A Government Shutdown's Worst Casualty: Confidence
Every passing federal government shutdown moves us further towards a complete collapse in public confidence .... & that's destructive
Publisher’s Riff
Government shutdown averted, that was close. Still, it’s not good that we keep flirting with jumps off the appropriations cliff at an almost annual rate. And if you were to engage in just quick or cursory research on government shutdowns, you’d find that it’s only in America.
Even in places like war torn Syria, government shutdowns haven’t occurred; Syrian government workers still get paid and go to work, as a matter of fact. Shutdowns are typically viewed as a primary signal that a nation is experiencing complete collapse. Yet, federal policymakers in the U.S. have perfected the art of administrative state shutdown without the full collapse. Shutdowns are, indeed, a uniquely American thing. Here’s the Economist’s comparison to other developed countries in 2019 …
More from The Week …
What’s more problematic than global embarrassment, however, is how government shutdowns - whether full, multi-day or multi-month shutdowns or the close calls such as what just occurred before this recent Friday midnight deadline - regularly erode public confidence in government. Here is a chronology of federal government shutdowns …
…. Let’s now layer this against levels of public confidence since 1958, according to Pew …
Of course, it seems like the impetus for historic drops in public confidence in government starts with American forays into Vietnam coupled with the end of the Nixon years. But, we can also see that decades of constant dysfunction, partisan rancor and the frequency of shutdowns aggravates the decreased confidence quotient. Over time that doesn’t bode well for civic engagement - voter turnout is anemic - and it accentuates government weakness. This is the most concerning feature of shutdown regularity: shutdowns become so commonplace that they’re normalized. The normalization, however, rapidly eats away at any positive public perceptions of government, and government can’t work without some public confidence and optimism that it can work. Dysfunctional government, after some time, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that creates an incessant doom loop that’s irreversible. Perhaps, certain political forces - such as the Republicans who keep precipitating government shutdowns - want that to happen, given their anti-democratic proclivities in recent decades. But, that’s a level of destruction we have got to avoid.