September 3, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment is about trust. It begins with a review of American Breakdown by Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal Editor-at-Large published in 2023. To create this review, I first read the book and highlighted key points months ago. Then I typed the PDF weeks ago, and a few days ago I condensed the PDF to the text that follows. Each time I marveled at how well Baker captured what is happening in our country, why we are so polarized, and why many of us are feeling tension in our lives, as a result. That rang truer at each iteration. His fundamental premise is that our cultural elites (predominantly progressives) are wildly running in a new ideology direction without regard nor the consent of the people, and it is happening in many institutions – government, corporate, media, education, and science and medicine. Net, we, the people, have lost trust in the leadership and the institution itself. He follows the evidence he presents on each institution with recommendations of what to do to rebuild that trust.
The segment ends with trust in Harris and Walz plus the media (Dana Bash the interviewer) conveyed in last Thursdays first interview since being nominated as the Democrat Party’s candidates for President and Vice President. Excerpts from a transcript of the interview will be followed by my comments relative to omissions and misstatements in the interview answers. In keeping with my discipline that my comments should be identified as commentary, this portion of the segment can be found in the commentary section of the blog found on the entry page (top, middle).
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment is about trust. It begins with a review of American Breakdown by Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal Editor-at-Large published in 2023. To create this review, I first read the book and highlighted key points months ago. Then I typed the PDF weeks ago, and a few days ago I condensed the PDF to the text that follows. Each time I marveled at how well Baker captured what is happening in our country, why we are so polarized, and why many of us are feeling tension in our lives, as a result. That rang truer at each iteration. His fundamental premise is that our cultural elites (predominantly progressives) are wildly running in a new ideology direction without regard nor the consent of the people, and it is happening in many institutions – government, corporate, media, education, and science and medicine. Net, we, the people, have lost trust in the leadership and the institution itself. He follows the evidence he presents on each institution with recommendations of what to do to rebuild that trust.
The segment ends with trust in Harris and Walz plus the media (Dana Bash the interviewer) conveyed in last Thursdays first interview since being nominated as the Democrat Party’s candidates for President and Vice President. Excerpts from a transcript of the interview will be followed by my comments relative to omissions and misstatements in the interview answers. In keeping with my discipline that my comments should be identified as commentary, this portion of the segment can be found in the commentary section of the blog found on the entry page (top, middle).
Happy Learning,
Harley
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY – SEGMENT 12
LOSS OF TRUST & CONFIDENCE IN LEADERS & INSTITUTIONS – EXCERPTS
American Breakdown dissects how, in the space of a generation, the pillars that sustain a once-dominant superpower have been dangerously eroded. From government to business, from media to medicine – the strength and security of the American experiment have been weakened by a widening gap between the elites who control these institutions and the public. At the root of this breakdown is a precipitous decline in Americans’ trust in their political, business, and cultural leaders. America in fact hasn’t failed. Americans have been failed – misled by inept and deceitful political leaders, deserted by predatory and cynical corporate chiefs, and, above all, betrayed by a cultural elite that has exploited the very freedom this country provides in order to destroy it.
INTRODUCTION: As the twentieth century ended, Americans could look back on it and reflect that they had won the Cold War, triumphed in two hot ones, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanizing ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised. A quarter of a century later vast numbers of Americans no longer seemed to have trust in their leaders, in their important social and civil institutions, even in their common values and ideals, or ultimately in one another. This modern elite rejects the idea that America has been a great force for good. It ignores the overwhelming evidence that, compared to most countries in the world, America has been and still is a uniquely benign force for freedom and prosperity.
On the other side, ordinary Americans, who had always believed in their nation’s virtues, even as they understood and accepted its many flaws. But they believed that the American values they had inherited were worth preserving. In this growing gulf between powerful elites that more than anything has generated the destabilizing levels of distrust we now see in American institutions and society. This loss of faith and confidence reflects the distance that separated most Americans from their leaders over the last twenty years – in politics, government, the judiciary, education, big business, technology, even science and medicine, trust in which is a bedrock of any society’s health and well-being.
The cultural elite has exploited the very freedom this country gave it in order to undermine it. If it is failing now, it is because America is losing its soul, its very sense of purpose as a society, its identity as a civilization. The U.S. is in the grip of modern technology that disowns its own genius, denounces its own success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing, and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules – large and small.
A NEW IDEOLOGY: The cultural elite turn their backs on and deride the very idea of national identity and distinctive American culture, and they prioritize planetary concerns – climate change, migration shared ideological values – over the interests of domestically rooted Americans. But something else defined this new alignment. A radical new ideology variously called critical race theory, identitarianism, and other neologisms, where the ideology placesT an individual’s race, gender, or sexual orientation at the core of their existence. It stemmed from the proposition that western society, especially America is historically dominated by privileged white, heterosexual, cisgendered males, and that that domination has exerted itself in every aspect of life – from government and business to sport and language. The way to reverse these injustices was to elevate minorities above the historical oppressor class of white Americans. Among other things this meant that traditional ideas of merit, talent, and hard work as key drivers of advancement should be replaced by identity.
