Trust in National Institutions Collapses

If you think about it, the combination of law and formal rules is not principally what enables us to go about daily life. Trust is. When you get on the elevator on the 50th floor, you trust that the fellow who keeps it in good repair — a fellow you don’t know and will never meet — knows his job and did it. When you send your kid to school, you trust that the school bus driver knows the route, and that when your kid arrives, his teacher knows at least something about the subject matter and isn’t a pedophile. When you eat at a restaurant, you trust that the chef washed his hands and that the food isn’t adulterated. When you go to the drug store, you trust that the pharmacist — again, someone you don’t know or barely know — knows his inventory and will give you the drug prescribed and not, though malice or negligence, something that’s going to crash your liver.

Trust is the indispensable lubricant that makes everyday civic and commercial life possible. And it’s disappearing.

For the last 50 years, Gallup has polled trust in the major institutions of our national life. The news has been bad for decades and is worse this year.

Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The largest declines in confidence are 11 percentage points for the Supreme Court…and 15 points for the presidency, matching the 15-point drop in President Joe Biden's job approval rating since the last confidence survey in June 2021….

This year's 27% average of U.S. adults expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in those 14 institutions is three points below the prior low from 2014.

In other words, as you are reading this, confidence in national institutions is lower than it’s been for at least 50 years.

The details are revealing. Small business and the military are the only institutions that enjoy over 50% confidence. The police are close with 46% (which is quite a feat given the relentless police bashing that has gone on from at least the time of George Floyd if not well before).

Dragging up the rear are six institutions. The least trusted institution in America is Congress, with a mighty 7% having confidence in its effectiveness and integrity. (Could someone remind me who controls Congress these days?). Also in the doghouse are TV news (11%) (tell me again the ideological slant of the big networks plus CNN and MSNBC); big business (14%) (did Disney just go Woke, and how many fat corporations are contributing to BLM?); the criminal justice system (we now have progressive prosecutors in major population centers like New York, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Baltimore, Minneapolis, etc., and, not coincidentally, a big spike in murder); and newspapers (what’s the political lean of the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, Star Tribune, etc., et al?).

And there’s one more institution toward the bottom — the Presidency. It has 23% expressing confidence. It also had the biggest annual falloff of any of the 16 institutions Gallup asked about — a loss of 15 percentage points in just the last year.

Gallup’s bottom line is this:

Americans' confidence in institutions has been lacking for most of the past 15 years, but their trust in key institutions has hit a new low this year. Most of the institutions Gallup tracks are at historic lows, and average confidence across all institutions is now four points lower than the prior low.

Notably, confidence in the major institutions of the federal government is at a low point, at a time when the president and Congress are struggling to address high inflation, record gas prices, increased crime and gun violence, continued illegal immigration, and significant foreign policy challenges from Russia and China….

The confidence crisis extends beyond political institutions at a time when a near record-low 13% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. Confidence in institutions is unlikely to improve until the economy gets better -- but it is unclear if confidence will ever get back to the levels Gallup measured in decades past, even with an improved economy.

Question: When only a little more than a quarter of our people have confidence in the major institutions that exert so much influence in shaping our lives, is the country we grew up in going to survive?

Answer: You tell me, because I don’t know.

There is one thing I think I have a better handle on, however, and that’s why institutions have lost so much trust. The answer is simple when you think about it.

They lost trust because they lie. Often it’s the MSM and politicians, but it’s not limited to them.

Sometimes the lying is in the form of what gets hidden or exposed to view only at a time, or in a way, that muffles its significance. Sometimes it’s the mirror image of that — magnifying even a noteworthy story beyond its significance (for example, does January 6, 2021 really need to be the most relentlessly covered news story in July 2022?). Sometimes, indeed hundreds or thousands of times a day, its by wildly slanted wording. Sometimes its just a flat-out whopper, see, e.g., “I did not have sex with that woman,” etc.

We have become a culture of mistrust because we have become a culture of deceit. 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" and it hasn't ended there. It's everywhere from WorldCom to "teaser" rates for borrowing 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 10 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 tells you in cheerleader tones that the economy is roaring. His Democratic predecessor told us that we can provide health care to 30,000,000 more people at no additional cost -- or, if a cost oddly appears, it will be paid by squeezing previously undiscovered — ready now? — "waste, fraud and abuse.”  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 2008-2009 the broad and painful toll rampant dishonesty can exact. 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.