The Leap: The Science Of Trust And Why It Matters Part 4

Government Trusting the Tax Man UP UNTIL fairly recently, Somalia was, for all intents and purposes, without a central government. Over the past two decades, there have been state-building fits and starts, charters and const.i.tutions, transitional governments and loose coalitions. But for the most part, there was no state. Warlords functioned as societal power brokers.1 Sewer lines were rare. Hospitals seemed like a luxury. Education was limited, and today only a minority of Somalis know how to read and write. For a while, a provisional government issued pa.s.sports, but few other nations recognized them. Transparency International recently ranked Somalia as one of the most corrupt nations in the world, which is saying a lot, given that the compet.i.tors are places that actually have governments.

When you think of Somalia, you might think of the pirates who have been hunting s.h.i.+ps in the Arabian Sea or the incident in 1993 when American forces battled Islamic militia in the streets of Mogadishu. But the life of the people who actually live there is more along the lines of MacGyver meets East Africa. People are highly self-reliant. In the early 1990s, for instance, just as the government began to disintegrate, Mohamed Aden Guled decided to establish a newspaper in Mogadishu.2 To communicate with his reporters, Guled would pay for time on a shortwave station. Because there wasn't a working mail or phone system, Guled had couriers who delivered copy for advertis.e.m.e.nts in person. Two gas generators powered his printers, since there was no electricity. What appeared to give Guled the most satisfaction, though, was the fact that he had 190 kids working as newspaper boys. "That's 190 boys with jobs," he told the New Yorker. "That's 190 boys not fighting."

We often overlook the role of government. There are the obvious services, of course, like supplying water and policing our borders. But nation-states also regulate building codes, secure debts, and invest in communication infrastructure such as cell phone towers. Governments also go a long way to establish norms and values; they promote a sense of unity and culture and civil society. And to live in a country without a state is like living in the Middle Ages, except that the soldiers carry AK-47s instead of swords. In Somalia, seven roadblocks once dotted one of the city's main highways and each one was manned by a different armed group looking to collect a bribe.3 To get through the "border crossings," either you paid a tax or you arrived at the roadblock with your own contingent of armed men and fight-ready stares.

The lack of a state in Somalia did not mean the total collapse of society. We are, after all, a highly cooperative species, and in ways big and small, Somali life went on. In some areas, markets flourished. People continued to trade and grow crops and do business. A few years ago, a government managed to stagger its way out of the political chaos, and the nation now has a parliament and a president. Police walk the streets of Mogadishu. People can get electricity. But faith in the government remains tentative. The United Nations has already found evidence of ma.s.sive corruption, and more than a dozen tax collectors have been murdered in recent years due in part to widespread skepticism about government initiatives.4 Political trust is different from social trust. Political trust measures our faith in government, and it is crucial for any large-scale community. More than two thousand years ago, Confucius argued that trust was more important for a leader than food or weapons. "If the people have no faith in their rulers, there is no standing for the state," he explained. And for the most part, the philosopher's idea has held true, as scholar Onora O'Neill has argued.5 In her work, O'Neill cites a few examples supporting Confucius's point, like the British government in World War II. I'll give a few more: despite chronic food shortages, the Communist government has stayed in power in North Korea. In Egypt, guns and truncheons and tear gas did little to stop the recent overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak.

In the United States, too, political trust has been in a steady nosedive. In 1958, 73 percent of Americans said that they "trusted the government in Was.h.i.+ngton."6 In other words, people believed that government could execute, that politicians could solve pressing issues of public policy. But today only 19 percent of Americans trust Was.h.i.+ngton. Consider that statistic for a moment: More than 80 percent of Americans believe that the federal government is unreliable and untrustworthy.

This breakdown in political trust has all sorts of consequences. When I looked at data from the DDB's Life Style Study, provided by DDB Worldwide Communications Group, I found that political trust correlates with key social outcomes. If political trust is high, people typically earn more money and have more schooling. In areas with high political trust, there's also less crime and a larger proportion of people own their own homes. (For state-by-state snapshots of political and social trust see page 137.) Low political trust also means low social trust, and the more that we have faith in our political leaders, the more that we're willing to place our faith in people we don't know. In a way, this goes back to Paris Hilton: Without a sense of order and safety, without a sense of rule of law, trust must be thick, and we trust only those we know well. But with inst.i.tutions, with laws and cops and courts, trust can be thinner. We can trust strangers more easily. Or think of it this way: If people are often very trusting, then we need to do more to improve trustworthiness so that their trust is rewarded.7 But there's more at stake because governments also model trust-and trustworthiness-and when individuals see wasteful government agencies, they're less likely to place their faith in strangers. Plus, governments can promote a culture of empowerment, which makes it easier for people to trust others outside of their groups.8 And finally there's the fact that government without some sort of political faith is powerless. Without some measure of faith, political leaders can't govern. Or just pick any of the most pressing issues facing the country today: the economy, terrorism, climate change. Each issue requires a coordinated approach. No local inst.i.tution can tackle these issues. Not states, not your local town council.

The question then is: Can our trust in government be improved? How can we avoid devolving into some sort of dystopian, Somalia-like future?

At its core, government is a type of social contract, and in theory it works something like this: Individuals enter into an agreement, and in exchange for security and stability, they give up some of their freedom and liberty. Government, then, is when people consent to be governed, and in return they receive governance.

