Corruption in Government

I remember hearing somewhere that people are less trustworthy of politicians now than ever before in America.  Unfortunately, I was unable to corroborate this information with any sort of study or statistic, but I do think that we can take that as a truth.

This leads me to a question; why do we trust our leaders so little.  I think that there are two reasdons that we trust them less now than ever before.  I don't think that corruption has anything to do with it, government has always been a little corrupt.

The first reason that we distrust our politicians: the transparency of new technologies.  In the time of "honest Abe" there were no TVs or websites or blogs or even radios.  Because of this, the only way to hold meetings was behind closed doors where anything could happen.  Without C-span, no one knows what happened (written reports can easily be fudged or not taken down for certain meetings).  Beyond that, there is the ease with which old technologies are dispersed.  Think about the number of books regarding government corruption come out every month.  It is an astonishingly high number.

The second reason is the way that we believe our government is more corrupt is the shift in the way that we look at politicians.  JFK was not considered corrupt by most of America.  At the same time, many Americans would consider Mark Sanford or John Edwards or Bill Clinton corrupt.  The truth is that all four of these politicians had affairs.  We have changed our view of politicians from seeing them as professional figures to seeing them as celebrities that can be judged on every base of their life.

I definately think that having intensified views over our elected officials is important, but as I said in my post Elect The Unqualified, I think that personal lives are irrelevant to an elected official's credentials.