s leading democracy and its allies has reached an unprecedented low point. Hardly anyone outside America (and Israel) trusts the United States or its president. According to a recent Pew Center poll, the loss of trust in America varies little across continents: from Germany to Pakistan, the same (high) percentage of respondents expresses little or no confidence in American acts and motives. America used to be admired, feared or envied. Now it is simply distrusted.
And not just by foreigners. The best measure of political health in a democracy is how much voters trust the leaders they didn’t elect. If your candidate lost the election, you may not care whether the other guy proves faithless to his promises. (Presumably you didn’t like them anyway.) But it is crucial that you believe the winner will return the nation’s public institutions intact for next time. It is only because we implicitly trust democratic politicians to do this that the system can work at all.
It is thus very disturbing that reasonable men and women in America today have begun to talk of an “October surprise”: not just some red alert designed to frighten the nation into rallying around the president, but a scheme to postpone the election altogether if it seems Bush might lose. This would be unprecedented, unconstitutional… and hitherto unimaginable. I have no idea how plausible the scenario is. What is troubling is that people give it credence–a striking indication of the erosion of public trust.
This is new. It is one thing to say that “we” made war on Iraq for oil, or for Halliburton. Conspiracy theories have respectable genealogies in any democracy–and sometimes they’re true. But it is quite another thing to say you can’t trust your representatives to preserve the core attributes of their own democratic culture. If Michael Moore has had more success with “Fahrenheit 9/11” than with all his past work combined, it is because his scattershot account of a corrupted oligarchy at the heart of American public affairs seems utterly credible to millions of his fellow citizens–one in three of whom now believes Bush lied (not “was misled” but lied) in order to get his war.
But America–and Bush–are not alone. Politicians all across Europe are now distrusted as well, above all by their own voters. Tony Blair, of course, and Silvio Berlusconi, both of whom have worked hard to discredit themselves; but also the embattled chancellor of Germany and the prime ministers of many new democracies in central Europe. Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, as it transpired, could not even be trusted to refrain from cynically exploiting a national tragedy for political gain. But whereas Aznar’s contempt for the public was repaid in kind by a massive electoral defeat, the perturbing response of most European voters has been to abandon politics altogether. The historically low turnout in last month’s European elections was a harbinger of worse to come.
Does it matter? According to Baroness Jay, former Labour leader of Britain’s House of Lords, low turnouts suggest people are “contented” with their lot. And the steady decline in voting throughout the West over recent decades was indeed part of a retreat from the overcharged ideological politics of the interwar years. But the political quiescence of the postwar generations, their withdrawal from the political to the domestic (save for the brief, misleading blip of the ’60s), was born not of distrust but of consensus.
Today, as we embark on a new era of political zealotry, that consensus can no longer be taken for granted. Even in the oldest democracies, public faith cannot be abused with impunity. Neither Bush nor Blair has taken responsibility for making war on false pretenses. Bush and Cheney even continue knowingly to insinuate a bin Laden-Saddam link. But cynical politicians beget cynical voters. By his actions and his words, Bush above all has brewed a noxious cocktail of anxiety and mistrust at home and abroad. As we know from the last ideological age, it is in just such a climate of fear that democracies wither. Why should anyone fly planes at us? All we really have is our infinitely fragile public realm, and that we can destroy all by ourselves.