What this all means is that government needs to perform. It needs to produce benefits for the people being governed. This explains, for instance, why corruption has such a negative effect on political trust. When an official skims off the top, he is making government work for himself rather than for society as a whole. Local leaders often understand this idea well. They know that their jobs depend on delivery. Has the city put in a stop sign on Fifth and Vine? Have the trees on Center Street been trimmed? Did the fire truck arrive at the Sat.u.r.day blaze fast enough?

Baltimore mayor William Donald Schaefer used to ride around the city at night looking for potholes.9 He followed garbage trucks to find out why trash wasn't being picked up. "Do It Now" was Schaefer's motto, and when asked about his leaders.h.i.+p style, Schaefer said simply: "Would you believe I have my nose in everything?"10 The voters loved Schaefer for it, forgiving his wild temper (he would bawl out officials) and his spiteful side ("Dear Edit-t.u.r.d" was how he once began a letter to a newspaper).11 Most of us don't think of government as an inst.i.tution that needs to perform. Part of the issue is the shortsightedness of human nature. Government seems distant and inst.i.tutional because it often is distant and inst.i.tutional. So we may trust local government-we see someone picking up our trash each week-but the state or federal government that is hundreds or thousands of miles away? Not so much.

And then there's the fact that some agencies don't seem to actually believe that their job is about delivery. They don't track outcomes.12 Ineffective programs aren't shut down. The consensus-building nature of the legislative process contributes to the issue, creating disparate and often uncoordinated programs. Today, for example, fifteen different federal agencies manage the nation's food safety program, operating under the jurisdiction of some thirty different laws.13 Similar problems exist at the local level; when I looked at the return on investment of the country's school districts for the Center for American Progress, I found that low productivity costs the nation's school system as much as $175 billion a year, or about 1 percent of the country's gross domestic product.14 But when it comes to political trust, performance is crucial. It's the way that we know our trust is being reciprocated, and politicians who improve outcomes can do a lot to improve our faith in government. Look at what happened in Great Britain in the early 2000s.15 At the time, it seemed as if the nation's public sector was falling apart. The police seemed flat-footed, and one woman had her house robbed three times over the course of two days.16 The nation's famed rail system didn't seem so famed, and in the fall of 1999, thirty-one people died in a London train accident.

The situation was particularly embarra.s.sing for Prime Minister Tony Blair. He had run on a good-government platform, and as he stumped around the country for his 2001 reelection campaign, he handed out "pledge cards" that listed his policy goals and how voters could hold him accountable. "When we make a promise, we must be sure we can keep it. That's page one, line one of a new [government] contract," Blair explained.17 Blair won reelection, and within weeks he decided on an approach to improving faith in government that at first glance seems childish: He created goals. Within health care, for instance, there would be a 40 percent drop in heart disease mortality. Every hospital would also have to ensure that no one waited longer than six months for non-emergency surgery. There would also be an increase in student test scores-and a measurable decrease in street crime.

Governments have long set targets, of course. That was far from novel. What was unusual about Blair's initiative was that the metrics were focused. Many of the reform areas had just a few goals, and some initiatives, such as reforming the railway system, had only one. Plus, Blair's targets were about engaging people and their experience of government. When it came to improving the performance of the rail system, the main target wasn't about maintenance or capital expenditures or new locomotives. It was about improving the punctuality of trains.

Over time, Blair's goals s.h.i.+fted the culture within agencies, and departments began writing out detailed plans, connecting their work to the outcomes set by Blair and his team. To build capacity, the prime minister also created a type of government performance SWAT team, which supported the reform efforts within the different ministries. The media began tracking the targets, and eventually the government showed success in almost every major area. In education, reading and math scores went up. In health care, waiting times fell. Street crime dropped off. "Blairism has restored faith in government as a creative and essentially benign force," one financial reporter wrote.18 Blair's effort did not tackle sweeping reforms. His initiative did not require major legislative changes or special commissions or high-profile committees. Nor did the work ultimately save the prime minister's legacy. In 2003, Blair supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, and many in Britain saw the decision as misguided. Hundreds of thousands of antiwar marchers flooded the streets of London. Faith in government again faltered-and for many Britons, Blair leaves a mixed legacy. But the point of Blair's reform efforts was not to save the prime minister from himself-or to save the nation from what many believed was an ill-conceived war. The point was to show that government can deliver.

If faith in government was all about performance, the world would have far more dictators. After all, almost every autocrat promises to make government stronger and more effective. Hitler, for example, murdered millions while his regime created the world's first nationwide highway system. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini built a police state while making the trains run on time. President Vladimir Putin oversees a "soft authoritarian" regime built on the premise that Russia will devolve into instability without a strong leader.

The point is that our faith in government contains a contradiction. On the one hand, we want government to deliver. Alexander Hamilton referred to this idea as government's "energy," and he believed that this sort of vitality was one of the most important signs of a strong, trustworthy government.19 On the other hand, we want government to be legitimate, to represent the majority of people, and we're reluctant to give too much power to a few. Political scientist Larry Diamond suggests that this is an unavoidable tension: We want government to perform, but no one wants to live in a police state.

The Founding Fathers understood this issue as well as anyone, and the framers of the Const.i.tution baked accountability into the nature of American government. To create a system of checks and balances, the powers of the executive are separate from the powers of the legislature. Plus, as Americans, we have certain famously unalienable rights, like the right to liberty, and while these mechanisms make our government less effective, they also ensure that the nation will not easily devolve into tyranny.

The issue isn't that politicians are different from you or me. The issue is the caustic effects of power. A few years ago, psychologist Dana Carney had a group of subjects gather in a room.20 Some of the subjects were told that they were leaders. Others were dubbed subordinates. Carney then hid a hundred-dollar bill among some books, and a computer told half the subjects to steal the money, while the other half were instructed not to. Then Carney asked the subjects to convince her that they did not pocket the cash.

