(Mis) trust of public officials

[Marshall Dayan]

I suspect most Americans want to trust our public officials, and will
give them the benefit of the doubt.  Those officials make it pretty hard
to do that, however.  I did not trust that Pres. Bush would be the
compassionate conservative he said he would be (and has, in my view,
completely dismissed), nor did I trust (rightly, I now believe) that he
would work to put an end the the bitter partisanship that he said
enveloped politics in Washington when he first ran for President in
2000.  That said, though I didn't trust that he would follow through on
those pledges, I nevertheless hoped that I was erring in my failing to
trust those promises.  On the other hand, I may be naieve, but I trusted
John Roberts' answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee's questioning on
a variety of subjects, and I remain hopeful that my trust was not
misplaced.  I surely heard him say that he believed there are
unenumerated constitutional rights, including some right to privacy; I
surely heard him say that he tended to reject the narrowest levels of
abstraction as to defining what unenumerated rights are so rooted in the
conscience and traditions of our people as to be ranked as fundamental
for, as he explained, a narrow level of abstraction is simply
circular--the case would not be before the Court if the unenumerated
right were so clear by means of referral to tradition that the right at
issue in the case had been well-established.  So, in sum, I suppose it
is difficult for me, and probably for most folks, to make a broad,
sweeping generalization about (mis)trusting public officials--it depends
upon the public official. Marshall Dayan

>>> <RJLipkin at aol.com> 11/3/2005 7:04:39 AM >>>
 
 
In a message dated 11/3/2005 3:58:42 AM Eastern Standard Time,  
SLevinson at law.utexas.edu writes:

Am I an outlier on this list in my mistrust of public officials (even
if we  
might disagree on which officials to trust or mistrust) or do I
describe a  
generally-shared perception of where we are right now in our political 
culture? 
 


I can only speak for  myself of course, but Sandy, in my view, is
absolutely 
right about distrusting  public officials in contemporary political
culture.  
But for me the  epiphany came in the late sixties. (Yes, I did once
trust 
public  officials.)
 
        Do those born in the  sixties have seventies have any lesser
reason 
to distrust public  officials?  I can't imagine why not?
 
Bobby
 
Robert Justin  Lipkin
Professor of Law
Widener University School of  Law
Delaware