In Defense of Government: The Fall and Rise of Public Trust.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

This is a book I hope most people in Washington won't read. Jacob Weisberg has written a brisk and convincing account of the shifting fortunes of "government" from Madison to Gingrich, and its argument is eminently reasonable: that a smart, activist government is essential, and that the typical conservative pose ("let's cut everything") and the liberal retort ("don't cut anything" miss the mark. It is a predictable case, and that's not a criticism. Reminding people of first principles is important, as is asking them to give up comfortable caricatures. Weisberg does both, but his title--In Defense of Government--probably dooms the book to become a fresh strawman for the usual suspects to use in reviews, on talk shows, and at think-tank conferences. The Heritage crowd will scoff, the Democratic Leadership Council will cheer: somebody in the ever-shifting Clintonian middle (maybe Bill Clinton himself, on his way to Marine One) will brandish a copy and declare it "thoughtful." And then they'll all quickly move on to something else, secure and unmoved in their own opinions. That's why the best audience for Weisberg's book will be people who don't obsess over politics.

Nothing in the book will come as much of a surprise to close readers of the Monthly, where Weisberg once worked as an intern and where similar points have often been made. As Weisberg puts it, "Conservatives exaggerate the Great Society's failure in order to discredit liberalism's successes; liberals overstate conservative cynicism to gloss over faults of their own." This will strike most people as exactly right, and it is. What can actually be done to create an effective government is always the troubling part.

There's no getting around the fact that most voters don't trust government. This seemed more pronounced, more bloody, just a year ago, after the Republican landslide of 1994. Now, inevitably, a fickle public and press seem to be tacking centerward, correcting for the gleeful, storming-the-gates sense of 1995. But everything is a matter of context, and the Clinton who could run on universal health insurance just four years ago is now offering himself as a stolid protector of the status quo--minus a few programs.

Weisberg, New York magazine's national political columnist, is very good at charting the historical and sociological causes of the current discontent. He points out, rightly, that suspicion of centralized power began not at Fort Sumter but at Philadelphia, and even...