What happens when we lose faith in government?

Martians didn't elect our government. A working majority of the American people believe that they deserve to receive immediate gratification of mutually contradictory desires, like ending global warming while getting $2 a gallon gas.
As long as that immature idiocy prevails, nothing will change. Some pols might slow the decline more than others, but turn things around? No. We have to do that.

 

That's one of the things I was getting at in the original post. There are two simple ways to get everybody united and on one page:
1) A foreign invasion, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The first isn't too likely to happen anytime soon (the only threats with the might to even try it are China, which would just as soon bankrupt us as invade us, and Russia, which doesn't have the military oomph to pull it off)
2) A great leader emerging from the pack. Someone like an FDR or a Reagan, who has the character and the ideas to inspire people to try harder.
For a while it looked like Obama might be that leader, but he's looking like more of the same-old same-old every day. So what happens when we don't get that leader in this election, and things continue to slide? I like to think someone will emerge. There's some intelligent individuals in Congress who actually have good ideas. Every day, I just get more discouraged that they'll actually get a shot at implementing them.

 

This guy has a better chance of leading us than the clowns in DC.

 

That kind of attitude is part of the problem too, though. It's fair to say the perception has been for nearly all of my lifetime that there's nothing but "clowns in D.C." Well, what are the voters doing about it? They keep voting the same alleged clowns into office. Why? Part of it is political parties sanitizing themselves to the point where they need to pick the most saccarine, non-offensive, Teflon candidates, a by-product of the power of TV and the importance of marketing. But then again, as a society, we let them get away with it. A lot of it is that people just don't pay enough attention to what their government does. It's easy to point the finger at the "clowns in D.C.", but how many can actually cite why they're allegedly clowns? Perhaps some, perhaps many, of them are not clowns at all, but they live under this negative cloud, a la lawyers and journalists, that they're perpetually ineffectual, true or not. That's on the public to change the perception of politicians, otherwise, the public gets what it deserves. To answer the thread title question, what happens when we lose faith in government? We get the government we deserve. Bottom line is until we start caring about our government as a society, we can whine and bitch all we want, but we only have ourselves to blame for our casual attitude.

 

How can we lose something we never actually had in the first place?

 

Hey! This country was founded on the principles of having faith in your govern----

Oh wait. Shit.

 

It was fucked up before I was born, and it'll be fucked up long after I'm gone. It doesn't matter.