The results? The people who believed that they were leaders had a much easier time spinning the truth. They fidgeted less. They spoke more eloquently. They had lower stress hormone levels. Power, it seemed, gave the subjects a type of emotional protection from the stress of lying. For them, rationalizations came much easier, and so they showed less anxiety about telling a fib.

The moral is not that power is bad. For a nation or a company or even a family to exist, someone needs to make decisions, and even in the most decentralized of groups, some people have more authority than others. But as psychologist Dacher Keltner has argued, power is a form of decay. It makes us less trustworthy. It pushes us to be less empathetic. For trust in government, the implications are obvious. Government should do what it says for the people that it represents, and we need to hold political leaders accountable. We need to create systems that ensure that political authority isn't abused. James Madison was right when he argued that "all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."21 Now we just have the science to prove it.

When Ronald MacLean-Abaroa became the mayor of La Paz some years ago, he knew that he would uncover some corruption in city government. MacLean-Abaroa had grown up in the Bolivian city, and he had often heard his friends and family talk about small-time graft.22 Want a construction permit? You need to take some cash down to city hall. Get pulled over by a cop? Make sure to hand over a few bills with your driver's license. Dream of starting a new restaurant? Try your cousin's uncle. "You know, petty corruption," MacLean-Abaroa told me.

But MacLean-Abaroa had no idea. On the day that he became mayor, he met with one of the city's accountants, and it turned out that the coffers of La Paz were essentially empty. By the end of the month, there would be no cash, and unless MacLean-Abaroa figured out another solution, he would have to stop paying everyone's salary-including his own-within thirty days. At first, MacLean-Abaroa thought that the problem was the economy. Inflation was running rampant at the time. And yet as he looked closer at the city's budget, he thought something else might be going on, perhaps some corruption or graft.

The extent of the problem didn't really hit MacLean-Abaroa until he arrived at the office for his second day of work, though. The city had given the new mayor a rusted-out 1978 Land Rover with a shattered pa.s.senger-side window, and he drove the car home after his first day. The next morning the Land Rover wouldn't start, so MacLean-Abaroa took his own car to city hall. And as he pulled into the city's parking lot, he was surprised to see all sorts of gleaming new cars. How was it possible that La Paz had no money, but some of the civil servants managed to have enough money to buy new cars? MacLean-Abaroa thought.

Then it dawned on him: Everyone was on the take. As MacLean-Abaroa sat in the parking lot, he thought about quitting. He couldn't see a good way out of the situation. How would he wage an anti-corruption war if everyone was corrupt? But MacLean-Abaroa had promised the head of his political party, Hugo Banzer, that he would take the job, and so, like well-meaning politicians around the world, MacLean-Abaroa set out to eradicate corruption. This is a time-honored practice, of course. It seems to happen after every scandal. Someone gets arrested. A stash of money is uncovered. There's a trial. Maybe even a confession. Someone may or may not go to prison.

MacLean-Abaroa didn't really have time to catch people in the act. "I would have had to fire everyone or prosecute everyone," he told me. So instead, he focused on a sort of radical transparency. Almost every aspect of his government would be done out in the open. One of the major sources of corruption, for instance, was the collection of property taxes. MacLean-Abaroa's solution? There would be no more tax a.s.sessors, who were easily bribed. Instead, homeowners filled out their own property tax a.s.sessments, and the information was published so that people could complain if their neighbor underreported the value of his or her house.

Another huge source of graft was the city's permitting process. When someone wanted to get a license to do construction or open an auto body shop, there were a half dozen ways that city workers could shake them down. So MacLean-Abaroa dramatically simplified the procedure and detailed the rules in a brochure, making it far easier for people to understand the process and file a report if someone asked for a bribe.

When I met MacLean-Abaroa recently, we sat in the back of a small French restaurant a few miles outside of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. He is short and stocky with brown eyes that sparkle with eagerness. He told me how corruption in La Paz dropped significantly during his tenure, and how he eventually became a four-term mayor of the city and a Bolivian presidential candidate. As we spoke, MacLean-Abaroa drew a formula on the paper tablecloth: CORRUPTION = MONOPOLY + DISCRETION ACCOUNTABILITY.

Tapping the formula with his finger, MacLean-Abaroa explained that when it came to government, managing the power part of the equation-monopoly and discretion-was often the easy part. It was a matter of getting the right level of centralization within the system. The bigger issue was building the type of accountability that didn't devolve into more bribes and payoffs, and for him the answer was transparency because, as MacLean-Abaroa told me, "corruption lives well in the darkness."

When it comes to political trust, openness matters. It encourages oversight, and to hold a government accountable for its actions, people have to know what sort of actions the government is taking. Plus, transparency can engage our social side. When people are honest and forthcoming, we are more likely to trust them. And finally, transparency offers a way to create a type of bottom-up accountability. It empowers citizens. It sustains whistleblowers, and without government transparency, we wouldn't know which schools succeed or which hospitals save lives or how exactly the military spends its budget.

That's not to say that everything should be done out in the open. The pressure for transparency should go upward within a society. Transparency, then, is for the powerful, not the powerless, and within a democracy, it's crucial that people have the ability to vote in secret.23 Within a company, it's key that people can voice complaints without fear of retribution. This sort of openness, this sort of empowerment, this sort of transparency, can s.h.i.+ft the culture of government, and when MacLean-Abaroa returned to La Paz a few years ago, he found that many of his reforms had been rolled back. And yet he felt some satisfaction. Of the four mayors that followed him, three had gone to jail on corruption charges, he said. "Now people know enough to fight back. I destroyed the taboo."