On issues such as immigration the elite who favored open borders overlapped with the ideologues who believed that since America was irredeemably racist, it had no right to stop people coming to its shores. On climate change, the globalists bought the arguments of climate alarmists that only planetary cooperation could save the Earth. The adherents to these ideologies became steadily dominant in American society over the last three decades and used their control of the key institutions to realize their goals. What they had in common was contempt for most ordinary Americans who shared neither the idea that the nation state was an irrelevance nor the claim that America was inherently evil. The elevation of ideology and identity over the virtues of merit and hard work has been the crucial in eroding the trust that ordinary Americans have in their leading political, economic, and cultural institutions.
GOVERNMENT DISTRUST: The distrust Americans have built up toward their government in the last twenty years not only runs wider and deeper than has ever been recorded by regular polling. In the last few years only one in five Americans expressed a high level of confidence that government will do the right thing. It is difficult to celebrate in the achievements of America’s political leadership and given that at least some of the most important woes can be ascribed to specific decision-making failures, it’s understandable that they have eroded public confidence.
No single event in the last few decades has weakened the bond between Americans and their government as much as the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. As millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes, Wall Street plutocrats cozying up to their friends in Washington to bail them out from the consequences of their behavior while ordinary Americans suffered. There were other failures in the last twenty years that destroyed the confidence many people once had: High and persistent levels of illegal immigration and the official responses to the COVID pandemic.
REBUILDING TRUST IN GOVERNMENT: The nation’s public discourse has been increasingly driven by those who subscribe to the most partisan ideologies. This is the first and most important task for restoring faith in government: work to dismantle the institutional structures that incentivize polarization. Greater government transparency would also weaken partisan ideology. Secrecy and lack of accountability breed suspicion and mistrust and fuel the most extreme critiques of government.
CORPORATE DISTRUST: American corporate leaders have lost trust by seeming to pursue agendas that suggest a lack of commitment to Americans and the values they have traditionally held. Shipping jobs overseas in a never-ending search for cheap labor prioritized their profits over the interests of the country. Corporate leaders have increasingly embraced the dominant nostrums of the modern progressive ideology. By elevating environmental, social, and governance (the notorious “ESG” investing principles) goals, many business leaders have opened an even wider gulf between them and millions of ordinary Americans.
On all the big issues – climate change; cross-border trade and capital flows; the importance of ethnic, gender, and sexual identity; business, political, and cultural leaders represented from almost every country in the world have much more in common with each other than they do with their fellow citizens back home. Secure in their own success, focused on their own idealistic goals of “climate justice” and “equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the Davos crowd failed to understand the backlash they were unleashing back home. All of this has contributed to the decline in trust in American big business.
Reasonable suspicions of political bias are just one reason why people have become wary of big technology companies. The evidence is indisputable. Uncertainty about how the tech firms manipulate our politics; the suppressing and outright blocking by Facebook and Twitter of embarrassing and potentially explosive stories like Hunter Biden in the days before his father was elected president in 2020. In 2018 Google announced it was dropping out of a contract to supply artificial intelligence to the Pentagon because its employees objected to it. You couldn’t get a clearer example of why so many Americans have come to distrust these companies – one of the world’s most powerful and innovative companies refusing to work with the military because its staff didn’t like products that might help- the U.S. defend itself. There was a time when the interests of great American companies seemed closely aligned with the interests of the people. That’s an idea that rings hollow in 21st century America.
REBUILDING TRUST IN CORPORATE AMERICA: Efforts to limit the power of big business domestically are crucial. There should be a much more aggressive antitrust approach aimed at encouraging more competition. Corporate governance changes are also essential to ensure better accountability of big companies to their shareholders and would help reduce the seemingly routine instance of corruption, greed, and fraud. Part of the solution for Big Tech in standing up to the little Maoists in their workforces who are insisting their technology is used to promote their ideological goals. Some reining in of the giant tech companies’ power through regulatory action is needed.
MEDIA DISTRUST: To understand what has gone wrong with American journalism we need to understand what it was about Trump that made his candidacy and his presidency such a fiery crucible for the relationship between the media and much of the public – and how it became a raging bonfire of distrust in modern news. It was in part Trump’s character and behavior that inspired so much animosity among the people who covered him – the falsehoods, the boorishness, the casual disdain for the niceties of Washington politics. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it was something else that turned them instantly into his foes; the likes of which they had not confronted in mainstream politics before, a man whose ideas and words should not be allowed to have a place in American public discourse.
