It's Not Trump and It's Not Biden That's Killing America, but Something They Have in Common

Dishonesty everywhere, and the consequent collapse of trust, is eating away at the fundamentals of our national life.

Commentary magazine has a depressingly thought-provoking article out. I’m going to quote a good deal of it and add some observations of my own, observations from my career as a litigating lawyer and, since then, from what I see around me every day. In a nutshell, what I saw as a lawyer and what I see now is a staggering amount of dishonesty and an even more staggering nonchalant acceptance of it. It’s in every nook-and-cranny of the culture — business, media, politics, academia, you name it.

Can a society that has become this saturated with deceit survive?

Here’s how the Commentary article begins:

So-called shock polls seldom shock. But in April, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of U.S. adults and found something [that did]. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said that life, “for people like them,” was better 50 years ago than it is today.

Fifty years ago was 1973. Now consider the apparently untroubled idyll of 1973 America. The Paris Peace Accords rendered the Vietnam War, in which more than 50,000 Americans had already died fighting Communism, officially lost (but not entirely over). OPEC nations imposed an oil embargo on the United States, sending fuel prices skyward, [creating gas shortages and gas lines everywhere], and contributing to the onset of a recession. All the while, Watergate was galloping along, with regularly televised Senate hearings and the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged misconduct of a sitting president. And American cities were awash in record lawlessness, with violent crime having shot up 126 percent between 1960 to 1970 and set to increase another 64 percent by 1980.

Yes, the good old days weren’t that good. To some of us, they’re not that old, either.

We have no shortage of conflicts and challenges in 2023. But is life in the United States worse than in 1973? Item by item, no….American troops aren’t fighting in a foreign war; Ukrainians are…The 1973 oil shock was the largest in history. In 2023, oil prices are down almost 11 percent from a year earlier. Whatever unsavory business dealings may be swirling around the Biden family, the president is not facing resignation or removal because of them. And while the crime rate has risen significantly in the past few years, the crime spike of the immediate postwar decades makes our age look paradisiacal.

The year 1973, much like the years surrounding it, was hell; 2023 just feels like it.

Until I saw the Pew poll, I thought I might be alone in feeling so grim about the direction of the country — in thinking that the foundations of American life are more genuinely at risk now than they were 50 years ago, notwithstanding that the objective metrics seem to say otherwise. But I’m not alone, not by a long shot. A big majority has the same uneasy sense.

The question is why. What exactly is so bad about the United States today? We must ask because, despite the itemized comparison, something does seem frightfully, and peculiarly, wrong with present-day America. Not just wrong, but disorienting.

Indeed, worse than disorienting. It feels like something deeply reassuring about the country, something critical that we all took for granted, has disappeared.

Donald Trump, the former president and current frontrunner for the Republican nomination, faces 37 federal charges…[a]nd the public is split between those who want to put Trump in jail and those who want to jail Joe Biden for orchestrating Trump’s indictment. So, again we must ask: What’s wrong with us?

There are many popular answers: We’re more and more politically divided. We’re more ideologically extreme than we’ve ever been. At the same time, we’re losing our attachment to the traditional American values of God, family, and country. We’ve become too isolated. And so on.

These are all more or less true. But they are only pieces of a puzzle. To solve it, we need a sense of the composite image that we’re aiming for. And there is, in fact, a greater national affliction that runs through these partial explanations and connects them to a still wider range of current misfortunes: American society is losing its capacity to trust.

Here the author, Abe Greenwald, is very much onto something. But he’s just slightly off target, I think: It’s not that we’ve lost our capacity to trust. It’s that so much in our culture has become untrustworthy. Dishonest, in a word. And that very few opinion leaders even take note of it, much less sound the alarm.

Not that dishonesty is new. I get that. When I signed on to my first job (at the Justice Department) 50 years ago, the thing that most surprised me was how aggressively misleading private lawyers were in presenting arguments to, of all things, the Supreme Court.