Government can provide a type of floor for our cooperative nature. It can undergird our faith in strangers, and that's crucial to a functioning society, as we saw in the case of Somalia. But there's a problem with this picture, and that's that faith in government doesn't actually begin with good government. Rather, trust in government begins with a sense of society, a shared understanding of goals and values. In a way, we know this already. Or at least we can see it in the data. During times of war, trust in government often goes up, and the September 11 attacks increased faith in Was.h.i.+ngton by more than twenty percentage points.24 The takeaway here is that trust in government requires a sense of commonality, an expectation of prosperity, a feeling of civic pride and owners.h.i.+p. This idea flitted across my mind when I met Paul Zak for the first time. It was a spring afternoon, and as I walked toward him, he opened his arms and embraced me.

"Remember, I'm Dr. Love," Zak told me, referring to one of his nicknames.

On that day, Zak and I sat at a small cafe not far from the U.S. Capitol building, and I asked him about what he thought the research on oxytocin meant for trust in government. For his part, Zak talked about some of the things that we've already covered. "Transparency is a really key, vital idea for government," he told me. But Zak argues that the recent research on our faith in others suggests a second, just as important strategy. Because if we're wired to connect with others, then we should-as Zak argues-take an approach to rebuilding our sense of society that engages those very connections.

In a way, this is an ancient idea. When the Athenians invented the idea of democracy more than two millennia ago, they built their political system around the notion that everyone should take part in the political process. Thomas Jefferson, too, advocated for active civic involvement. More recently, this idea was central to Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone.

Over the past few years, a number of politicians have taken these ideas to heart and launched innovative initiatives to rebuild a gra.s.sroots sense of community. In his writings, Zak discusses the mayor of Bogota who reduced crime by putting mimes on street corners. I recently spoke to former St. Petersburg mayor Rick Baker, who built dog parks all around the city in order to encourage a greater sense of connection.

But my favorite example remains Bud Clark, who became mayor of Portland in the early 1980s.25 Clark was nothing like the career politicians who typically won the races for Portland's city hall. He had a woolly beard and a handlebar mustache and owned one of the city's most popular taverns, the Goose Hollow Inn. He called himself a "born-again pagan" and had a distinctive greeting ("whoop whoop") and would bike around the city wearing lederhosen.26 Clark's biggest claim to fame, though, was being the flasher in a poster t.i.tled "Expose Yourself to Art."

But Clark won the election in a landslide. The sitting mayor of Portland had run a weak campaign, and the city was struggling. Homelessness was a growing problem. Economic projects had been put on ice, and yet as mayor, Clark didn't just push typical big-city mayor initiatives-better schools, more cops, new jobs. He also dedicated himself to getting people involved, to creating a stronger sense of civic culture.

When it came to reducing crime, Clark thought that the police seemed like an "occupying army," so he encouraged Portland's cops to wear beards and shoulder-length hair to appear more friendly and approachable.27 Regarding Portland's homeless problem, Clark expanded the city's "sobering station" and encouraged Portlanders to call a special phone number if they ever saw someone pa.s.sed out.

For Clark it was all about engaging people in the role of government. "I want people to say hi to each other on the street," he once explained.28 "I think we need to bring an esprit de corps back to Portland." Clark wasn't a pushover. He fired city workers who didn't cut waste. He led a project to build a convention center, and in the end, his citizen-driven approach showed results. Neighborhoods turned around. Unemployment levels dropped. Clark's homeless initiative became a national model.

Still, Clark wanted to be the "people's mayor," and every Thursday he had lunch with whoever came into the office on that day-high school students, city hall reporters, the occasional street person. During the meals, Clark talked about potholes and homework and waivers for obscure city ordinances. He would hear complaints and discuss parades and talk about who might be crowned King Hobo at the annual Friend of the Hobos festival. "The U.S. is a representative democracy," Clark told me in an email. And that means that "the representatives need to communicate with the citizens that they represent."

There doesn't appear to be any polling data that shows that Clark actually increased trust in government, but consider this: After he left office, a newspaper columnist launched a "Bucks for Bud" initiative to help the former mayor pay down his campaign debts.29 And even though Clark was no longer running for office, people sent him money. Some of the missives also included pictures. Others held long, appreciative notes. Almost all of the envelopes contained some cash, and the effort eventually pulled in more than thirty thousand dollars.

This doesn't mean that we all should join the local Elks Lodge. Nor do I believe that noontime mayoral lunches are always the answer. But we have to admit that we've lost an important piece of our civic fabric. Looking forward, there are large-scale solutions. Some may lie with the Internet's decentralized ways, and writer Steven Johnson argues that the peer-driven nature of the Internet can work to foster a more dynamic society.30 In New York, city leaders have created a 311 hotline, which allows people to report everything from missing manhole covers to illegal social clubs. The Obama administration has also pushed a thoughtful "open government" initiative that allows citizens to partic.i.p.ate more directly in policy and policymaking.

While many of these efforts to rebuild American government hold promise, so far they've not been enough. When Clark first became mayor of Portland, he was offered a car and driver. But he waved it off and continued to ride his bike into work every day, because it made it easier for voters to approach him with suggestions.31 Today, of course, it's hard to imagine any big-city mayor refusing a chauffeured car, but the fundamental idea is critical. We need to show trust, to build a culture of community, even if we risk looking like fools. "We all came here [to Oregon] on wagon trains" in search of a better life and new adventures, Clark explained near the end of his time as mayor.32 "Now we're on the farthest sh.o.r.e we can get to . . . so we've got to make things work."

