A well entrenched cynicism towards politics & public service.

Obama starts his book telling us about the cynical attitude that many Americans adopt when discussing politics:

It's been almost ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I'd get some version of the same two questions.

"Where'd you get that funny name?"

And then: "You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?"

I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I'd first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism that —at least in the South Side neighborhoods I sought to represent— had been nourished by a generation of broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was —and always had been— another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country's founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.

(Barack Obama: pp. 1-2)

It's not something limited to the US, of course. Most Europeans view politics (not to talk of the politicians themselves) with the very same cynicism. Is it something new? Is this cynicism something that identifies our era, as many argue? I'm not so sure about it. We always hear of a past when things were supposedly better, people more straightforward and honest. However, it only takes a quick trip to the archives to see the letters to the editor from thirty, forty, sixty years ago. They dealt with the very same issues. They displayed the very same missaprehension towards politicians and businessmen, always considered the self-serving elite. My feeling is that there never was a golden age of politics, where our politicians were all humble statesmen who gave their lives away to serve the people. That is always an interpretation we make afterwards, years later, decades later even, way after the facts. On the spot, when it truly matters, a sizable chunk of citizens (perhaps the majority) always felt skeptical about their leaders. That's not news, I think. In that sense, there is no need to be overly pessimistic about it either. We are not going downhill, as some might have it.