Scholars have offered various explanations

. One set of explanations centers on an increasingly
shrill and unyielding politics dominated by what the political scientist Morris Fiorina calls
“extreme voices” and what the political journalist E.J. Dionne Jr. refers to as  “a series of false
choices” that preclude consensus.
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 Naturally, domination by extremists leads to a vicious circle,
in which the louder they get, the more the  “moderate middle” drops out, thereby producing an
even more extreme politics that is ever more resistant to consensus building. A related
explanation centers on the distancing of candidates from the electorate through polling, televised
appeals, and direct mail, and the concomitant alienation of the citizenry from elected officials. As
the political scientist Hugh Heclo has observed, politics has become a “permanent campaign” in
which the public feels cynically manipulated by spin-masters, talked at rather than with.
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 A third
explanation is the  “expectations gap”: As government tackles ever-more-complex social
problems, it has created public expectations that it cannot conceivably meet.
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 Fourth, as good-
government reforms have opened up policy making to public view and unleashed a press ever
more aggressive in its watchdog role, the American people for the first time have laid eyes on the
necessarily messy inner-workings of their democracy.
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 It is no wonder we are appalled.
We disagree with those critics who state that growing distrust of government and politics is not
worrisome. They argue that democracy depends on healthy skepticism and note that, according to
some accounts, distrusters participate almost as much as trusters. We are sympathetic to these
points. However, as people interested in bolstering civic life, we believe that government distrust