Indeed, you could argue that a critical reason for Trump’s success was precisely that he articulated ideas and beliefs held by many Americans that the mainstream media had denounced, derided, or ignored. And it’s this that points us to the reason that trust in the media has been sliding for so long. Trump merely crystallized a process that had been trending for more than four decades.
In its heyday journalism demanded skepticism and curiosity. The modern journalist is different. His primary ambition is to belong, not to risk the isolation of independent thought, to be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite. Journalism has become a profession dominated by a new generation of young graduates of American universities where an ideological hegemony had taken hold.
One more factor that has accentuated the declining trust in journalism is commercial in character Advertising revenue at major newspapers in the U.S. has fallen by more than 70% since 2000. For television the decline in ad revenue share is smaller but still significant. This collapse in the main source of revenue for companies has forced media groups to pursue strategies that unwittingly sharply exacerbate the decline in trust in traditional news. To deal with the decline in revenue, two approaches were followed. One was to maximize reach with increasingly sensationalized news reporting designed to appeal to larger and larger audiences, to hold on to the scraps of ad revenue that were still here. This has led to an explosion in mass market digital news, whose journalistic standards are low, where maximizing number of eyeballs far outweighs the importance of reporting accuracy.
They have become increasingly driven by their readers to produce news of a particular ideological style. It enjoined journalists to reject the outdated idea of “objectivity” because it was a standard that was “dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly white newsrooms and reinforced their view of the world.” The very idea of objectivity – that there is objective truth out there about a story that it is a reporter’s job to discover – is racist.
It was about acknowledging that there is truth in the world – in politics, in business, in international affairs; in culture, art, entertainment, and science; and that through hard work, extensive reporting and investigation, it can be discovered. If the media has now finally abandoned that idea, then whatever remaining trust there is in its work is likely to disappear.
REBUILDING TRUST IN THE MEDIA: A clearer separation between news and opinion will foster an understanding among audiences that there is a difference between objective truth and subjective interpretation of it. Less obsessive coverage of politics, and the tendency to view all news through a political lens will further help reduce the ubiquity of partisan ideology that feeds distrust among audiences. More accountability for news coverage and transparency in how it is created would also improve trust. Hiring staff from outside the predictable college campuses and geographies would widen the range of perspectives they publish and help replenish the trust among large numbers of Americans they have depleted.
EDUCATION DISTRUST: Faith in the nation’s public schools as a whole – from kindergarten right through to college – has also been declining, and again the deterioration has accelerated in recent years. The proportion of people saying they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools was in the high 40% range in the Gallup surveys of the 1980s. In 2022 the number was 28%. Large numbers of Americans now see the institutions that are responsible for educating their children as essentially indoctrination centers, inculcating extreme ideas in the nation’s youth.
A significant part of this modern extremism has its roots in the development of a radical intellectual movement that emerged in university faculty common rooms more than three decades ago. Critical race theory and other intellectual currents was a successor ideology to traditional Marxist thought.
In short, the dominant idea is that society has been built on systems of oppression – led by white male heterosexuals – and those systems of privilege and advantage still define the character of contemporary society. Anti-discrimination policies, the new thinking says, are incapable of redressing fundamental inequality; that can only be achieved through an immersive rejection of the system itself. Modern proponents of the idea insist this means white people must acknowledge their sinfulness.
REBUILDING TRUST IN EDUCATION: Leavening the monocultural orthodoxy with some real diversity of thought would significantly improve not only the confidence they enjoy among US citizens but also their also their output., Public universities that have allowed this narrow intellectual totalitarianism in the humanities especially should be held accountable by the state governments that fund and nominally administer them. For too long, they have operated as independent fiefdoms immune to the needs and demands of taxpayers. There are encouraging signs in states such as Florida that lawmakers are beginning to respond to the problem and introduce some proper accountability.
Here is a radical idea: universities should police free speech by identifying those students who attempt to suppress it, and then employers should stop hiring them when they graduate. Colleges like to boast about how many of their alums get big jobs with big companies – let the rewards of a top job be conditioned in part on whether the candidate has shown a commitment to tolerance of views other than his or her own.
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE DISTRUST: The COVID pandemic from 2020 to 2022 and the public health community’s response to it severely damaged trust in medical science and in science more generally. But it is not the only factor a growing number of Americans are now suspicious of much of what they hear from the leadership of the scientific community, seeing it as consistently skewed toward a particular ideological viewpoint with the aim of achieving wider social objective in line with the tenets of modern progressivism.
COVID: At almost every stage of the COVID pandemic and with almost every public policy decision, and “official” scientific view was reached and promulgated, and any attempt to challenge it was fiercely opposed. The real reason so much trust in science and medicine was lost during the pandemic was this: leading figures in public health across the country essentially inverted the scientific method. Normally in the scientific process, a hypothesis is advanced, tested, and then either proved or disproved in conclusion. But in the case of COVID, officials – while citing scientific authority all the time – determined the conclusion first, then made sure that the data produced the answer they wanted – and ignored or actively suppressed data that contradicted it.
