Would dialog create trust among the voters?

Somebody--perhaps the same reader as before--has written to suggest that Americans' trust in their government will be a reality only when there is evidence of dialog between Capitol Hill's elected Democrats and Republicans.  Presumably, the reader's intention is to suggest that such a dialog actually produces results.

Okay, it's worth a try.

But that brings us to this question:  How would those results be measured?  Or, maybe the question is this:  What is the measurement that would convincingly and objectively show that results have happened?

If, as the reader/writer states, it is true that Republicans and Democrats--my assumption is that this is intended to mean elected Republicans and Democrats--"seem to be incapable" of having an "open and honest" dialog, then you might think that different people who can have an open and honest dialog would be elected.

However, the voting public--at least some of whom must be among those Americans who say they don't trust their government--tends to vote for the same Congressional and Senatorial candidates year after year, if the high incidence of reelection is any measure.

Why is that?

Maybe it's at least partly caused, as some poet once said, by the fact that hope springs eternal in the human breast.  (My apologies for mangling the original verse.)  Possibly it's also because the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.  Another way of looking at it is that voters simply are not convinced--in a global sense--that there is any better choice.

Dialog is good.  Dialog that produces results is better.  Dialog that produces beneficial results is the best.

How do we motivate our elected representatives to proceed along that path, and how do we measure the progress in a trustworthy way?

All of this is worthy of time and effort.  Maybe we can come up with some good answers to these questions.

"Trust" apparently has many dimensions and a lot of history

A reader wrote in on the last posting about the American public's trust--or lack thereof--in its government to point out that trust is multi-dimensional; it is, in large part, the product of experience, environment, time, and basic human nature (which might be the most important one of all).

And, of course, all things are relative, too.  For illustration, this person suggests making a comparison with current-day Egypt. The inference seems to be that the trust Egyptians place in their government at this stage in its evolution is lower by orders of magnitude that it is in this country.  In other words, sometimes we can't appreciate how good it is on our side of the fence until we take a look at what things are like on the other side.  Makes sense to me.

What really caught my attention, though, was the part of the comment about basic human nature:  Perhaps what we really don't trust--and maybe never will fully trust--is the inherent authority of government.  Government is one of the few ultimate embodiments of authority.  For most Americans, government is likely to be THE ultimate embodiment of authority.  Nothing can surpass it for Americans, since we pride ourselves--as we have discussed before--as a nation of laws, and we see our fundamental legal structure as extending into the indefinite future, maybe even an unlimited future.  By virtue of its laws, nothing can surpass its power, and by virtue of our outlook, nothing can outlast it.

All of which makes for a lot of authority.

Let's face it:  Americans have issues with authority.  Those issues are baked into our history and our heritage.  As British colonies, we started out mostly as people escaping from established authorities.  National settlement and expansion for the next three hundred years were prominently motivated by clashes with authority.

By the time we Americans got around to writing our Constitution in the late 1780s we were even more distrustful of government and authority than we were before the Revolution.  The evidence is right there in the Constitution itself, and in the way that the Constitution survived its birth:  The Constitution, as originally written, was dead-on-arrival, and required amending ten times before it was deemed viable.  Those first ten amendments are commonly called the Bill of Rights, but perhaps they could also be called "Here's the Things That We Don't Quite Trust to a National Authority."

I'm going to read each of those ten amendments, and after each one ask myself "Does this sound like the words of people who are placing their trust in what they have just created?"  I'll report the results in future writings.