Probably true. And I’d agree, the current state of the country and specifically the way government is perceived is part of this. I’d also note though that pretty much all of this situation–the distrust of government and the ineffectiveness of government–is the fault of the right wing of the Republican party which has been beating the anti-government drum for literally decades, as described above by others. Historically, there has always been some healthy distrust of government–my father used to say “no man’s life, liberty, or property is safe when the legislature is in session”–but much of it was balanced by at least a modicum of understanding that, at its core, government in our country is in fact us. Since at least Newt Gingrich’s time in Congress, that basic belief has been deliberately undercut to make government paradoxically both an evil to be opposed/avoided/thwarted, and (when in the hands of the rightists) an unquestionable and infallible agent of destiny rooting out unspecified but very much to be feared domestic “threats” to God, guns, white people.
There is also the matter you alluded to I think about what sorts of missions our military gets tasked with. Many evils stem from misusing tools. If no one can or will participate in actual discussion and critique of policy and goals, though, such misuse is inevitable. The USA ended up letting Cold War fears and domestic politics short-circuit vigorous debate about both goals and means in South-East Asia, and we paid a heavy price for that. Unfortunately, the modern (post Desert Storm) way of doing things seems to have doubled down on that pattern; we haven’t had a serious and informed discussion nationally about what we should be using our military for in decades.
I often wonder whether, politically necessary as it was, the ending of the draft really helped anything. Once you move away from a system of universal service (and yes, admittedly the SSS at the time of Vietnam was a disaster in many ways) you seem to lose that connection between the people and the military, along with any wide-spread basic knowledge about the services and what they entail. Of course, to @Timex’s point upthread, even with a conscript military during Vietnam there was this gap that emerged, though I think this points to a similar problem we have today. When the military services are being used for purposes that the majority of people do not understand, which the majority of political leaders do not really understand either, and where whatever goals are articulated never seem to materialize and warfare becomes a sort of ongoing self-referential and self-sustaining cycle, without any denouement or results, and finally where the only actual results seem to be broken people on all sides, it’s understandable why people react the way they do.
Some of those reactions take the form of attacks on the military per se, which often can go off the rails and target the wrong people, often ignoring our own culpability as voters and too often striping the bulk of dedicated servicepeople with a too-broad negative brush. But other reactions go to the other extreme, and double down on the ineffective and brutal cycle of violence so that warfare itself become the goal, and violence becomes the end, not the means to an end; when there is no discernible or practical end (and no, “ending terror” is not a viable or even a comprehensible goal), but for ideological or psychological reasons you can’t bring yourself to criticize or even question the missions the military is given, you end up having to endorse everything because you’ve convinced yourself that to do otherwise is wrong. In effect, many Americans I think have boxed themselves into a corner–they can’t get back to what used to be a sacred cornerstone of citizenship, which was informed, rational interrogation of American policies and actions, where it was possible to support the country while vigorously debating or even opposing its actions (cf. the opposition to the Mexican War, for instance, or pretty much most foreign policy debates up until Wilson’s misplaced idealism in WWI started to change things).
tl;dr, yes, there is a dearth of appreciation about citizenship, and most of this comes from the near total absence of any sense of shared or common aspects to that citizenship. Where once we were able to embrace the idea that solid American citizens could disagree over things as vital as war and peace and still be respected members of the same polity, today it seems that adherence to very specific aspects of policy decisions or actions (including the use of the military) have become binary indicators of “true” Americanism, and this is very very dangerous IMO. And yes, it isn’t limited to one “side” or the other, but I personally think this is not something that is balanced equally because IMO at least the right bears the lion share of the blame (though the rest of the country is hardly blameless).
