Also, It Isn't and Shouldn't Be About Trust

What does it mean to say that you "trust" someone or something? Well, one thing it could mean is that you have a very high estimate of the probability that they will perform well in a given situation; for instance, I might say that I trust Tiger Woods to sink a three-foot putt on the 72nd hole of a major to win by one stroke. Or I might say that I trust someone with my life; what I mean is clearly that I expect their behavior to be of a high enough quality that my life will be adequately protected. In this context, the opposite of trusting someone is to simply not trust that same someone, to not believe that they'll perform up to snuff. I wouldn't trust Chin-lung Hu to get the winning base hit in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series.

There's another sense of the word, though.
I might say, going to a new restaurant with someone who's been there before, that I trust their judgment about what we should order. Or I might say that I trust Paul Krugman's judgment on economic issues. What this means is that the simple fact that Paul Krugman holds opinion X on economic policy will count as evidence for me that opinion X is correct. This kind of trust involves a certain delegation of judgment, and of course like the other kind of trust must be earned in appropriate ways. The opposite of this kind of trust isn't lack of trust (well, okay, that's one kind of opposite), it's distrust, which means taking the fact that person A holds opinion B as evidence against the validity of opinion B.


So let's go back to the question of whether conservatives "distrust" government. This could be a sloppy way of saying that conservatives do not trust the government, i.e. that they expect it to do bad things, or to do things badly, quite a lot of the time. Or it could mean that they distrust government in the way I defined above, i.e. if the government proposes to do something that makes them think that thing must be a bad idea. Likewise, trust in government could mean either a confident expectation that the government will do the right thing or it could mean a kind of delegation of judgment to the government. Set aside the "expectation" sense of trust, because I think it's a much more boring issue, and let's consider whether it makes sense even to talk in terms of trusting or distrusting the government's judgment in the second sense.

I contend that it does not. After all, essentially everyone can agree that some potential government actions would be good and some would be bad. But every government action is being, you know, carried out by the government! So clearly whether a thing is being done by the government cannot help us discriminate between good and bad government policies. The entire concept of delegating one's judgment about policy to the government is absurd on its face. Now, delegating one's judgment to a particular set of elected officials makes much more sense. I might say, for instance, that I trust President Obama's judgment, in the same way I said above I might trust Krugman's. Certainly I do trust Obama's judgment a hell of a lot more than I trust the Republican caucus's judgment. This makes perfect sense, because Obama will favor some policies and the Republicans will favor some other policies, and I can easily have a sense that knowing Obama favors and the Republicans oppose a certain policy is a good reason to think it's a good policy. I might be wrong, but it makes sense to talk that way.

But it doesn't make sense to talk about trusting "government" per se, not in this sense. Such an attitude would amount to pure indifference as to public policy debates. Now, one might simply decide to be a low-information, low-engagement person vis-a-vis politics, but even this would be at most an expression of confidence in the government to get it right without your involvement, not a statement that if the government does it it must be right. The only sensible position to take when considering any government action is to consider the relative merits and demerits of that issue for oneself, perhaps taking into consideration the opinions of certain trusted figures like Krugman and Obama in my examples above.

So if this sense of "trust in government" is nonsense, why did I say above that the other sense of trust is boring? Well, because obviously if I think some government actions would be good and others would be bad, I will trust any government to do the right thing in almost direct proportion to how much the wielders of power within that government agree with me. I trusted the federal government very little during the window from 2003 to 2006 when Republicans held all three branches of that government, and much more when Democrats controlled the White House and 59% of each House of Congress. I trust the New Jersey government much less now, under the Christie Administration, than I did under the previous Democratic governors.

So perhaps conservatives have a lack of trust in government, if only because over the course of recent American history government has by and large wanted to do things conservatives thought were wrong. Perhaps there's even been a trend toward doing things conservatives think are wrong, which makes them even less confident that the right things will happen going forward. Perhaps conservatives have a lack of trust toward government economic regulations, and liberals toward the security state and social regulations, but only because they know that they disapprove with those policies on the merits.

And maybe there's a sense among conservatives that government bureaucracies screw things up juts as a matter of incompetence, but even this is not particularly relevant at an ideological level. I'd say most liberals believe that bureaucracies do a spotty job of things at best most of the time; the difference is, where conservatives want to throw up their hands in despair because of this and simply stop trying to have the government do good things, liberals want to improve the bureaucracy so it can do better things better. Again, not interesting, and not some sort of deep-seated philosophical inclination to "distrust government," whatever that means.

So it isn't about trust, and it shouldn't be about trust. It is, as always, about what policies you believe are good, and that is about what kind of world you want to live in.