If doctors become known for making decisions on politics, if the training regimen weakens considerably, if scientific judgments disappear in the face of woke political pronouncements, we will lose more than a generation of dedicated professionals, we will also lose a broader sense of trust in our medical system.
BIOLOGY: During her nomination hearing for a position of the US Supreme Court in 2022, Judge Ketanji Brown was asked if she could define the word “woman.” The judge demurred: “I am not a biologist.” Even just a few years ago the idea that one needed formal scientific qualifications at an advanced level to define what a woman was would have seemed ludicrous to most people. But it has become the currency of modern discourse on gender. The fact that a successful nominee for the nation’s top court considers it prudent not to give an answer on what most people view as among the most basic questions of human biology demonstrates the degree to which progressive ideology has succeeded in undoing the fundamental tenets of commonly agreed science. The widespread suspicion is that science is being hijacked by ideologues in furtherance of an agenda, that they are reinventing the most fundamental scientific principles for reasons that have nothing to do with biology. This can only further undermine trust in science and its practitioners.
CLIMATE CHANGE: One other field in which science has been heavily infected by ideology – with predictable effects on public trust – is climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations has been the official body collating the work of climate science for decades. In 2022 it issued its latest warning the world had only a few years to being about a peak in carbon emissions or else catastrophe awaited. But the panel has been doing this consistently and with remarkable regularity for decades. To deal with the inconvenient truth that the world hasn’t ended on time, as they repeatedly said it would, climate scientists have taken to attributing every natural disaster in the world to man-made global warming – it’s extremely hot: climate change. It’s extremely cold: climate change. It’s raining a little: climate change. It’s dry with a slight chance of rain but absolution no prospect of a severe weather event anywhere in the foreseeable future: climate change. All this hysteria merely damages public confidence in scientists.
SUMMARY: Scientists -- doctors, professional researchers, public health experts, and others – have fallen prey to one of the principal temptations of the modern culture, the tendency to see everything through the prism of a set of political or ideological prejudices. Scientists with the highest credentials from the most distinguished institutions in America and the world have manipulated evidence, massaged data, obscured facts, and sometimes simply told lies to the public in pursuit of some political or administrative agenda.
REBUILDING TRUST IN SCIENCE: The reassertion of objective knowledge and truth in the medical profession and the elimination of ideological objectives and analysis will be essential to the restoration of trust.
TURNING BACK THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: These institutions have been captured over the last 30 years by a progressive ideology that disdains traditional American values and focuses instead on the concerns elevated by this ideology – racial and gender “equity,” the centrality of identity as the defining characteristic of social and economic and civic relations, the elevation of global priorities over national identity and domestic obligations, and climate change. All this has been amplified by increasing intolerance for any diversity of views that might challenge this hegemony. On the other hand, a large body of working and-middle-class Americans who continue to believe in traditional American values and ideals, put American domestic economic and social interests ahead of global concerns, and favor tough immigration restrictions and the reassertion of American sovereignty.
The constant dialectic between these two has created a vicious circle of eroding trust. As mutual distrust increases, each side ascribes the worst motivations to the other, believing they prove themselves to be morally inferior. So as new disputes emerge, the willingness to think only the worst of the other side increases. Since their motivations are deplorable, then every new point of tension only reduces trust further. The march of the elites through the major political, economic, and cultural institutions of the country has been achieved without the consent of most people. They have pushed an ideological program—on race gender, sexuality, crime and punishment, educations, globalization, climate, even an understanding of what the U.S. stands for and how it was founded – on a populace in an extraordinary short period of time in a way that has only served to alienate large numbers of Americans.
It is the progressive leadership that has moved further away from the traditional center of American politics and culture than conservatives have. And it is in any case a misrepresentation of the concerns of many ordinary Americans to ascribe their misgivings to bigotry, racism, and prejudice. It’s not the product of prejudice to believe that America has a proud history and that the advances of its civilization have brought immeasurable benefits to the world. It’s not racist to think that a nation has the right to control its own borders. It’s not bigoted to believe that traditional virtues such as the nuclear family, the centrality of faith, or a local community are worth preserving and defending. Nor is it some result of prejudice or obscurantism to be suspicious of a ruling class that – from war to financial crisis to pandemic – has repeatedly failed the people. But in all these cases, populist sentiment is characterized by these same elites as something despicable. In fact, sympathy for this populist sentiment is not necessarily right wing at all. Opinion polls show large majorities oppose many of the modern manifestations of cultural progressivism – and even significant numbers of minorities do too.
