Our Declining Trust in Institutions

Well, it’s no deal; you can’t sell that stuff to me.

Ah, no deal; I’m goin’ back to Tennessee.

                              - Townes Van Zandt

A few commentators have bemoaned the mendacity of the scientists who seem to have misrepresented the origin of COVID, apparently at the behest of their bureaucratic “higher ups” in order to shield them from deserved blame.  Those commentators are troubled at the blow to the credibility of science such a scandal entails, but I suspect not much damage was done.  Compared to other institutions, Americans generally think pretty well of science.  See, Pew Research and the General Social Survey.

A few other institutions - the police, religious leaders, medical scientists and the military - are reasonably well respected by Americans.

But toward other institutions, we’re merciless.

Consider elected officials.  According to Pew Research, an amazing 2% of Americans have “a great deal of confidence in elected officials to act in the best interests of the public.”  By contrast, 23% have “no confidence at all” that they will.  The latter figure is up eight percentage points in a year.

Democrats and Republicans?  According to Gallup, 56% of Americans “believe the current parties do such a poor job that a third major party is needed.”

Government generally?  In June, 2022, Pew found public trust in government to be at an all-time low, with about 20% of Americans trusting government to “do what is right just about always (2%) or most of the time.” (18%)

Congress?  This Gallup poll found that just 7% of the people trust Congress “a great deal or quite a lot.”

The presidency?  It garners just a 23% trust rating, down a whopping 15 percentage points in one year.  One year!  Biden?  Just 13% of Americans “strongly approve” of the job he’s doing, while 59% disapprove.

Journalists?  Only six percent of Americans have great confidence in them and 24% none at all.

The news media generally?  Sixty-six percent of Americans have either “not very much” trust and confidence in the media or “none at all.”  Just 7% have “a great deal” of trust and confidence.

Television news?  Only 11% of people told the Gallup poll they trust TV news.

Business leaders?  Pew found that 4% of Americans have great confidence and 15% none at all in C-Suite occupants, although 68% of us have a great deal of confidence in small business owners, according to Gallup. 

Colleges and universities?  A July 2023 Gallup poll found just 36% of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in higher education.  That’s down an eye-popping 21 percentage points from just eight years ago.

Elementary and secondary education?  This Axios poll found that just 28% of Americans had trust in public schools, just 2 percentage points above the all-time low.

I could go on and on, but more important than individual institutions is the fact that the trend of our trust continues steadily downward.  The Gallup organization found declines, some of them sharp, in 15 out of the 16 institutions about which it asked. 

The question is “why?”  The answer may be as simple as “familiarity breeds contempt.”  Today we know more about the inner workings of those institutions than ever before and what we know falls somewhere between concerning and outrageous.

Fifty years ago, we got information from three major TV networks and PBS, radio stations and local newspapers and a couple of national newspapers.  More importantly, those outlets tightly controlled what was “fit to print,” aka, what they deemed appropriate for Americans to know.  Yes, there was a range of viewpoints, but it was narrow and anything that fell outside it didn’t see the light of day. 

Plus, the news media had a cozy relationship with government.  That meant, for example, that Cold War policies particularly went mostly unquestioned by the MSM.  It took years of massive anti-Viet Nam War protests for the news media to finally come around to the view of the majority of Americans and against that of governing elites.    

Liberal professors Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann persuasively called this “Manufacturing Consent” for elite policies.  For decades the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was essentially beyond criticism despite its widespread illegal spying on those it considered dissidents.  The Gulf of Tonkin “Incident,” a complete fiction confected by the Johnson Administration to usher the U.S. into the Viet Nam War, went unexamined for years.

The point being that, to a great degree, Americans were under the thumb of the mainstream media - the gatekeeper of information that shielded us from much of the mendacity and corruption that were probably as plentiful then as now.  Our trust in major institutions was strong because we knew little about what they were doing behind the veil of reported news.

Today we know much more, mostly because of the Internet and social media.  News institutions no longer play the gatekeeper role to anything like the extent they used to.  As the legacy media become less trustworthy and more nakedly partisan, other sources of information have not only stepped up, but have done so free of the restrictions that news placed on itself in the past.  If you want to know the truth, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Mark Shellenberger, Bari Weiss and many others are likely more reliable than the Times or the Post.  There seems to be an inverse relationship between the quantum of our knowledge about those institutions and our trust in them. 

That goes a long way toward explaining the Biden Administration’s powerful embrace of censorship.  It desperately wants to play the role of information gatekeeper that editorial boards used to.  It wants to have the final say on what Americans can and can’t know.  But much information has escaped the corral and theirs is a desperate effort to round it back up.

They’re doomed to fail.  That’s because there’s too much information to be censored, too many people who want to make it public and too many social media platforms on which it can be publicized.  And if those platforms clamp down (as I predict they will), others like Rumble will fill in the gaps, giving everyday people easy access to the world’s most valuable commodity.

Meanwhile, there’s a war going on.  On one side are the usual centers of elite power trying to control what the rest of us read, hear and see.  On the other side are you and me using the Internet to communicate with each other and form our own opinions that more and more doubt elite claims to wisdom and virtue.  We do that for the best of reasons – their past performance that has too often included mendacity, self-dealing, dishonesty and incompetence.  Seemingly every day, elites in business, government, academia, the administrative state and elsewhere provide us more and more reasons to continue our declining trust.

And every day, we do.