"WE WANTED to do better, but it turned out the way it always does," Viktor Chernomyrdin, then prime minister of Russia, famously said of the botched currency reform his government carried out in 1993. The line has gone down in history partly because it encapsulates the cynicism Russians have long felt towards their governments, a cynicism that has doomed one reform attempt after another and helped frustrate the country's transition towards democracy and the rule of law. There was a time when Americans had vastly more trust in government; Americans' high levels of trust in their fellow citizens and other social institutions spilled over into their attitudes towards the state. But that trust in government has steadily evaporated over the past five decades (with temporary recoveries during the Reagan and Clinton presidencies), and while Barack Obama came into office hoping to reverse the decline, he hasn't been able to. Matthew Yglesias thinks the poor debut of the Obamacare website, which was supposed to help restore government's reputation, has instead severely compounded the mistrust:

The public has long been skeptical of the political system’s practical ability to do the things progressives say they want to do. A health care website that comes in months late, over budget, and still lacking full functionality confirms all those fears when it was initially meant to debunk them.

On Wednesday, as part of his relentless campaign to rescue Obamacare from public scepticism, Mr Obama delivered a speech that tied health-care reform to the broader issue of widening economic and social inequality. He addressed the issue of decaying public trust head on: "Rising inequality and declining mobility are bad for our democracy. Ordinary folks can’t write massive campaign checks or hire high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else’s expense. And so people get the bad taste that the system is rigged, and that increases cynicism and polarization, and it decreases the political participation that is a requisite part of our system of self-government."

After the speech, Amy Davidson of the New Yorker interviewed Robert Putnam, a sociologist at Harvard famous for his attention to public-trust issues over the past two decades. Mr Putnam said the speech was right to see these issues as all tied together.

“The part about democracy is relevant,” Putnam said. There was a cohort of “lost kids we see in our data, who have no opportunity for economic mobility”; what’s more, “those kids know.” They also know, he said, that there are other people who do have those chances. “The data show that not only is there declining trust in government, there is declining trust in other people”; although it wasn’t exclusive to them, this shift was “concentrated among these poor kids, the kids who have been left out,” Putnam said. “They are deeply, deeply cynical about the whole world… Basically, they don’t trust anybody. And for good reason.” This was not some “wave of adolescent paranoia,” but a recognition of having been let down. Everyone really is against them.

It is probably overly optimistic of liberals to see mistrust of government as primarily a phenomenon of economic inequality. It is true that the poor are more likely to be generally mistrustful of other people. But mistrust of government specifically seems to be at least as widespread among the well-off. Techies and internet junkies, for example, who are generally not poor, have a tendency to skew libertarian, to think government is a slow-footed dinosaur that is either actively pernicious or simply too incompetent to contribute to welfare, and to have strongly anti-collectivist attitudes on economic and ethical issues. In fact, they haven't just abandoned the idea that government should be responsible for social-welfare programmes like social security and universal health insurance; they've dropped the idea that government should be responsible for that traditional core competency, money.

Over the past six months, as Washington was first paralysed by the government shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis and then overwhelmed by the Healthcare.gov debacle, the value of the independent online currency Bitcoin went from somewhat over $100 per coin to over $1,200. The online community, which increasingly means everyone, has been showing that it is willing to put its faith in a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency system, even as public trust in the traditionally accountable organs of democratic governance has been evaporating. Sceptics have argued that the currency's value will evaporate if governments decide to take it down, and on Thursday morning that seemed to be happening: the Chinese government announced that domestic financial institutions would be barred from transacting with Bitcoins, and its value dropped by as much as a third in two hours. But by mid-day the exchange rate was back up to $1,060 per Bitcoin.

At some level there's an epochal historical struggle going on here. The Obama administration came into office powered by a vision of a digitally empowered 21st-century new New Deal. Techno-utopianists of a libertarian bent think this vision is a confused botch, and that the purpose of the internet is to provide decentralised autonomous peer-to-peer systems that can replace government, not empower it. Bitcoin may well yet crash, but its current success would make hapless currency reformers of yesteryear like Viktor Chernomyrdin envious. Looking at the trials Healthcare.gov has gone through, it probably makes Barack Obama envious too.

(Photo credit: AFP)