The Washington Post’s The Fix reports incredulously:

It’s no secret that the American public views its elected officials with some combination of disgust, disappointment and distrust. Congress’s approval rating is in used-car-salesman territory, and with every legislative crisis it dips, somewhat amazingly, lower.

But, as bad things are, there is a tendency to assume that the current attitude toward the federal government is sort of how it always has been. Except that it hasn’t always been like that.

This chart is taken from a broader interactive project from the Pew Research Center that aims to document public attitudes toward the federal government from 1958 to the present day. It documents the percentage of people who said they trust the government in Washington either “just about always” or “most of the time.”

When public trust in government collapsed from 53 percent in 1972 to 36 percent in November 1974, it made sense. The Watergate investigation, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, was just the sort of ugly — and prolonged — episode to make public perception of government erode in a relatively rapid manner.

Ditto the historically low trust ratings reached in Pew polling in the early 1990s, as a series of congressional scandals — with the House Bank scandal being the most prominent — produced large amounts of media coverage focused on what the heck politicians were doing in the nation’s capital.

But the recent drop, which began in earnest after the goodwill toward Washington surrounding its actions in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks wore off, seems disconnected to any single notable event. There have been a fair share of legislative standoffs and scandals in recent years, but nothing nearly as heavily covered or broad as Watergate or the House bank.

Instead, it appears to be a political death — or at least bloodletting — by a thousand cuts. No one event is to blame. Rather, something even more corrosive to government appears to be happening — a steady and growing belief that politicians in Washington are simply not to be trusted.

Well, you know what? Politicians in Washington — and Madison, and elsewhere — are simply not to be trusted. That should be the platform on which all political beliefs are based. Recall why this country was created — distrust of the bewigged fops across the sea, who took tax revenues from this country without doing a thing to represent the interests of those taxpayers.

The reasons should be obvious. State legislators make almost as much money as a median-income family in this state, by themselves. Congressmen and U.S. senators make almost $200,000 a year. Curious, isn’t it, how nearly every legislator and federal elected official comes out of office much wealthier than they went into office. Politicians of either, or no, party have considerable incentive to increase their influence through expanding what government does and government controls.

(This goes far beyond merely Washington and Madison. Consider, for instance, a city that has a lot of one-car-garage houses owned by people with more than one car that prohibits parking (1) in front of their house and (2) on the lawn of said house.)

George Will mentions Nobel Prize economist James Buchanan:

Public choice theory demystified politics by puncturing the grand illusion that nourishes government growth. It is the fiction that elected politicians and government administrators are more nobly motivated, unselfish and disinterested than are persons acting in the private sector.

Buchanan extended the idea of the profit motive to the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats, two groups seeking to maximize power the way many people in the private sector maximize monetary profits. Public-sector actors often do this by transactions with rent-seekers — private factions trying to maximize their welfare by getting government to give them benefits, such as appropriations, tax preferences and other subsidies. …

Actually, Buchanan’s theory supplanted an ideology — the faith in government as omniscient and benevolent. It replaced it with realism about the sociology of government and the logic of collective action. The theory’s explanatory and predictive power, Buchanan wrote, derives from its “presumption that persons do not readily become economic eunuchs as they shift from market to political participation.”

Concerning the cold logic of power maximization, Buchanan was as unsentimental as Machiavelli, whose “The Prince,” the primer on realism that announced political modernity, appeared exactly half a millennium ago, in 1513. …

The political class is incorrigible because it is composed of — let us say the worst — human beings. They respond to incentives of self-interest. Their acquisitiveness is not for money but for the currency of power, which they act to retain and enlarge.

I find it pathetic, frankly, that the liberals who at the beginning of my life protested governmentally promoted civil rights violations and the Vietnam War now have this childlike faith in government, the biggest and most intrusive institution of them all. Liberals should be able to point to not merely Jim Crow and Vietnam, but also interning Japanese-Americans during World War II, injecting Tuskegee Institute students with syphilis just to see what happened, and any number of instances of politicians promoting the interests of their supporters at the expense of others. How about the Patriot Act? How about drones?

Remember when Bill Clinton claimed you cannot love your country and hate your government? He was wrong.