Americans distrust government. Republicans distrust government even more than Democrats. Most Americans believe government operates largely on behalf of wealthy, powerful special interests and not for the greater public good. Most of us believe our politicians are dishonest.

Those are the findings of a new nonpartisan survey by the Pew Research Center, and they are not even remotely surprising. Our leaders so relentlessly do and say so many things that invite our distrust in so many ways that we’re frankly amazed anyone expressed much faith at all in our government.

More interesting is that according to Pew, 20 years ago large majorities in both parties and among independents still expressed “trust and confidence in the political wisdom of the American people.” The big decline in that trust began in the 2000s and accelerated in the late 2000s toward the end of the George W. Bush administration. The nearly rock-bottom figure now is just 19 percent of Americans believing government does the right thing most of the time.

What happened? A rote assessment of American politics says that the Age of Cynicism began with Vietnam and Watergate. Yet a quarter century after those events most Americans still trusted the process. The tipping point wasn’t Richard Nixon’s burglars or Lyndon Johnson’s lies.

Could it be generational? As older Americans who remember a time when government leaders were more respected die off, the citizenry is increasingly dominated by those who have known nothing but the post-Watergate era. But that’s a gradual evolution, and wouldn’t explain the late-Bush, early-Obama collapse of trust.

Partisan hysteria has fueled our disgust, to be sure, but has the rancor also been fostered by that same displeasure? Our leaders didn’t suddenly pass a resolution declaring compromise to be evil. What started driving us farther apart?

Theories abound, but one answer is the wealth gap. As income disparities have grown, so has the distrust. We have increasingly become a winner-take-all society, empowering the one percent, destroying the middle class, and turning political discourse into blood feuds in which there can only be victors and the slain. The rapid drop in trust in the later 2000s coincided with the economic meltdown, which is hardly a coincidence.

What the Pew poll makes clear is that Americans are unhappy with their leaders most of all, but not necessarily government itself. Respondents give generally strong marks to what government actually accomplishes when asked about specific programs or policy areas.

It’s worth noting that the Pew research is no ordinary poll. It covers 6,000 interviews, an unusually high number for such a survey, and included respondents contacted by cell phone, which encompasses a broader cross-section of Americans than a landline-reliant poll.

So we can plead for more honesty and transparency from our elected officials as a means of beginning to restore trust. But even more effective would be the reduction of the wealth gap, giving more Americans the sense that their interests aren’t being ignored. Until that happens, trust in our leaders will be a rare commodity indeed.

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