Even in our hyper-polarized society, it seems as though nearly all Americans agree that the government should not be trusted. Yet the reasons for that distrust differ wildly. The State You See, by Aaron J. Rosenthal, delves into this phenomenon and considers both the causes and consequences of this divide using in-depth interview data, policy histories, and analyses of national survey data.
The core argument that Rosenthal advances in this book is that people see “government” differently depending on their social position—most prominently, their racial identity. Due to public policy changes and elite rhetoric, white people in the United States most strongly associate government with taxes and welfare, which they do not see as benefiting them or their group. Black people, on the other hand, associate the government with the intrusive and violent criminal legal system that targets their communities. In both cases, this negative view of government results in distrust, which Rosenthal shows has been growing in recent years. He contends that this split in government visibility is consequential when it comes to political participation. While both forms of visibility garner distrust, white Americans’ distrust pushes them to participate in politics while Black Americans’ distrust does not—which, Rosenthal argues, further entrenches racial inequality.
Rosenthal identifies five policy changes that have contributed to this “dual visibility dynamic.” The first three—submerging benefits (to white Americans) in the tax code, the changing racial valence of welfare, and the growing visibility of taxation—come together to make white people see government as something that takes “their” tax dollars and gives them to people of color (Chapter 2). Importantly, his policy history details the way that a racial, not just class, split has been ingrained in American social policy. The last two policy changes—the decline of civil rights legislation and the rise in the criminal legal system (CLS)—come together to produce distrust among people of color, and most directly, Black Americans (Chapter 3). This rise in “law and order” policies contribute to the increased visibility of government among Black Americans as a punitive force that fosters distrust.
All of these policy changes produce increased distrust of government. Chapter 4 shows that people connect their political distrust to the part of government that is visible to them – for white Americans, taxation and welfare, and for Black Americans, the criminal legal system. Rosenthal is careful to note that government visibility is one reason for political distrust, but that it is not the only reason. Instead, it is an important and previously overlooked explanatory variable for why Americans come to distrust the government.
Rosenthal does note that whites’ vision of government as something that takes from them without providing is fiction while Blacks’ vision of government as a punitive agent is fact. But the consequences of this dichotomy could have been further elaborated. Black Americans have an accurate perception of a hostile government while white Americans’ vision is based on false premises. While Rosenthal demonstrates that it is one’s vision of government that matters the most attitudinally, it seems like there are practical and normative consequences to the fact that whites’ view of government is based on false stereotypes while Black Americans’ is based on true experiences. Practically, it seems much easier to change the way that the government is made visible when that visibility is rooted in elite rhetoric and policy narratives (as it is for whites) than when that visibility comes out of direct personal and collective experiences with an arm of government, the police, and the criminal justice system (as it is for Blacks). Normatively, distrust arising from an unwillingness to contribute to collective good seems vastly different than distrust that comes from structural subjugation and oppression.
Importantly, Rosenthal focuses on the participatory consequences of this political distrust, and in doing so, clarifies previously disjointed findings in the political science literature about how trust and participation relate. He demonstrates that the effect of distrust on participation varies significantly by race. For white people, distrust can mobilize them to action (take Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as an example) but for Black people, distrust demobilizes. Through interview data, he demonstrates that this divide grows out of the root of the distrust. Whites’ distrust comes from a sense of investment and membership in the polity while Blacks’ distrust is tied to a sense of diminished citizenship due to their subjugation by the CLS. In considering the racial divide in the way that trust is connected to participation, Rosenthal fills an important gap in the political behavior literature.
The argument that distrust demobilizes Black Americans brought up questions about the success of protest movements—both historically and contemporarily. Helpfully, Rosenthal directly addresses this inevitable question. In Chapter 6, he turns to the ways that these structures can be disrupted with a focus on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. He argues that Black Lives Matter worked to make government more visible but in two different ways: for white Americans, BLM made the police a more visible part of government; for Black Americans, BLM transformed the narrative about policing from personal failure to collective grievance. In doing so, BLM was able to translate distrust into political action among Black Americans, thus disrupting the connection from distrust to diminished participation. Rosenthal’s profile of Black Lives Matter is a significant contribution of this book. He directly addresses a key example of how increased government visibility can sometimes increase political participation among Black Americans—which is in direct opposition to the narrative he had worked to construct throughout the first five chapters of the book. This nuanced take strengthens his theory of government visibility and adds depth to our understanding of it.
His methodological approach is part of what makes this possible—Rosenthal’s pairing of rigorous qualitative interviews with quantitative analyses of national survey data is another exemplary aspect of this manuscript. The in-depth and revealing qualitative interviews make this book a particularly enjoyable read—and something that would be accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students in the classroom. Rosenthal’s integration of multiple literatures within political science makes the manuscript a helpful addition to students of public policy, political behavior, and policing. This points to another large contribution of this manuscript. By bridging multiple fields of study and literatures within those fields, The State You See unifies previously disjointed findings in a way that furthers our understanding of how public policy shapes attitudes, behavior, and trust in government.
Rosenthal concludes that “public policy changes over the last five decades have created a dynamic in which the most conspicuous manifestations of government in people’s lives are not trustworthy” (p. 158). This careful consideration of government visibility and outline of the way that the “dual visibility dynamic” reinforces racial inequality in American society is a refreshing new framework. The State You See makes an immense contribution to literatures in political science, public policy, and criminal justice.
