Gerard Baker
At the heart of America’s political and cultural turmoil is a crisis of trust. In the space of a generation, the people’s confidence in their leaders and their most important institutions to do the right thing has collapsed. The federal government, big business, the media, education, science and medicine, technology, religious institutions, law enforcement and others have seen a precipitous decline.
As public faith in the performance, credibility and integrity of these institutions has collapsed, so too has mutual trust—the social glue that holds the country together. Americans have become suspicious of one another, distrusting their fellow citizens as much as they distrust foreign adversaries.
Think about the controversies that have played out in the past few years—allegations from both parties of stolen elections, false claims by mendacious presidents and other politicians, politically motivated federal law-enforcement decisions, questionable advice and mandates from public-health officials, news coverage that skews in one political direction, a succession of corporate scandals and financial crises, and the various social dysfunctions caused by social media and emerging technologies.
All reflect and exacerbate a climate of deep popular distrust. This rapid loss of confidence is startling and unprecedented. It has ominous implications for the cohesion, prosperity and even survival of the U.S. Trust is the essential feature that allows society to function—more important the more modern and complex society grows.
Since 1979 Gallup has measured trust among the public in the most important American institutions—from the presidency and the Supreme Court to big business, science and the media. Its latest survey, published in July, found that across the nine key institutions Gallup has tracked consistently, the proportion of Americans who said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” averaged out at 26%. That is the lowest figure ever recorded.
“Confidence has generally trended downward since registering 48% in 1979 and holding near 45% in the 1980s,” the report finds. “It averaged closer to 40% in the 1990s and early 2000s before dropping to the low 30% range in the 2010s. Last year was the first time it fell below 30%.”
Of the 16 institutions Gallup has tracked over the past decade, 11 recorded their lowest-ever level of popular trust in 2022 or 2023. Only two institutions, the military and small business, enjoy the confidence of a majority of Americans.
The Pew Research Center has conducted similar surveys for 30 years. The General Social Survey is conducted by NORC—formerly the National Opinion Research Center—at the University of Chicago and the American National Election Studies at Michigan and Stanford. Both have found the same broad decline in trust.
Some institutions have forfeited more trust than others. In 1979 Gallup found that 51% of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers. This year the number was 18%.
Perhaps more alarming is the decline in levels of trust Americans have toward each other. “Generally speaking,” the General Social Survey asks, “would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” The proportion of those saying people can be trusted has dropped from about half to less than a third in the past 50 years.
The first explanation for our trust deficit is an obvious one: the performance of the institutions themselves. In an important sense, the problem isn’t distrust but untrustworthiness. In the past 20 years institutions betrayed the people’s confidence in them with false promises and terrible outcomes:
• A trusted government told Americans in 2003 that an enemy had weapons of mass destruction and was poised to deploy them against the U.S., and that a war to disarm the country would be an easy task for the U.S. military, who would be greeted as liberators. The weapons were never found, and the grinding occupation claimed thousands of American lives.
• Trusted bankers and regulators told Americans in 2008 that the financial system was sound, that their money was safe. When that turned out to be false, ordinary Americans lost their jobs and homes while those who had caused the crisis were bailed out.
• Trusted technology companies told Americans the personal data they handed over was safe and that the new apps and platforms they were using were good for them and society. Americans have found for themselves the darker side of the digital revolution in its effects on mental health, personal privacy and security.
• Trusted big businesses told Americans that their pursuit of global markets would be good for the economy, create jobs and reduce prices. Then these businesses turned themselves into propagandists for woke ideology.
• Trusted administrations and lawmakers of both parties insisted they were controlling illegal immigration, even as the numbers streaming across the southern border grew year after year.
• Trusted news organizations and commentators told Americans that the winning candidate in the 2016 presidential election worked with the Russian government to secure his election, a claim that proved false.
• The incumbent president told his trusting supporters that the 2020 election was stolen.
• Trusted public-health officials ordered Americans to stay home during a pandemic, insisting that they were “following the science.” The “science” seemed to shift depending on politics.
It should come as no surprise that these episodes, coming in a period in which Americans endured slow economic growth, widening inequality and a steep decline in global strategic dominance, have sapped confidence in the nation’s leadership.
Another factor is the bitter partisanship that has defined politics in the past 20 years. Polling shows that while the decline in trust is broad and deep across the political spectrum, in some respects it reflects sharply different political loyalties. When Donald Trump was in the White House and Republicans controlled Congress, Democratic voters expressed less trust than Republicans in the federal government; when the tables turned, so did the poll results. This tendency to distrust the government when the other side is in charge has increased dramatically.
The sharp partisan differences are reflected in differential trust in other institutions: Republicans distrust the media, education, science and medicine more than Democrats, who distrust the police and the Supreme Court more.
A third factor has been the explosive growth and ubiquity of information technology that has transformed our relationships with institutions and each other in multiple and profound ways. The advent of the internet, the digital accessibility provided by the smartphone and the vast network of connections they have opened up have played a major role in weakening confidence in most major institutions.
Too much has been made of “fake news” and “misinformation,” terms often used to stigmatize dissenting opinions. But personal technology and access to unlimited information have changed the way citizens think and behave. People are no longer dependent on mainstream news organizations. They can verify at least some of the information themselves—reading a whole government report or watching the full video of a speech or protest rather than relying on reporters to select relevant quotes.
This democratization of information has significant benefits. But the ease of access to information—whether true or false—that contradicts what a government official, business leader, teacher, journalist or doctor says leaves users with plenty of reasons to doubt what used to be seen as almost unimpeachable authorities.
The biggest factor driving mistrust, though, is surely the widening cultural gap between the people who have led and thrived in our major institutions and the rest of the population. The past 20 years have seen the rapid emergence of a new elite—expensively educated, versed in progressive nostrums, increasingly distant from and disdainful of the rest of America and its values.
This crowd comprises much of the nation’s permanent government classes, almost its entire academic establishment, most of the people who control its news and cultural output, and a good deal of its corporate elite. They subscribe to what have been termed “luxury beliefs” that assert global priorities over national ones on issues such as climate change and immigration; place outsize emphasis on the elevation of racial and sexual identity and radical ideas about gender; and insist on rewriting history to portray the U.S. as an evil nation that needs to expurgate its sins by imposing new burdens on nonelite Americans.
The rising tide of popular distrust in the values, actions and leadership of this elite calls to mind Bertolt Brecht’s poem about East Germany: “The people had squandered the confidence of the government and could only win it back by redoubled work. Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
Anyone who has lost money to a con man, believed the lies of an unfaithful lover or wasted an afternoon waiting for the repairman who promised to come knows that once forfeited trust isn’t easily recovered. The confidence Americans place in their leaders has been in steep decline for two decades and won’t be repaired overnight.
That will require change—first from the leaders of the institutions themselves. Government and law-enforcement authorities need to be more transparent. Media companies must strive for greater ideological diversity. Schools and colleges must do the same—or be compelled to. Business leaders should return their companies to their core economic objectives and stop acting as vehicles for cultural and social change. Technology companies must protect their users’ privacy and mental health. Public-health officials and scientists need to stop acting like infallible authorities and convey the latest evidence and data with the humility that the scientific method demands.
Above all, it will require a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between the people and their leaders. It will require political change so that Americans can take back control of the institutions that direct the country and affect their lives. Only by restoring the primacy of the values that made America the most successful nation on earth will Americans again trust their leaders.
Mr. Baker is a Journal columnist and editor at large. This is adapted from his book, “American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence,” which will be published Tuesday.
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