You would think that presenting your case to the High Court would call forth an extra measure of probity. You would think wrong. I soon got “educated” that lawyers (not all of them but way more than a few) passed off tendentious exaggeration and misleading omissions as “advocacy, “ — hey, look, they’re trying to put my client in a cage — and with that label, expected to get away with, and virtually always did get away with, a degree of disingenuity that, as a ten year-old, would have got me sent to my room for a week.

At first I thought it was just the criminal defense bar, but then experience wised me up. It’s not just the criminal defense bar nor even the bar generally. Sleaze is at its worst in criminal defense, true, but the license with truthfulness found there takes root in a far broader, and now culture-wide, acceptance of deceit. Indeed, by 2009, the time the Court heard a case involving the numerous slippery (but, so the Court would hold, not illegal) business practices of Lord Conrad Black, I was forced to observe:

The Black case opens a window on our culture of dishonesty. Understandably seldom said out loud, the truth is that staggering amounts of misleading, deceptive and sleazy behavior, both public and private, are increasingly prevalent in this country and increasingly accepted. It didn't start with, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky," and it hasn't ended there. It's everywhere from WorldCom to "teaser" rates to liar loans to fly-by-night disaster "charities" to the razzle-dazzle microscopic fine print setting out the 89 exceptions in your car repair warranty. Your e-mail is bulging with offers ranging from half-truth come-on's to outright swindles.  You can't watch TV for 20 minutes without hearing some miraculous offer to "fix" your credit, all followed up by some fellow who races through the real terms in a voice so fast and low no human ear could understand it. On the nightly news a half hour later, the President of the United States [then Barack Obama] tells you in earnest tones that we can provide health care to 30,000,000 people at no additional cost -- or, if a cost oddly appears, one that will be paid by squeezing previously undiscovered "waste, fraud and abuse" out of an already near-bankrupt Medicare system.  Slick talk and slick dealing -- with the not infrequent outright whopper -- have found their way to every corner of our culture.

We saw in the banking crisis of 2007 - 2009 the broad and painful toll rampant dishonesty can exact. There, it was almost universal lying on mortgage applications, passed up the chain by even more rampant lying in the banks’ secondary mortgage market. More such crises and more such pain are coming in a society that still treats the march of deceit as the mostly harmless outcropping of a boys-just-want-to-have-fun culture, and any consternation or pushback as so much tiresome Puritanical nagging.

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Without honesty, we can’t have trust. And without trust, we are in deep, deep trouble. As Greenwald observes:

Trust is the key ingredient in what’s known as “social capital,” which we can define as the benefits accrued by people in social networks. And these benefits are plentiful. High-trust societies are characterized by increased wealth, less crime and corruption, and greater transparency. Low-trust societies are associated with impaired economies, higher crime and corruption, and ill-defined norms.

And there’s this: A free country without trust cannot long survive as a free country. Trust undergirds our social contract and thwarts the authoritarian tendencies of government. Loss of public trust, on the other hand, create opportunities for state intervention. It’s when we can no longer enter into profitable relationships in good faith that the regulators, rule-makers, and enforcers come calling.

We’re not Colombia or Peru, where fewer than 10 percent of the population believes that “most people can be trusted.” But we’re sliding in the wrong direction.

The wrong direction being, as the article notes, that in 1973, 47 percent of Americans believed that most Americans could be trusted. Today, it’s down to 32 percent.

Earned distrust — because of dishonesty — is everywhere in our politics (much of Ringside is about it in one way or another), but even more annoying and ubiquitous, and in a much more corrosive way, in our daily life.

In fact, [distrust is] mostly atmospheric, weaving through the headlines and trends that make up our days. What, for example, is the obsession with cryptocurrency if not a declaration of distrust in our traditional monetary system? What about the rise in homeschooling—still up some 30 percent since 2019? Or the growing anti-work movement, which preaches that the employer-employee relationship is a big swindle? And for those who do go to work, there’s mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, because you can’t be trusted to act like a decent human being. Nor are you to be trusted at the drug store, which is why the toothpaste you want is under lock and key…And public fact-checking is now its own celebrated branch of journalism.

Distrust to this gargantuan extent is horribly destructive, but not as destructive as the vice that creates it. Until honesty returns to public and private life, this is how it’s going to be.