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The thing about trust is that it has to be earned. Not requiring people and institutions to earn your trust before you trust them is how you end up murdered or in a cult or drinking magic bleach to cure your COVID. Take it from me, a person who spent a whole year going to an actor’s studio that turned out to be a weird sex cult at the age of 15 without anyone even once trying to brainwash her — cynicism saves lives.
But Jedediah Britton-Purdy of The Atlantic would disagree. In what may or may not be a sprawling 600,000 word thinkpiece (just estimating here!), Britton-Purdy argued that the thing truly destroying America is a lack of trust in our fellow countrymen and in institutions like government and journalism. The cure, as it so often is, is some combination of Americans somehow becoming more trusting of one another and our institutions, the Right putting their trust in more trustworthy people and institutions, and the Left agreeing to stop being so gosh darn mean to conservatives and thinking that they are either “fools or jerks,” just because they believe stupid and cruel things.
Sounds fun, right? Well let’s take a look:
The past half century has brought a collapse in Americans’ trust in one another and their government. In 1972, more than 45 percent of Americans said that most people are trustworthy. Since 2006, the number has been barely more than 30 percent. Young respondents are particularly mistrustful: In 2019, 73 percent of those under 30 agreed that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” and almost as many said, “Most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance.”
Oh boy! I wonder if some things happened that might have led to that? Like, oh, I don’t know … an entire decade in which the nation was led by poor-people-hating union busters who actively encouraged everyone to be entirely out for themselves, for fear that otherwise communism would take hold? Oh! Or being lied to by both the government and legacy media in order to force public support for a very stupid and irresponsible war?
Trust in government has taken an even greater hit. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. In 2022, that number was 22 percent, and it has been languishing in that neighborhood since 2010. In 1973, amid riots, domestic terrorism, the Watergate scandal, and clashes over the Vietnam War, majorities trusted Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Majorities (in many cases substantial ones) mistrust all of those institutions now. Trust in newspapers and public schools has traveled the same trajectory.
Yes, people didn’t like the Vietnam War — but they were largely upset about their friends and family members being killed in a war that was becoming increasingly unwinnable. But Robert McNamara didn’t come out with the information that the government had actively lied to them about the Gulf of Tonkin incident until the 2003 documentary The Fog of War.
As for Watergate, the assumption there was that Nixon was an aberration and that he was caught due to the checks and balances provided by the Fourth Estate. Slightly different from The New York Times beating the weapons of mass destruction drum, no?
Britton-Purdy, unsurprisingly, also dips his toe into the “Wasn’t it great when we all got all of our information from Walter Cronkite?” pool.
The sun rose every day, the trains ran on time, and Walter Cronkite came on at 6:30.
That complacency was the privilege of an invisible consensus, in which most people’s trust was, so to speak, facing in the same direction. Those who believe Trump’s stolen-election fables or anti-vax theories are not refusing to trust: They are trusting some other mix of reporting, research, teaching, and gossip. The polls showing collapsing trust in “newspapers” or “television news” don’t really show a decline in trust; they show a fragmentation, trust displaced. But from the perspective of a democracy that relies on a common set of facts, acute fragmentation might as well be a collapse.
I get it, but it’s also worth noting that during this idyllic time of “everyone listened to one guy and believed all of the same things were true” (that I’m not actually certain ever really existed), there were a whole lot of things that were true that were ignored — partly due to ignorance, but also partly due to a desire to maintain social harmony.
I would also argue that this idea that we all had the same understanding of the world around us is, in part, what has led to the Right going right off the deep end. How many times have we heard that they thought that issues like racism and sexism were solved forever and that no one had to ever speak of them again? The assumption that things like giving women the vote or passing the Civil Rights Act actually solved everything is directly tied both to trust in the government at that time and to not necessarily hearing about all of the bad stuff, except as aberrations — as things done by bad people who were not them. This is why they were completely broken by concepts like white privilege, male privilege, rape culture, and systemic racism that held nearly all of us to account for our participation in injustice.
Given that we are dealing with a tome the size of Moby Dick, Britton-Purdy is not entirely wrong about everything. He does correctly note that economic inequality leads to people thinking that they live in a world that is built to benefit the rich. This is entirely reasonable, given that they absolutely do live in a world that is built to benefit the rich.
