No one in their right mind would advocate trusting authority except those who stand to profit from such intellectual error.

Trust is never more important than when citizens are asked to make sacrifices for a brighter future. Mistrust of the government making this request could be the harbinger - even the cause - of national decline.The writer, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Trust is never sillier than when there is something at stake. It is trust, in this case, that brings monotonic social degradation and national decline. That doesn't mean that no work can be delegated to government, it means that they must be continuously monitored and managed and only given tasks suited to their abilities. When things go wrong - not if, when - you don't get a do-over, it happens to you. It is foolish and irresponsible to trust government, or blame it when trouble comes.

Often misread as an expression of national arrogance, "American exceptionalism" denotes a sociological fact. The US differs from other advanced democracies in two respects above all - religiosity and suspicion of state power. The former moved to the centre of American politics in the decade just ended; the latter may well dominate the decade just begun. The lack of trust in government has framed, and weakened, the Obama presidency thus far. And rebuilding trust may well be the administration's most important political task.

The notion that there are other advanced democracies needs unpacking. Other democracies were late arriving and partial at best. They never really advanced to the point of self rule, clinging instead to older forms of authoritarian existence. They made their kings and aristocracy a bit more accountable, and changed their titles, but the form of government and its relationship to society is much the same. The bloody twentieth century is a fine demonstration of the error in this behavior, though the bloody eighteenth century was lesson enough for those who were paying attention.

Consider the most recent survey conducted by CBS News and The New York Times. Only 19 per cent of respondents - near the record low - said they trusted the government to do what is right all or most of the time. Only 29 per cent thought they had much influence on what the government does, while 78 per cent believed the government to be run by a few big interests, not for the benefit of the people.

Not surprisingly, these sentiments helped shape attitudes about the exercise of public power. Only 35 per cent thought that government should do more to solve national problems, versus 59 per cent who believed it already did too many things better left to individuals and the private sector. Some 56 per cent would prefer a smaller government offering fewer services; only 34 per cent favoured a larger and more active government.

These sentiments are not without precedent in US history. From the beginning, doubts about government have been part of America's cultural DNA. Around the middle of the 20th century, however, it was possible to believe that anti-statism was a thing of the past. Between 1933 and the mid-1960s, the federal government had fought the Great Depression, prevailed in the second world war, contained the Soviet Union, and presided over the greatest expansion of middle-class prosperity in human history. Little wonder that public trust in government reached 76 per cent by 1964.

The trauma of the world wars era and the profoundly negative impact it had on American society is a bizarre argument for trust in government. Compared to what? Decades of regimentation in a fight to survive can create a more obedient and unquestioning population, but that's not a good thing. This was also the era of government excess and intrusion - McCarthyism comes to mind as well as segregation - that sowed the seeds of its own defeat.

And then the tide turned. Influenced in part by perceptions of deceit over (and defeat in) Vietnam, trust in government fell to 53 per cent in 1970. After Watergate, it fell again, to 36 per cent, in 1974. After the Great Inflation of the mid- and late 1970s, it collapsed to only 25 per cent by 1980. The economic recovery that began during the Reagan administration in 1983 moved trust back up for a while, but it stood at only 29 per cent on the threshold of Bill Clinton's presidency. After rising again during President Clinton's second term and George W. Bush's first, it fell rapidly after 2004 and stood at just 17 per cent in the weeks before Barack Obama's historic victory.

To the surprise of many - including, one suspects, the incoming administration - Obama's inauguration did little to increase trust in government. While the American people had invested their hopes in a promising young leader, they had not withdrawn their reservations about the institutions from which the change he had promised would have to flow.

The tide turned a decade earlier than 1970, it just took a while for that to become apparent to the government - the times they were a-changin'. Americans were heartily sick of the swollen government that had come into being during war and wanted nothing more that a return to normalcy, which is what those who don't quite grasp what America is about call exceptionalism. That's why every would-be dictator that comes to power in America tries to start a war of some sort. Wars on poverty, drugs, pollution, obesity, whatever - they all want to lead a Great Leap or found a Great Society. America is already a great society: not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but much further along the path of self rule and rational governance than other societies.

As schoolchildren, most Americans encounter the ancient maxim, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". Within limits, it is. But taken too far, the spirit of vigilance yields what the late historian Richard Hofstadter termed the "paranoid style in American politics". Most political observers dismissed last summer's raucous town meetings and "Tea Party" demonstrations as an angry fringe phenomenon. That cannot be said today. In a CNN survey released two weeks ago, 56 per cent endorsed the proposition: "The federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens". This is deeply troubling. Moderate anti-statism helps preserve liberty. But extreme anti-statism undermines democratic self-government.

There's nothing extreme about the current opposition to overwheening and inept government. Our political class and bureaucracy are a bunch of bumblers, time servers who are squatting on the neck of society. Their cost far exceeds their benefit. It is perfectly rational - not extreme - to demand relief from their predations. They simply aren't very good at what they do and need to be downsized like any other enterprise that has lost its focus and no longer produces value.

To some extent this is correctable, even self-correcting. All else being equal, as economic growth resumes and unemployment declines, trust in government will increase. And the Obama administration has it in its power to bring promise and performance into closer alignment. It is better to under-promise and over-perform than the reverse; the mistaken optimism surrounding the stimulus package can and should be a one-off, not the administration's modus operandi.

Incompetence is less noticeable and objectionable during boom times. A broken automobile manufacturer - say General Motors - can drift along aimlessly during a boom, but booms always end. Hoping for a new boom in order to avoid necessary restructuring is profoundly bad strategy.

But there are deeper forces at work, and they offer less hope. Economic inequality in the US stands at levels not seen since the 1920s, and polarisation between the two principal political parties is deeper and more pervasive than at any time since the 1890s. Scholars have linked both these trends to intensified public mistrust.

This is bad news, given the challenges facing the US. Over the coming decade, political leaders must convince Americans that the current fiscal course is unsustainable and that only unpleasant changes can rectify things.

Political leaders have no idea what they are doing. They need to listen rather than preach so that they can become marginally less incompetent. Scholars are, after all, just as confused and overmatched by events, though it is supposedly their jobs to be aware of the situation. Instead, they are repeatedly blind sided by their own mistakes as well as the unexpected. It has always been so. That's the main lesson that both scholars and politicians must grasp: you don't know what you are doing so proceed with caution rather than blundering blindly ahead full tilt with your obsessions and confusions.

It isn't that there is some magic formula, some set of politicians and policies that can make huge, centralized authoritarian societies work well. They can't work well. It's a silly idea that arises from muddled thinking that glosses over the particularities of systems. It a juvenile notion that belongs in a jar kept by the door where you place your cherished illusions when leaving your cloister to engage with the reality of the world at large.