That’s a question I often ponder. Because, ideally, we want a government that we can trust, that has earned the populace’s trust. And I do trust certain parts of the government–just not the surveillance and military arms. And I have to wonder for myself on what exactly it would take for them to gain my trust that they actually are doing their jobs with the aim of actually protecting the populace they ostensibly serve.
Because that’s an important question; to draw a parallel, the difference between an honest skeptic and a denialist is that the skeptic has a threshold of evidence that will convince them, while the denialist will never be convinced, and will always move the goalposts for their evidence threshold. And, ironically, if I take the stance of the denialist in regards to governmental trust, then there is no point in them even trying to gain my trust, and the trust of others like me, so they might as well continue with business as usual.
So the answer that I’ve come up with so far (subject to review and examination) is apparently fairly close to the unstated BoingBoing general preferred outlook: a trustworthy government is one that does not use the powers and authorities granted to it by the populace it governs to abuse that populace for the private gain of the individuals empowered by that government, and is open to review and transparency to that populace.
(I’ve noticed that one must also be careful to avoid the nirvana fallacy, too, and be willing to recognize steps in the right direction, and avoid demanding perfection at the cost of progress; we will never have a perfectly trustworthy government, but movement in that direction should still be applauded, not derided as “not good enough, perfection-or-nothing”)