Ruy Teixeira, a left-leaning author notes that many of the minorities who are deemed to be the beneficiaries of these elite “woke” programs and ideas are notably hostile to them. Majorities of Hispanics, for example, are strongly in favor of measures to curb illegal immigrants; many blacks are alarmed at the soft-on-crime approach progressive extremists pursue in the name of racial justice. He and other Democrats are converging with the views of many on the right in arguing that time is ripe for a new, multi-ethnic, democratic populism to seize the political high ground and begin to take back political and cultural direction of the country from these elites. This may indeed be the best hope for restoring a sense of unity to the country and the trust that will surely follow, a movement that cuts across party lines and seeks to elevate the daily concerns of middle and working-class Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, tackling the common challenges they face – of poverty, lack of opportunity, crime, drug abuse. Instead of endlessly focusing on issues that divide Americans, there is a need and an opportunity for leaders to focus on issues that will unite most of them.
As we have seen in the past, performance more than anything else drives trust. When Americans are experiencing prosperity at home and success overseas, it’s hardly surprising they trust the institutions that helped deliver them. Perhaps the most obvious way then to revive trust in America and its institutions is to give people a reason to trust them.
Source: American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence by Gerard Baker (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
LOSS OF TRUST & CONFIDENCE IN LEADERS & INSTITUTIONS – EXCERPTS
American Breakdown dissects how, in the space of a generation, the pillars that sustain a once-dominant superpower have been dangerously eroded. From government to business, from media to medicine – the strength and security of the American experiment have been weakened by a widening gap between the elites who control these institutions and the public. At the root of this breakdown is a precipitous decline in Americans’ trust in their political, business, and cultural leaders. America in fact hasn’t failed. Americans have been failed – misled by inept and deceitful political leaders, deserted by predatory and cynical corporate chiefs, and, above all, betrayed by a cultural elite that has exploited the very freedom this country provides in order to destroy it.
INTRODUCTION: As the twentieth century ended, Americans could look back on it and reflect that they had won the Cold War, triumphed in two hot ones, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanizing ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised. A quarter of a century later vast numbers of Americans no longer seemed to have trust in their leaders, in their important social and civil institutions, even in their common values and ideals, or ultimately in one another. This modern elite rejects the idea that America has been a great force for good. It ignores the overwhelming evidence that, compared to most countries in the world, America has been and still is a uniquely benign force for freedom and prosperity.
On the other side, ordinary Americans, who had always believed in their nation’s virtues, even as they understood and accepted its many flaws. But they believed that the American values they had inherited were worth preserving. In this growing gulf between powerful elites that more than anything has generated the destabilizing levels of distrust we now see in American institutions and society. This loss of faith and confidence reflects the distance that separated most Americans from their leaders over the last twenty years – in politics, government, the judiciary, education, big business, technology, even science and medicine, trust in which is a bedrock of any society’s health and well-being.
The cultural elite has exploited the very freedom this country gave it in order to undermine it. If it is failing now, it is because America is losing its soul, its very sense of purpose as a society, its identity as a civilization. The U.S. is in the grip of modern technology that disowns its own genius, denounces its own success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing, and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules – large and small.
A NEW IDEOLOGY: The cultural elite turn their backs on and deride the very idea of national identity and distinctive American culture, and they prioritize planetary concerns – climate change, migration shared ideological values – over the interests of domestically rooted Americans. But something else defined this new alignment. A radical new ideology variously called critical race theory, identitarianism, and other neologisms, where the ideology placesT an individual’s race, gender, or sexual orientation at the core of their existence. It stemmed from the proposition that western society, especially America is historically dominated by privileged white, heterosexual, cisgendered males, and that that domination has exerted itself in every aspect of life – from government and business to sport and language. The way to reverse these injustices was to elevate minorities above the historical oppressor class of white Americans. Among other things this meant that traditional ideas of merit, talent, and hard work as key drivers of advancement should be replaced by identity.
On issues such as immigration the elite who favored open borders overlapped with the ideologues who believed that since America was irredeemably racist, it had no right to stop people coming to its shores. On climate change, the globalists bought the arguments of climate alarmists that only planetary cooperation could save the Earth. The adherents to these ideologies became steadily dominant in American society over the last three decades and used their control of the key institutions to realize their goals. What they had in common was contempt for most ordinary Americans who shared neither the idea that the nation state was an irrelevance nor the claim that America was inherently evil. The elevation of ideology and identity over the virtues of merit and hard work has been the crucial in eroding the trust that ordinary Americans have in their leading political, economic, and cultural institutions.
GOVERNMENT DISTRUST: The distrust Americans have built up toward their government in the last twenty years not only runs wider and deeper than has ever been recorded by regular polling. In the last few years only one in five Americans expressed a high level of confidence that government will do the right thing. It is difficult to celebrate in the achievements of America’s political leadership and given that at least some of the most important woes can be ascribed to specific decision-making failures, it’s understandable that they have eroded public confidence.
- The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, baptized the new century in an unexpected and horrifying was.
