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In Defense of Distrust in Government
President Barack Obama declared in his inaugural address that "our patchwork heritage is a strength" because people of all backgrounds and creeds had come together to make America great. But there was one group, Obama suggested, that wasn't quite welcome in the American family: the "cynics," those miserable killjoys who dare to "question the scale of [the federal government's] ambitions."...

...But, as usual, the political elites have it precisely backwards. Declining trust in government is a good thing, something that Americans of every political stripe ought to celebrate.

Conservatives should welcome increasing skepticism toward federal power, because that skepticism makes ambitious federal programs much less likely to pass. Vanderbilt University's Marc Hetherington, one of America's leading scholars on the subject, writes that declining faith in the feds makes "another Great Society or New Frontier... unlikely in a post-Cold War world."

Professor Hetherington leans left, so he's not happy that the data has driven him to that conclusion. But even though increased political distrust presents major challenges for the Democratic agenda, liberals should recognize that there's a silver lining in the growing cloud of skepticism.

When Americans trust their government too readily, they tend to support policies that most liberals oppose. The post-9/11 period led to the greatest rise in political trust since Watergate, which helped George W. Bush make the case for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq.

Professor Hetherington's research shows that declining trust decreases support for foreign-policy adventurism, and other scholars have shown that it also makes the public less likely to endorse restrictions on civil liberties....