We want things to work.
There is this common misconception that liberals have blind faith in the government. For younger Americans, this can be a factor of age. Those of us born after the dawn of Reaganism can not appreciate how government activity alienated Americans. We have been living through the negative fallout of passive governing. So we grow annoyed when people bring up inflation and inefficient government programs. It seems like an old and stale argument. Respectfully, it comes out of a certain frame of reference.
In my experiences, I don’t think liberals have blind faith in “the government.” Liberals worry about the lack of faith many nonpartisans and partisans have in the public sphere. This may be a consequence of America’s rampant privatization in recent decades. It is also a factor of growing secularism. Or, there is a noticeable fragmentation of this citizenry’s social and communal connections. Either way, what bothers liberals the most isn’t trusting the government blindly (because many liberals also don’t). But there can be a total disregard for how general democratic government acts. Like it or not, it is one of the cornerstones of a healthy body politic.
But this often gets conflated with, “They want to use the government to solve their problems, and it’s lazy.”
This would be one of the cruder opinions presented. It describes the general feeling about liberal initiatives among much of America.
So I don’t think liberals have blind faith in government. They understand that you can’t avoid and ignore the public sphere forever. Sometimes the public is better served by democratically elected officials (who actually want to work for people) rather than skilled but differently-motivated individuals that permeate the private sector.