- The war in Afghanistan – A chaotic withdrawal as the Taliban resumed control.
- The fateful decision of invading Iraq, a decision that must rank as one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in US history. The Bush administration did not willfully lie about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but it did mislead.
- Half-hearted military interventions in Syria and Libya under Barack Obama leaving the U.S. in an even weaker strategic condition in the Middle East.
No single event in the last few decades has weakened the bond between Americans and their government as much as the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. As millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes, Wall Street plutocrats cozying up to their friends in Washington to bail them out from the consequences of their behavior while ordinary Americans suffered. There were other failures in the last twenty years that destroyed the confidence many people once had: High and persistent levels of illegal immigration and the official responses to the COVID pandemic.
REBUILDING TRUST IN GOVERNMENT: The nation’s public discourse has been increasingly driven by those who subscribe to the most partisan ideologies. This is the first and most important task for restoring faith in government: work to dismantle the institutional structures that incentivize polarization. Greater government transparency would also weaken partisan ideology. Secrecy and lack of accountability breed suspicion and mistrust and fuel the most extreme critiques of government.
CORPORATE DISTRUST: American corporate leaders have lost trust by seeming to pursue agendas that suggest a lack of commitment to Americans and the values they have traditionally held. Shipping jobs overseas in a never-ending search for cheap labor prioritized their profits over the interests of the country. Corporate leaders have increasingly embraced the dominant nostrums of the modern progressive ideology. By elevating environmental, social, and governance (the notorious “ESG” investing principles) goals, many business leaders have opened an even wider gulf between them and millions of ordinary Americans.
On all the big issues – climate change; cross-border trade and capital flows; the importance of ethnic, gender, and sexual identity; business, political, and cultural leaders represented from almost every country in the world have much more in common with each other than they do with their fellow citizens back home. Secure in their own success, focused on their own idealistic goals of “climate justice” and “equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the Davos crowd failed to understand the backlash they were unleashing back home. All of this has contributed to the decline in trust in American big business.
Reasonable suspicions of political bias are just one reason why people have become wary of big technology companies. The evidence is indisputable. Uncertainty about how the tech firms manipulate our politics; the suppressing and outright blocking by Facebook and Twitter of embarrassing and potentially explosive stories like Hunter Biden in the days before his father was elected president in 2020. In 2018 Google announced it was dropping out of a contract to supply artificial intelligence to the Pentagon because its employees objected to it. You couldn’t get a clearer example of why so many Americans have come to distrust these companies – one of the world’s most powerful and innovative companies refusing to work with the military because its staff didn’t like products that might help- the U.S. defend itself. There was a time when the interests of great American companies seemed closely aligned with the interests of the people. That’s an idea that rings hollow in 21st century America.
REBUILDING TRUST IN CORPORATE AMERICA: Efforts to limit the power of big business domestically are crucial. There should be a much more aggressive antitrust approach aimed at encouraging more competition. Corporate governance changes are also essential to ensure better accountability of big companies to their shareholders and would help reduce the seemingly routine instance of corruption, greed, and fraud. Part of the solution for Big Tech in standing up to the little Maoists in their workforces who are insisting their technology is used to promote their ideological goals. Some reining in of the giant tech companies’ power through regulatory action is needed.
MEDIA DISTRUST: To understand what has gone wrong with American journalism we need to understand what it was about Trump that made his candidacy and his presidency such a fiery crucible for the relationship between the media and much of the public – and how it became a raging bonfire of distrust in modern news. It was in part Trump’s character and behavior that inspired so much animosity among the people who covered him – the falsehoods, the boorishness, the casual disdain for the niceties of Washington politics. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it was something else that turned them instantly into his foes; the likes of which they had not confronted in mainstream politics before, a man whose ideas and words should not be allowed to have a place in American public discourse.
Indeed, you could argue that a critical reason for Trump’s success was precisely that he articulated ideas and beliefs held by many Americans that the mainstream media had denounced, derided, or ignored. And it’s this that points us to the reason that trust in the media has been sliding for so long. Trump merely crystallized a process that had been trending for more than four decades.
In its heyday journalism demanded skepticism and curiosity. The modern journalist is different. His primary ambition is to belong, not to risk the isolation of independent thought, to be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite. Journalism has become a profession dominated by a new generation of young graduates of American universities where an ideological hegemony had taken hold.
One more factor that has accentuated the declining trust in journalism is commercial in character Advertising revenue at major newspapers in the U.S. has fallen by more than 70% since 2000. For television the decline in ad revenue share is smaller but still significant. This collapse in the main source of revenue for companies has forced media groups to pursue strategies that unwittingly sharply exacerbate the decline in trust in traditional news. To deal with the decline in revenue, two approaches were followed. One was to maximize reach with increasingly sensationalized news reporting designed to appeal to larger and larger audiences, to hold on to the scraps of ad revenue that were still here. This has led to an explosion in mass market digital news, whose journalistic standards are low, where maximizing number of eyeballs far outweighs the importance of reporting accuracy.