Chapter 8.

Politics "Encourage You to Be Nasty"

SOME years ago, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse decided to find out why Americans hated Congress so much, and the results of their research were both obvious and surprising.1 The issue, in short, was democracy itself. Democracy is, of course, a form of government where everyone has a say-either directly or through representatives-and by definition, it is filled with conflict and compromise. The process requires bickering and bargaining. No one always gets his or her way. Progress is slow. Victories are small.

At least in theory, we're supposed to appreciate all this deliberation. Robust debate should be a sign that the system is working. But what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found was that Americans don't actually want their politics to be this way. The core aspects of democracy do not promote the core aspects of trust. When we see politicians debating each other, we don't view their discussions as signs of a vigorous democracy.

Instead, for many of us, the back-and-forth between politicians seems unnecessary. Don't we know the policy solutions already? As for a compromise, that's even less appealing. When we see a politician give ground, he or she appears to be pandering. But worst of all, argue Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, is a careful study of a policy problem. For most of us, policy solutions seem self-evident, and so a detailed examination of a proposal seems plainly gratuitous.

Much of the issue is that we don't actually view Congress as an inst.i.tution that's supposed to be engaged in discourse. Instead, we believe that Congress is a place for implementation. People "want politicians to take care of the problems without fuss and without muss, and debates seem completely unnecessary," Theiss-Morse explained to me. "Americans think politicians are just wasting time and unnecessarily increasing the conflict level when people believe there is a consensus and politics should just get the job done."

This distaste for the mechanics of democracy seems to influence almost every major political event. Look at health care reform as an example of this idea, as writer Ezra Klein has suggested.2 When President Obama first proposed reforming the nation's health care system in February 2009, only around 11 percent of Americans thought the bill would make their family worse off. But as the debate dragged on, people began turning against the initiative, and by the time the bill pa.s.sed, almost a third of Americans believed that the legislation would be bad for their families.

The issue didn't seem to be the policy proposals. Even some legislators might not have known everything that was in the thousand-page bill. The problem, it seemed, was the raw, unbridled political rancor that the health care debate inspired. The death panels, the horse trading, the constant backing-and-forthing, it all seemed to undermine the arguments for the bill's proposals. After all, if the ideas in the bill were so good, why hadn't anyone implemented them already?

There are some important lessons to take from Hibbing and Theiss-Morse. Our trust in our political system is a lot like our trust in others. It's often deeply social. What's more, we often have a far too idealistic view of democracy, and as political scientist John Mueller points out, the nature of our political process is such that we never fall into blissful agreement.3 Consensus is never reached. Someone always loses. Winston Churchill once explained that "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government-except all those other forms that have been tried." I'd argue that Churchill didn't go far enough. Democracy is not just the worst form of government. It turns out that if you pay close attention, it can actually be bad for you.

The problem goes deeper than that, though, and our political system has become a case study in how not to build trust. It is rife with two of the traits that might do more than anything to destroy a cooperative culture, extremism and conflicts of interest. In other words, when it comes to social trust and government, there's a deeper problem than issues of bureaucratic oversight or agency transparency. The issue is faith in our nation's political system, and while democracy might be hard and messy, that does not mean it can't be improved. There are better ways to administer a representative form of government-and build the sort of civic community that the nation needs to succeed. To put it simply, the Founding Fathers never expected someone like Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich's political story begins in 1978. Gingrich was a thick, square-headed academic back then. He had run two campaigns for Georgia's Sixth Congressional District, but both efforts had fallen short. Gingrich, it seemed, was the sort of ivory tower academic who just couldn't make it in American politics. But Gingrich decided to run a third campaign, this time against Democrat Virginia Shapard, and he launched a scorched-earth operation that caught many off guard. In TV spots, Gingrich claimed that Shapard supported fraud.4 "If you like welfare cheaters, you'll love Virginia Shapard," said one commercial. Gingrich also suggested that if Shapard went to Was.h.i.+ngton, she would be a neglectful mother by leaving her family behind in Georgia. The Atlanta Journal Const.i.tution had endorsed Gingrich in his previous two runs for Congress. But the newspaper drew the line in 1978. Gingrich's campaign, the newspaper argued, had devolved into "demagogy and plain lying."5 Gingrich won the congressional race against Shapard, and the victory provided a lesson that would frame the rest of his career: When it comes to politics, the ends justify the means. By today's standards, of course, Gingrich's campaign tactics seem almost timid, and over the past three decades, slash-and-burn politics have come to dominate Was.h.i.+ngton. But Gingrich played a crucial role in developing this sort of bare-knuckle political approach, as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein argue in their excellent book It's Even Worse Than It Looks, and the Georgia Republican may have done more than any other single, recent political figure to foster the no-holds-barred political climate that's crippling our nation's democracy.6 Gingrich always had big dreams. He once wrote that his primary mission in life was to be a "definer of civilization," and while most members of Congress arrive in Was.h.i.+ngton wanting to learn the legislative process, Gingrich arrived wanting to get noticed.7 Even more than your average politician, Gingrich would do whatever it took to land newspaper headlines, and in speeches, he argued that Democratic policies would "murder women and children."8 Gingrich once explained that one of the Republican Party's "great problems" has been that "we don't encourage you to be nasty."9 For Gingrich, these tactics had a clear logic. His political stunts drew attention, and attention, for him, meant a type of power. "The number one fact about the news media," Gingrich once explained, "is they love fights . . . You have to give them confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate."10 At the same time, Gingrich was willing to sacrifice the inst.i.tutions of democracy in order to achieve his political goals, according to Mann and Ornstein. The House, the Senate, the notion of compromise and cooperation, it didn't seem to matter to Gingrich, if he could achieve his political ends. Or as Republican Trent Lott once told the New York Times, "Newt was willing to tear up the system to get the majority."11 This sort of twenty-first-century Machiavellianism has its benefits. Gingrich got elected Speaker of the House. He was on the cover of Time. The New York Times and Was.h.i.+ngton Post wrote long articles about him, and under Gingrich's leaders.h.i.+p, the Republicans scored major political victories, including a tax overhaul and welfare reform. But eventually he went too far, and after the failed effort to impeach President Clinton, Gingrich resigned as Speaker in 1998.