The workplace is a microcosm of an economy where workers and many middle-class families have seen stagnation and increasing insecurity for 50 years, and fewer parents are optimistic about their children’s prospects. Economic stress is an important reason that Trump might win reelection. Beyond 2024, it’s also a lesson that the country is set up to benefit other people who don’t care about you. Countries with lower levels of economic inequality tend to have higher levels of social trust, and individuals with less money tend to be less trusting. Rebuilding a middle-class economy is a way to buttress democratic trust.
Or, rather, being trustworthy is a good way to earn trust.
The fact is, “economic stress” (or anxiety) is a feature of the American economy, not a bug. In no other country on earth do people have to worry that they could be fired at any time for no reason — at-will employment is largely unique to us. Workers are purposely kept afraid so that they do not ask for more. Unlike other countries, we do not have universal health care. People have to worry that if they or their children get sick that they could lose everything, and they know that if they do lose everything, there will not be much of a social safety net to catch them when they fall. Their health care is, also, attached to their job, which makes the prospect of losing that job even more terrifying. Workers are also told that if they don’t put up with the scraps they are served, that their jobs will be given to robots or to people in countries with even fewer labor regulations. Scared workers are diligent workers who don’t ask for time off, don’t ask for raises and don’t make waves, for sure, but to ask for that and their trust as well is too big of an ask.
Being that this is The Atlantic, Britton-Purdy also spends no small amount of time pining for a world in which the political isn’t quite so personal:
What are steps toward healthier trust? Americans need ways to see one another more charitably and also to see politics more clearly. Every partisan knows the sense of threat that today’s political environment can trigger—seeing a car with a bumper sticker from the other side cut in front of you in traffic, stopping for gas somewhere you suspect everyone is on the hostile team, feeling your way through a first conversation with a dozen political trip wires. Ironically, it is impossible to practice politics if we reduce one another to our partisan identities. We need to practice nondefensively meeting serious disagreement—and proceeding to the rest of the human being.
There are a lot of people who like the idea of politics being more like rooting for different teams, though these are largely people for whom the political is not ever going to be all that personal. That is not a luxury that is available to all of us. Someone sporting an anti-abortion bumper sticker may be, for Jedediah Britton-Purdy, simply a person who disagrees with him on a matter of policy, but that is a policy that involves my personal uterus and therefore I have somewhat stronger feelings about that than he might.
Another distinction between personal and political trust that we need to learn involves living with sharp moral disagreement. In our own lives, we may refuse to enter close and lasting relationships with people who, say, disagree with us about questions as fundamental as how we should raise our children or what gender roles mean in our family. (I don’t mean that this is necessarily the right approach, and we may lose something when we cut ourselves off from challenge in this way, but the decision is an intelligible one.)
I promise you, Jedediah — I am losing absolutely nothing by not entering into close and lasting relationships with people who “disagree” with me about what my “gender role” is supposed to be. Except possibly time spent vacuuming.
But politics is about coexistence with disagreement around issues as fundamental as these, such as abortion. If we treat moral disagreement as proof of moral badness and as a reason, effectively, to cut off civic as well as personal relationships, then politics is done. Politics is a relationship we cannot escape, for better or worse. We can poison it, though, and confusing it with personal relationships that we can refuse or leave is one way of poisoning it.
People are welcome to not like abortion. Once they try to take away my right to it, I think I am free to think that they are a bad person. I would, in fact, argue that it is worse to take away someone’s reproductive rights than it is to think that the person doing that is “morally bad.”
Political feelings about issues like civil rights and LGBTQ rights do not exist in a vacuum either, for those affected by them.
Much of the gist of this polemic seems to be that the Right is wrong for trusting the wrong sources, but that the Left is equally wrong for not tolerating intolerance for the sake of social harmony. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, but the fact that we have to keep hearing it over and over again is, itself, noteworthy.
I will say again that trust has to be earned. People have no reason to trust governments that lie to them, media outlets that further those lies or to trust individual people who would be more than happy to see their rights taken away. The issue isn’t people not trusting enough but people and institutions not being trustworthy enough.
Once that happens, then maybe we can start getting our magnaminty on.
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