They have become increasingly driven by their readers to produce news of a particular ideological style. It enjoined journalists to reject the outdated idea of “objectivity” because it was a standard that was “dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly white newsrooms and reinforced their view of the world.” The very idea of objectivity – that there is objective truth out there about a story that it is a reporter’s job to discover – is racist.
It was about acknowledging that there is truth in the world – in politics, in business, in international affairs; in culture, art, entertainment, and science; and that through hard work, extensive reporting and investigation, it can be discovered. If the media has now finally abandoned that idea, then whatever remaining trust there is in its work is likely to disappear.
REBUILDING TRUST IN THE MEDIA: A clearer separation between news and opinion will foster an understanding among audiences that there is a difference between objective truth and subjective interpretation of it. Less obsessive coverage of politics, and the tendency to view all news through a political lens will further help reduce the ubiquity of partisan ideology that feeds distrust among audiences. More accountability for news coverage and transparency in how it is created would also improve trust. Hiring staff from outside the predictable college campuses and geographies would widen the range of perspectives they publish and help replenish the trust among large numbers of Americans they have depleted.
EDUCATION DISTRUST: Faith in the nation’s public schools as a whole – from kindergarten right through to college – has also been declining, and again the deterioration has accelerated in recent years. The proportion of people saying they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools was in the high 40% range in the Gallup surveys of the 1980s. In 2022 the number was 28%. Large numbers of Americans now see the institutions that are responsible for educating their children as essentially indoctrination centers, inculcating extreme ideas in the nation’s youth.
A significant part of this modern extremism has its roots in the development of a radical intellectual movement that emerged in university faculty common rooms more than three decades ago. Critical race theory and other intellectual currents was a successor ideology to traditional Marxist thought.
In short, the dominant idea is that society has been built on systems of oppression – led by white male heterosexuals – and those systems of privilege and advantage still define the character of contemporary society. Anti-discrimination policies, the new thinking says, are incapable of redressing fundamental inequality; that can only be achieved through an immersive rejection of the system itself. Modern proponents of the idea insist this means white people must acknowledge their sinfulness.
REBUILDING TRUST IN EDUCATION: Leavening the monocultural orthodoxy with some real diversity of thought would significantly improve not only the confidence they enjoy among US citizens but also their also their output., Public universities that have allowed this narrow intellectual totalitarianism in the humanities especially should be held accountable by the state governments that fund and nominally administer them. For too long, they have operated as independent fiefdoms immune to the needs and demands of taxpayers. There are encouraging signs in states such as Florida that lawmakers are beginning to respond to the problem and introduce some proper accountability.
Here is a radical idea: universities should police free speech by identifying those students who attempt to suppress it, and then employers should stop hiring them when they graduate. Colleges like to boast about how many of their alums get big jobs with big companies – let the rewards of a top job be conditioned in part on whether the candidate has shown a commitment to tolerance of views other than his or her own.
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE DISTRUST: The COVID pandemic from 2020 to 2022 and the public health community’s response to it severely damaged trust in medical science and in science more generally. But it is not the only factor a growing number of Americans are now suspicious of much of what they hear from the leadership of the scientific community, seeing it as consistently skewed toward a particular ideological viewpoint with the aim of achieving wider social objective in line with the tenets of modern progressivism.
COVID: At almost every stage of the COVID pandemic and with almost every public policy decision, and “official” scientific view was reached and promulgated, and any attempt to challenge it was fiercely opposed. The real reason so much trust in science and medicine was lost during the pandemic was this: leading figures in public health across the country essentially inverted the scientific method. Normally in the scientific process, a hypothesis is advanced, tested, and then either proved or disproved in conclusion. But in the case of COVID, officials – while citing scientific authority all the time – determined the conclusion first, then made sure that the data produced the answer they wanted – and ignored or actively suppressed data that contradicted it.
If doctors become known for making decisions on politics, if the training regimen weakens considerably, if scientific judgments disappear in the face of woke political pronouncements, we will lose more than a generation of dedicated professionals, we will also lose a broader sense of trust in our medical system.
BIOLOGY: During her nomination hearing for a position of the US Supreme Court in 2022, Judge Ketanji Brown was asked if she could define the word “woman.” The judge demurred: “I am not a biologist.” Even just a few years ago the idea that one needed formal scientific qualifications at an advanced level to define what a woman was would have seemed ludicrous to most people. But it has become the currency of modern discourse on gender. The fact that a successful nominee for the nation’s top court considers it prudent not to give an answer on what most people view as among the most basic questions of human biology demonstrates the degree to which progressive ideology has succeeded in undoing the fundamental tenets of commonly agreed science. The widespread suspicion is that science is being hijacked by ideologues in furtherance of an agenda, that they are reinventing the most fundamental scientific principles for reasons that have nothing to do with biology. This can only further undermine trust in science and its practitioners.