Gingrich left behind a new brand of politics, and today many in the GOP have taken up his raw, pit bull style. They're willing, in Mann and Ornstein's words, to engage in the "politics of hostage taking." On this issue, Democrats are just as guilty, and over the years they've engaged in all sorts of winner-takes-all campaigns. For instance, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was asked if Democrats would work with former Republican governor Mitt Romney if he was elected president, Reid made it clear that he would be a pure obstructionist.12 "Mitt Romney's fantasy that Senate Democrats will work with him to pa.s.s his 'severely conservative' agenda is laughable," he explained.

The problem is that our political system isn't meant to have such deeply adversarial parties. Political scientists sometimes call these European- or parliamentary-style political parties.13 In a parliamentary system, the head of the government-usually called a prime minister-is also the head of the legislative body. In the United States, this would be like the Speaker of the House being president, and in a parliamentary system, the minority party typically works in total opposition to the majority party. But the United States has a presidential system of governance, where the powers of the presidency are separate from the powers of Congress, and within this system, the two opposing parties are generally supposed to work together. But that's not what's happened. Instead, what we have is parliamentary-style political parties in a presidential system, and the result is gridlock.

Extremism has made this problem worse. As a whole, much of the nation is politically middle-of-the-road, and more than a third of Americans identify themselves as moderates in some way.14 But in recent years, there has been a clear uptick at the edges of both the far left and the far right, and an increasing number of people call themselves very conservative or very liberal. This trend has dramatically shaped the Republican Party, and today the Tea Party faction has significant influence over the GOP's platform. They control who runs in many primaries. They often help decide what issues get attention. This doesn't happen nearly as much on the left, and there's almost nothing on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that compares to the Tea Party. Only the GOP has an extremist power broker like Senator Ted Cruz.

In many ways, this issue goes farther back than Gingrich. It goes back, in fact, to the creation of the closed primary system, because in a closed primary, only members of the political party can partic.i.p.ate, which makes the more extreme elements more powerful.15 Without nonparty voters, in other words, primary candidates cater more to the political fringe than to the political middle. Even worse has been the deeply partisan drawing of congressional boundaries in recent years. By creating highly gerrymandered districts, political leaders have made moderates an endangered political species, a civic dodo bird, and in many areas there is simply no political fallout for a GOP politician who caters exclusively to the hard-line elements in his or her party.16 This change in the GOP has led to odd policy twists. Take Gingrich again, for example. During his early career, the congressman's views weren't particularly extreme. He supported medical marijuana. He believed in climate change. It wasn't clear, Gingrich said, if waterboarding was a type of torture. But when Gingrich ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2012, he veered deeply to the right. Medical marijuana became "a joke."17 There was no "conclusive proof" of climate change.18 As for waterboarding? It has become, by Gingrich's a.n.a.lysis, clearly legal.19 "Waterboarding is, by every technical rule, not torture," he explained.

Politicians should be able to change their minds. That's not the problem. The issue is that extremist, winner-takes-all politics impedes democracy, inhibits good government, and corrodes social trust. And as a nation, we have developed a political system that discourages the very things that civilization depends on: compromise and cooperation.

There have been some experiments with growing moderation. California has a new open-primary system that holds promise. Demographic s.h.i.+fts might help as well, and today's young people are more moderate than their parents. But these are long-term trends. They won't change the fundamentals of the system any time soon. As a congressman, Gingrich once confessed, "I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to s.h.i.+ft the entire planet."20 For Americans, the good news is that the whole planet hasn't s.h.i.+fted. The bad news is that our country has-and we're the worse for it.

Not long ago, neuroscientist Ann Harvey conducted an experiment. The study was fairly straightforward, and Harvey first had subjects evaluate some artwork while they were in an fMRI scanner.21 The paintings themselves weren't terribly interesting, the sort of stuff that you'd see in a college dorm room-a canvas by Degas, a painting by Pica.s.so. In the scanner, the subjects would rate each artwork on a scale from positive four (love it) to negative four (hate it), and they would be paid $30, $100, or $300 for their time. Harvey added a key wrinkle, though: Before the subjects entered the scanner, they were told that a company had sponsored the experiment and that sometimes the subjects would see the logo of the sponsoring firm next to the work of art.

