Reason for Decline of Trust Empathy and Civic Engagement - Essay Example

Reason for Decline of Trust Empathy and Civic Engagement A healthy political environment requires strong association, communication and good understandings between the government and its citizens, because these elements constitute people’s trust and empathy for their government. Thomas J. Volgy in his book Politics In The Trenches claims that American democracy has been witnessing remarkable decline of trust and empathy for elected representatives. If and only people trust their government, it can sustain and offer good governance, which in turn will make the country more powerful and stable. thus citizens will trust more in their government. In other words, trust and understanding between the government and its people are essential for a country’s government to work well. Moreover, civic engagement is also an essential condition for a country’s healthy political environment. The term civic engagement refers to community’s joining together to be a collective source of change, and which can be political and non-political in their nature and objective (Wikipedia). The positivity of attending community activities can be a way of viewing citizens’ positivity of caring about their country’s politics. However, in recent years, trust, empathy as well as civic engagement have gradually declined between the federal government and US citizens. There are growing negative reasons for the declining for today’s America, and the major reasons can be attributed to citizens’ lack of political knowledge and enthusiasm. When politicians lack efficiency and do not keep good communication with their people, they tend to lose public trust and empathy; and this will affect both the country and the government in the long run. Moreover, media plays a major role in revealing the ugly facet of politics, which makes Americans skeptical about their government. Evidently, both US citizens and the US government officials should be responsible for the declining of trust, empathy and civic engagement prevailing in the country. As for the citizens, Volgy claims that US citizens neither have political knowledge nor they try to understand it. Also, they may not even know about the personal lives of their own political representatives. As Volgy writes,“Yet few if any citizens have much inkling about the daily lives of those who represent us in the government” (37). Politics is often made much more complex with what we read and watch over media. However, most people have no patience at all to comprehend the situations and support the government in crucial times. People may have many misunderstandings about the government and they become vulnerable to rumors. Moreover, the highly developed technology today makes people to have less “face to face”connections between each other. They rather perceive the world through TV or internet relying on the convenience offered by the technology. Although some people still attend community activities, they are reluctant to take responsibilities. All this behaviors have adversely affected civic engagement more than ever. When it comes to politicians, “the failure to remedy society’s problems is only part of the reason why empathy and trust are declining.” (Volgy 31). People still have hope on their government, but the politicians often mess up their works and discard citizens’ faith. Once people lose their trust and confidence, they start questioning about their daily work. There are some other reasons also for the decline. The first reason should be the influence of the social media. It is undeniable that media has become the main source of information today. It has the most powerful factor that influences people’s attitude towards their government; however, as Volge claims, many TV channels tend to show the ugly face of the government in order to gain wide attention. Such programs and reports can dramatically ruin the image of the government, and this will lose people’s empathy for their leaders. Another reason that causes citizens to be less willing to care about politics is that being voters they have to choose from a wide pool of candidates collecting and evaluating information on each one. It makes the work hard and difficult for citizens that they rather randomly choose a candidate. Once the connections between politicians and citizens become weak, people can barely feel empathy for the politicians because citizens hardly know them. It is undeniable that the “lack of empathy and understanding about what happens in the political process will eventually doom the experimental method of democratic governance.” (Volgy, 30). Volgy uses a vivid metaphor in his book saying the politicians are like “scientists” and the government is like “laboratory”. Once citizens start feeling that all of the political ‘scientists’ are liars, crooks, and cheats, “the people working in the laboratory will spend less time on experiments and more time publicly denouncing each other and shortcomings of the laboratory. Long-term experiments will be cut short.”(30). It may be come into a terrible result that “the only people who will be hired to run the laboratory will be those who pledge to reduce the costs of running it or to close it or together.”(30). As long as citizens have no empathy to the government and feel that the government is no longer theirs, the democracy becomes really impractical. Since the civic engagement is declining, few qualified people are willing to be involved in politics, and it will negatively influence American democracy in every respect. The continuous decline of trust and empathy between US citizens and government may finally lead American politics to great peril. In this regard, the issue requires immediate attention. As Patti Tamara Lenard indicates in her article The decline of trust, The decline of democracy?, the best way to make citizens trust their government is that government should keep the economy stable and “stop making ‘stupid’ decisions” (The decline of trust, The decline of democracy?). It is because if the government wants its people to change their attitudes, it should improve its work first. Such a step will make the government more efficient and ultimately eradicate corruption. The other important way to solve the problem is to evaluate the progress of the welfare programs. The evaluation is not only for the politicians but also for citizens who participate in politics in their community because their attitude always influences many other people in a certain community. These people should be well educated and know about politics first in case they mislead the majority. Meanwhile, the TV and radio programs should also be evaluated by its broadcasters and the officials. The producers should not only care about their audience rating but should also be responsible for every word they broadcast. In other words, TV programs should not only for mere entertainment but also for educating people. To sum up, the decline of social trust, empathy and civic engagement is resulted in many aspects. Obviously, the US citizens, US government, and the media are collectively responsible for this unwanted situation. In order to solve the problem, the US society should unite together to build up the trust and understanding between the government and its citizens. This way, the nation can rebuild a much healthier political environment which will bring forth immeasurable benefits in the near future. Work Cited Patti Tamara Lenard. The decline of trust, The decline of democracy?Nuffield college, oxford university,UK, 2005. Print. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness. London and New York: Verso, 2007. Print. Thomas J. Volgy. Politics in the Trenches. The University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 2001. Print. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_engagement Read More