The self-fulfilling prophesy of "government doesn't work"

Voters themselves are a big part of the problem, for more than one reason. One, as I explained a couple of weeks ago, is that their habit of swinging back and forth from one election to the next might be the biggest cause of gridlock in Washington.

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But there’s another, perhaps deeper reason, one that’s both a cause and an effect of the political dysfunction from which we now suffer: a sharp decline in the public’s belief that government works.

This unwarranted, excessive negativism has a real effect on the electorate’s behavior, and in turn creates a pattern of voting — and equally important, non-voting — that determines which efforts to improve things will succeed and which are very likely to fail.

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