In many ways, the results of the experiment were what you might expect: If the sponsoring company's logo appeared next to the painting, the subjects were far more likely to say that they enjoyed the artwork. The amount of cash made a difference, too, and the more money that a subject received, the more likely it was that he or she would like the painting. What was surprising, though, was just how unaware the subjects were of their bias. When Harvey asked the subjects if the logo shaped their choices, none of them said that they had been influenced by the company's generosity. And when Harvey looked at the fMRI data, she discovered that the nature of the brain activity made it nearly impossible for someone to even be aware of his or her prejudice. According to Harvey, the bias didn't appear to be something that the subjects could have ever consciously recognized.

What does all this have to do with our nation's political system? A lot, it turns out. Because beyond the general breakdown in political discourse, there's the issue of money, and our political system is flush with cash. We've become so used to this fact that we're immune to the vastness of the problem. But consider for a moment that President Obama raised more than one billion dollars for his 2012 campaign.22 To put that amount of money into perspective, Facebook bought the online photo-sharing service Instagram for the same amount of money that year. And that's just the start. Mitt Romney wasn't far behind Obama-the GOP presidential candidate also hauled in over a billion dollars. In fact, today many Senate seats cost more than ten million dollars.23 One recent school board race alone had a three-million-dollar price tag.24 Our nation's lawmakers have become beggars in Brooks Brothers clothing. They are constantly searching for cash. They spend huge amounts of time soliciting groups for money. When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently gave a presentation to new lawmakers, they recommended that new members of Congress spend at least four hours a day dialing up donors.25 As writer Alex Blumberg recently argued, our nation's lawmakers have two jobs.26 During the day, they pa.s.s-or don't pa.s.s-laws. At night, they work as telemarketers. "Most Americans would be shocked-not surprised, shocked-if they knew how much time a U.S. senator spends raising money," Senator d.i.c.k Durbin told NPR.

The issue has grown far worse in recent years, and after the Supreme Court knocked down limits on corporate and union money in 2010, outside groups gained the power to fund almost everything. Again, Gingrich's story is ill.u.s.trative. When the Republican ran for president in 2012, he burned through cash, and for a long time it looked like Gingrich would simply run out of money. But in the closing months of the race, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson wrote a five-million-dollar check to a Super PAC that supported Gingrich-and in a moment, it changed the nature of the campaign.

This is remarkable. A single billionaire was able to keep a presidential candidate afloat-and fundamentally s.h.i.+ft the race for the White House. There was nothing illegal about Adelson's donation, of course. In many ways, the gift was average, and in the 2012 election cycle, almost 30 percent of the cash came from some thirty thousand very wealthy individuals.27 Nor is there much surprising about why Adelson makes such large political donations-the billionaire wants political influence.28 Certainly Gingrich would have known that. The former Speaker has long been an expert in the ways that money flows through Was.h.i.+ngton, and after he left Congress, he built what some called "Newt Inc."29 Firms paid Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation up to $200,000 for a members.h.i.+p, and in return, the firms got the services of Gingrich. The companies received, according to the firm's marketing doc.u.ments, "direct Newt interaction."30 Our political leaders, it seems, are a lot like the subjects in the fMRI staring at a reproduction of a van Gogh with a little corporate logo in the corner. They think that they're different, that they won't be swayed. But the evidence suggests that they're wrong. Or take what Adelson once told Politico: "I don't believe one person should influence an election," he explained. "So, I suppose you'll ask me, 'How come I'm doing it?' Because other single people influence elections."

Money and politics have long been intertwined, of course. In George Was.h.i.+ngton's 1758 campaign for the Virginia House of Burgesses, he purchased gallons of rum, brandy, and beer to win over voters at the polling booth.31 In the early 1850s, Samuel Colt handed out pistols to members of Congress in order to seek support for the pa.s.sage of a bill.32 But in recent years, a culture of lobbying has arisen in Was.h.i.+ngton that's far beyond what the Founding Fathers could have ever imagined. What's remarkable, actually, is the fact that we know it's so bad but we do so little to fight it. Because when we think about what makes people untrustworthy, few things give us more pause than knowing that our partners are in the pocket of someone else. What we need to realize is that every favor does have a price.

When we think about building political trust, there's one final thing to consider, and that's the politicians themselves. Just look at what happened to Al Gore. For a while in September 2000, it seemed likely that Gore would be the next president of the United States, as political scientist Marc Hetherington recounts in his book Why Trust Matters.33 The vice president had beaten expectations at the Democratic Convention. His poll numbers were high. The scandals of the Clinton White House seemed to have faded into memory. In contrast, George W. Bush seemed weak and blunder-p.r.o.ne. The Texas governor's youthful drinking benders were again making headlines, and then, at a campaign event, a hot mike recorded Bush calling a New York Times reporter a "major-league a.s.shole."34 But then Bush released a political ad that dramatically energized his campaign, according to Hetherington. In a TV spot t.i.tled "Trust," Bush speaks directly to the camera.35 "I believe we need to encourage personal responsibility so people are accountable for their actions," he explains. A few heart-warming scenes then flit across the screen: a mother and her child in the kitchen, some men at a construction site. "That's the difference in philosophy between my opponent and me," Bush says. "He trusts government. I trust you." The ad went a long way to define Bush as a politician, as Hetherington argues, and the Texas governor began using the ad's antigovernment message in debates. The Trust ad was played in heavily contested states, and from the moment that the campaign commercial was released until the election, Bush almost never lagged again in the polls.36 A decade later, and Bush's approach seems almost stale. "Never trust the government" has become a rallying cry for the Tea Party. "Every day I serve in Congress, I work to fight Was.h.i.+ngton" was the talking point of one recent Republican messaging doc.u.ment.37 This isn't an exclusively Republican approach by any means. All sorts of Democrats have run on an anti-Was.h.i.+ngton message over the years. For politicians, these arguments are an easy way to get ahead. The candidates understand that attacking Was.h.i.+ngton is an effective way to present themselves as something new. Politicians don't typically bad-mouth the effectiveness of specific federal agencies. They generally don't go after the Marines or the U.S. Postal Service or the Centers for Disease Control. Instead, they present government itself as the problem.

