( CNN ) -- Americans are in a period of amazingly negative thinking about the state of our country . A recent Gallup analysis drove home how deep and how threatening the current mood is . Gallup asked Americans in early June how much confidence they had in our nation 's institutions . The answer : not much . Only 30 % had `` a great deal '' or `` quite a lot of confidence '' in the Supreme Court . Just 29 % felt that way about the presidency . And an abysmal 7 % had faith in the Congress . Who is the worst president since WWII ? Think about what this means . Our most trusted national institution , the unelected Supreme Court , has the confidence of almost ( but not quite ) one out of every three Americans . The presidency is slightly weaker and the Congress collapses to fewer than 1 in 10 Americans . Gallup also did some comparative analysis using findings from its World Poll and the trends regarding Americans ' views on government are even more sobering . In the poll , 79 % of the American people believe corruption is widespread in government . That is a jump of 20 points since 2006 , when 59 % of the country thought government was corrupt ( a year when the country was dissatisfied enough that the ruling Republicans lost control of both the House and Senate ) . The Gallup analysis demonstrates that Americans are more likely to believe their government is corrupt than people in Brazil , Hungary or Tajikistan , to cite just three examples . In January of this year , Gallup found that more Americans picked bad government and corruption as our biggest problem than picked any other challenge , including the economy and unemployment . These are stunning numbers . When four out of five Americans believe government is corrupt , something is profoundly wrong . It is a lot bigger than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or for that matter George W. Bush . Under the weight of this negativity , there has been a dramatic decline in satisfaction with the freedom we have to choose how we live our own lives . The number of people saying they are dissatisfied has jumped from 9 % in 2006 to 21 % in 2013 . This 12-point jump in dissatisfaction tied the United States for No . 10 among countries suffering the most rapid decline in satisfaction . The other countries that have experienced drops of that scale are seriously troubled places , including Pakistan , Yemen , Cyprus , and Spain ( where youth unemployment is approaching 60 % ) . To put this in context , the Gallup numbers show that in 2006 the United States was one of the top countries in the world when it came to satisfaction with freedom . By 2013 it had dropped out of the top 25 % of all countries . A country in which 4 out of 5 people believe their government is corrupt is a country teetering between a populist uprising and a collapse into cynicism , passivity , and fatalism . These results suggest we will either renew our commitment to the rule of law , the punishment of corruption and the insistence on honest self-government or we will cease to be America as the land of the free and the land of opportunity . This Fourth of July weekend , we need to remember what our Founding Fathers did to create the liberty we enjoy and dedicate ourselves to a new burst of freedom and a new wave of political reform that cleans up the corruption and re-establishes the right of every American to dream and to work to fulfill that dream . Join us on Facebook.com/CNNOpinion .
Newt Gingrich is concerned about polls showing people have little faith in government . Gingrich : If most believe government is corrupt , we are teetering between an uprising and cynicism . Without change , he says , we will cease to be the defender of the free and of opportunity .