CLIMATE CHANGE: One other field in which science has been heavily infected by ideology – with predictable effects on public trust – is climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations has been the official body collating the work of climate science for decades. In 2022 it issued its latest warning the world had only a few years to being about a peak in carbon emissions or else catastrophe awaited. But the panel has been doing this consistently and with remarkable regularity for decades. To deal with the inconvenient truth that the world hasn’t ended on time, as they repeatedly said it would, climate scientists have taken to attributing every natural disaster in the world to man-made global warming – it’s extremely hot: climate change. It’s extremely cold: climate change. It’s raining a little: climate change. It’s dry with a slight chance of rain but absolution no prospect of a severe weather event anywhere in the foreseeable future: climate change. All this hysteria merely damages public confidence in scientists.
SUMMARY: Scientists -- doctors, professional researchers, public health experts, and others – have fallen prey to one of the principal temptations of the modern culture, the tendency to see everything through the prism of a set of political or ideological prejudices. Scientists with the highest credentials from the most distinguished institutions in America and the world have manipulated evidence, massaged data, obscured facts, and sometimes simply told lies to the public in pursuit of some political or administrative agenda.
REBUILDING TRUST IN SCIENCE: The reassertion of objective knowledge and truth in the medical profession and the elimination of ideological objectives and analysis will be essential to the restoration of trust.
TURNING BACK THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: These institutions have been captured over the last 30 years by a progressive ideology that disdains traditional American values and focuses instead on the concerns elevated by this ideology – racial and gender “equity,” the centrality of identity as the defining characteristic of social and economic and civic relations, the elevation of global priorities over national identity and domestic obligations, and climate change. All this has been amplified by increasing intolerance for any diversity of views that might challenge this hegemony. On the other hand, a large body of working and-middle-class Americans who continue to believe in traditional American values and ideals, put American domestic economic and social interests ahead of global concerns, and favor tough immigration restrictions and the reassertion of American sovereignty.
The constant dialectic between these two has created a vicious circle of eroding trust. As mutual distrust increases, each side ascribes the worst motivations to the other, believing they prove themselves to be morally inferior. So as new disputes emerge, the willingness to think only the worst of the other side increases. Since their motivations are deplorable, then every new point of tension only reduces trust further. The march of the elites through the major political, economic, and cultural institutions of the country has been achieved without the consent of most people. They have pushed an ideological program—on race gender, sexuality, crime and punishment, educations, globalization, climate, even an understanding of what the U.S. stands for and how it was founded – on a populace in an extraordinary short period of time in a way that has only served to alienate large numbers of Americans.
It is the progressive leadership that has moved further away from the traditional center of American politics and culture than conservatives have. And it is in any case a misrepresentation of the concerns of many ordinary Americans to ascribe their misgivings to bigotry, racism, and prejudice. It’s not the product of prejudice to believe that America has a proud history and that the advances of its civilization have brought immeasurable benefits to the world. It’s not racist to think that a nation has the right to control its own borders. It’s not bigoted to believe that traditional virtues such as the nuclear family, the centrality of faith, or a local community are worth preserving and defending. Nor is it some result of prejudice or obscurantism to be suspicious of a ruling class that – from war to financial crisis to pandemic – has repeatedly failed the people. But in all these cases, populist sentiment is characterized by these same elites as something despicable. In fact, sympathy for this populist sentiment is not necessarily right wing at all. Opinion polls show large majorities oppose many of the modern manifestations of cultural progressivism – and even significant numbers of minorities do too.
Ruy Teixeira, a left-leaning author notes that many of the minorities who are deemed to be the beneficiaries of these elite “woke” programs and ideas are notably hostile to them. Majorities of Hispanics, for example, are strongly in favor of measures to curb illegal immigrants; many blacks are alarmed at the soft-on-crime approach progressive extremists pursue in the name of racial justice. He and other Democrats are converging with the views of many on the right in arguing that time is ripe for a new, multi-ethnic, democratic populism to seize the political high ground and begin to take back political and cultural direction of the country from these elites. This may indeed be the best hope for restoring a sense of unity to the country and the trust that will surely follow, a movement that cuts across party lines and seeks to elevate the daily concerns of middle and working-class Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, tackling the common challenges they face – of poverty, lack of opportunity, crime, drug abuse. Instead of endlessly focusing on issues that divide Americans, there is a need and an opportunity for leaders to focus on issues that will unite most of them.
As we have seen in the past, performance more than anything else drives trust. When Americans are experiencing prosperity at home and success overseas, it’s hardly surprising they trust the institutions that helped deliver them. Perhaps the most obvious way then to revive trust in America and its institutions is to give people a reason to trust them.
Source: American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence by Gerard Baker (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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