Why does this matter? Well, these political arguments have broader consequences. They stoke fears and anxieties. They foster political cynicism. For Democrats who believe in a more active role for government, the effects have been particularly strong, and research by Hetherington has shown that declining political trust has led to less support for social programs like affirmative action. The lack of trust in government has limited Republicans, too, Hetherington told me in an interview, and without trust in government, many GOP leaders have had a harder time pus.h.i.+ng through their agenda.

There's a lot of good news, however. Americans broadly love America, and as I'm sure Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would be happy to know, democracy continues to be highly popular. More than that, the federal government isn't as rife with incompetence as many believe. As political scientist Douglas Amy points out, the government has gone a long way to protect public health, offer consumer protections, and create the strongest military that the world has ever seen. Over the past fifty years, the government has also put a man on the moon, helped map the human genome, and built countless bridges and highways. And despite government shutdowns and debt ceiling crises, we're not heading for a type of Somali dystopia any time soon.

But there's also a real danger. If politicians continue to tell the public not to trust government, then the public won't trust government. Why would they? After all, it's the politicians who are in charge. And in the end, what's surprising, and far worse, is that all of the negative messaging has a terrible impact far beyond Was.h.i.+ngton: It even influences the nation's murder rate.

It was around four in the morning on October 4, 2009, in Mont Vernon, New Hamps.h.i.+re. Kim Cates and her eleven-year-old daughter, Jaimie, were sleeping together in Kim's bed.38 Some male voices rang through the dark house.

"Jaimie, is that you?" Kim Cates called out.39 Two men were standing at the side of the bed. They had a machete and a long knife, and they began hacking at Cates and her daughter.

"Please don't do it," Kim Cates called out. "No. Please, no."

The men waited until the bodies appeared lifeless. Then they roamed the house, taking whatever appeared valuable. Some jewelry boxes. A pearl necklace. All in all, it wasn't much. But the men didn't care. That's not why they were there. One of the young men, Christopher Gribble, later bragged that the murder had been "awesome."40 The second man, Steven Spader, told the same friend that he wanted to "do it" again.41 Neither of the two killers knew Cates. They had broken into her house because it was secluded, and the two promised each other to kill whoever they found inside. Within days, police arrested Gribble and Spader, and after a trial, the two men received life sentences without parole.

Historian Randolph Roth begins his book American Homicide with a different murder, and he comes to a simple conclusion that extends to almost every homicide: The court-approved, appears-in-the-newspaper account doesn't explain all that much about why people actually murder each other. Motives, Roth argues, "say very little about what shapes the mindset of murderers . . . to become killers." More than that, the court-approved, appears-in-the-newspaper account doesn't explain why murder rates differ across cultures, as Roth points out.

There must be something in our history, then, that explains why Americans kill each other so much. After all, we have three times the murder rate of Canada, and ten times the rate of some of the world's least murderous nations.42 No other first-world democracy has higher homicide levels than the United States, according to Roth, and today, almost one out of every two hundred American children will die at the hands of someone else.

Some two decades ago, Roth began looking more closely into why exactly our nation's murder rates are so high. At the time, most experts believed that the cause was a mix of social and economic issues. Unemployment, weak salaries, crack cocaine-these were supposed to be the engines of homicide. But when Roth a.n.a.lyzed historical databases, he uncovered a different set of causes. It turned out that the less people felt connected to others, the more likely they were to murder each other, and when our political leaders seem incompetent or divisive, people become aggrieved. They feel disconnected, and so they're more likely to kill.

Other criminologists have come to similar conclusions as Roth, but on a smaller scale. In the 1990s, for instance, sociologist Gary LaFree showed that over the previous fifty years, att.i.tudes toward government closely tracked homicide rates. Roth takes a longer view, going all the way back to the seventeenth century, and it turns out that King Philip's War led to a sudden drop in the murder rate by creating a sense of solidarity among the early colonists. And the biggest jump in the nation's murder rates? That occurred after Watergate. As the nation became disenchanted with politicians-and society itself-an increasing number of people killed each other.

But perhaps what's most surprising might be the power of feeling connected to others. "People's views about the legitimacy of government and about their fellow citizens correlate so strongly with how often they kill unrelated adults-much more strongly than other factors such as guns, poverty, drugs, race, or a permissive justice system," Roth explained to me.

Take, for instance, the two men who murdered Kim Cates. Christopher Gribble had grown up isolated. His parents had homeschooled him. As a teenager, he would wear the same camouflage outfit day after day, and during the trial, he showed little remorse. "I thought I would feel bad," Gribble explained.43 "I'm almost sorry to say I don't. I thought I would at least puke afterward or something." The other killer, Steven Spader, was an only child who had dropped out of high school. After the homicide, he wrote a letter to the Nashua Telegraph arguing that he and his friends were different. Outsiders simply didn't understand them. He dismissed the public as "brainless conformists."44 To be clear, the solution isn't for politicians to tell people to stop killing others, though certainly that can help. Instead, thoughtful leaders promote a sense of togetherness, an overall feeling of community, and homicide levels dropped under inclusive presidents such as Eisenhower and Clinton, according to Roth. In other words, when it comes to governing, a little trust can go a long way.