ABSTRACT
Distrust of politics and politicians in the United States is nothing new. It rather has been a continuing feature of American politics from the eighteenth century to the present. The causal analysis of distrust must be sensitive to the different types and amounts of trust that exist to the interrelationships between them. Assessing the dangers of the current state of public trust raises a set of questions that are just as difficult to resolve as those connected with the causal analysis of trust. At the policy level, distrust serves as a catalyst for change, and at the governmental level it bolsters incentives for accountability. The size and persistence of the forms of distrust that now prevail should be seen as very strong signals of a high degree of stress in the arches and buttresses that sustain the structure of representative government.
