To some extent, of course, such cynicism comes from our intellectual tradition and is in our very political bloodstream. Is anyone more cynical about public life in 1994 than Mark Twain was in his time, or Will Rogers in his? They were but two among the countless other writers, wise guys, pamphleteers and sourpusses whose irreverence, vituperation and unappeasable suspicion have been a saving glory of the republic since its founding. One of the most frequently quoted (and variously attributed) bits of folk wisdom we have along these lines is that of the legendary old countrywoman who was supposed to have said, whenever election time came around, “I never vote. It only encourages them.”
I will acknowledge that there is much truth in current assertions that we in the press, in our own relentlessly cynical depictions of what goes on in public life, have probably made people even more distrustful of government and politics than they need to be or would have been without our excesses. And it is no doubt also true that in doing so we have managed to generate plenty of richly deserved cynicism about ourselves, not just our subjects. But, still, none of this seems to me to go to the gut issue of whether people might not be even more cynical than usual these days because it seems to them to be the only sane and prudent response to the world around them.
By “cynic,” “cynical” and “cynicism,” I am assuming that neither Clinton nor the others engaged in discussion means to refer to the specific terms of the ancient Athenian philosophy from which the contemporary phenomenon gets its name. To us the idea of being cynical merely means, roughly, some combination of disillusionment, disbelief, skepticism and inclination not to take things at face value. There is a kind of emperor’s-new-clothes quality to some of the bafflement being expressed that the American people should have acquired such an outlook and such a propensity, when faced with any new person or promise, to initially suspect the worst. But how could they not by now? I can’t imagine that anyone who has been awake for the better part of the last two decades, upon reading that people had become greatly less willing to believe in appearances, would say to himself, “Gosh, I wonder why that should be?”
But in case there is such a person, let’s take just a tiny trip down memory lane. It has become a kind of mind-stopping cliche by now to cite Vietnam and Watergate – they are spoken as almost one word – as sources of public disenchantment and, yes, cynicism. So we won’t even pause there, despite their rich trove of false statements, incarcerated officials and the rest. And we won’t rehash the all-too-well-known current but unsettled Whitewater stuff. Let’s see, then, what would be left? Well, one whole realm is that of public crime-fighting, moralizing posturers who ended up, a la Vice President Agnew, in deep legal trouble for being on the take. We have the ones they nabbed in Congress and the ones they nabbed in various administrations. We have the HUD scandals and the convictions that followed. There are the S&Ls and their public custodians in both parties. Though he has yet to defend himself in court, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has recently been indicted. Other members of Congress and their patronage employees have also been tarnished by scandal and punished by law. Oh, yes, I almost forgot all the saintly churchmen who turned out to be a little more fleshly and/or monetarily greedy than churchly and got into big trouble, including into the clink. There are the great political pledges: Read my lips, universal coverage or veto, which come out of a tradition going back before the no-bargaining-for-hostages pledge to (at least) FDR and JFK and LBJ and Nixon et al., well before the past couple of decades through which we are having our stroll.
Shall we go a little further? There were all those cases of big companies’ persisting in the promotion of products their management knew perfectly well to be dangerous or absolutely unable to fulfill their advertising claims. There were the unions that became private preserves for their officials and a chosen few. There were those criminal rip-offs of poverty programs by people who had professed themselves great advocates of the poor. There were those programs that rose up and devoured the Treasury and created as many problems as they solved. There were those truly humiliating episodes in which the press, big time, got it wrong. And, if anyone among the public cares to look briefly into the mirror, there is the self-evident but generally suppressed hypocrisy of droves of citizens who demand at the same time that government up their bene-fits and lower their taxes and just stop spending so darn much money and balance the budget – and who, on the basis of this essentially mindless, phony and self-serving argument, gather together to throw decent public servants out of of-fice all the time.
Yes, there are decent public servants, vast numbers of them . . . and vast numbers of decent just about everything else that I have mentioned above which comes in indecent or fraudulent form as well. My point is not woe-is-us, or even that all we see about us is suspect and tainted. I just think that it is pointless and distracting for people in public office to bewail the cynicism of the populace as a whole, as if this were a wholly inexplicable attitude and one of which those who held it ought to be ashamed. No one can be chastised out of this kind of cynicism anyway, although people can be led by particular conduct to another point of view. For such cynicism – never mind how much we in the press may stir it up and make it worse – is essentially a function of cumulative experience. So is trust.
