Neil Howe: Trust in US Institutions Continues to Decline
app.hedgeye.com
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1. The institutions are tremendously capable and trustworthy, and somehow people aren't trusting them as they rightly deserve. Then this lack of trust is a big, big problem! It's a mismatch and we need to figure out why people aren't trusting these otherwise great, selfless, highly competent institutions.
2. The institutions are incompetent, looking out for their interests vs the public, and doing things that otherwise make them untrustworthy. In this case, the lack of trust isn't a mistmatch between deserved trust and realized trust, it's the realized trust being in line with deserved trust.
Everyone might have their own take on if we're in a case 1 or case 2 scenario. I personally think it's more of a case 2 situation at this time.
Trying to identify your priors about what you expect as a baseline level of competence from a big org just based on them existing at all and having an authoritative name might help you learn something.
To your latter point, the US became significantly more bellicose after the War Department became the Defense Department (merged with the Navy Department). This coincided with escalating dishonesty about the wars the US was making. The Korean War was at the time a "police action." The casus belli for full commitment in the Vietnam War was the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident. And then, of course, who could forget the the invisible WMDs in Iraq?
The Spanish-American War was likewise begun under suspicious circumstances, but it was the first fueled mainly by the press.
The US also engaged in pointless wars like WWI and unjust wars like the Indian Wars following the Civil War.
"War is a racket" sounds interesting, so I'd be curious to read the arguments. Maybe my interpretation is wrong or incomplete! I do think there was a significant shift from wars being perpetrated by elected officials seeking political ends to wars being largely planned and executed by the MID (and the press), with the elected leaders dragged along like the tail wagging a dog.
Did we?
After independence, we spent about a century engaged in war with native tribes until they'd effectively been wiped out. The conflicts spanned from Florida to California, Texas to the Dakotas.
We invaded and annexed half of Mexico. We attempted to invade Canada in the War of 1812. We fought in North Africa not long after securing our independence and would do so multiple times.
We were pioneers in industrial total war which we practiced upon ourselves in the Civil War.
We won Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain in a war that had much flimsier causes than WMDs in Iraq and lacked any semblance of a noble goal.
The Department of Defense came after WWII, and while we've had our fair share of at best misguided wars since then, it's not a recent development.
That's not to say the name isn't Orwellian in nature.
I made another comment conceding the point about the the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, which were fraudulent albeit separated by several decades.
Nevertheless, the thought of the US Government unilaterally dropping bombs or executing a raid on sovereign foreign countries like we have done in Iraq or Pakistan would have been seen as outrageous before the DoD days, notwithstanding that the United States is the preeminent economic and military power today. But I think that fits in with OP's point: the incompetence is a feature of giant, hegemonic power, not a bug.
If we are on scenario 2, what do we do?
A lot of people think that the answer is "make the government as small as possible, because governments are always incompetent". There's an implicit assumption there about the free market and corporations taking some of the government's previous duties.
To me (an European) that is a bonkers way of looking at the issue. I have seen what decent government (not perfect, not even "good" government) can accomplish. But I understand how someone who has only experienced shitty governments (or has been convinced that their government has always been shitty) can think that way.
The other approach is "let's change things so that the government improves". I understand that this is a difficult, undefined, and risky endeavor. It might take generations. I understand how others can think that it is idealistic / impractical ("if that was on the table, why do we have a shitty government to begin with? people before us would have changed it for the better already. And I want improvements now, not in 20 years"). It still does sound like a better bet to me than "let corporations do what they want, the invisible hand will save us". That can turn bad in a single legislature.
Came here to say exactly this. If you do not trust your democratically elected institutions you need to improve your democratic system.
> "Popular sovereignty is the principle that the authority of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political power."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_sovereignty
Don't get me wrong, this is not an actionable solution, but I'm a bit surprised that it's not even discussed conceptually? Why is that?
Now everyone would not trust the mayor and the sheriff. And there would be gobs and gobs of tweets about "who was sleeping with who and that's why this kid got the contract to fix this road over here" and so on. With that entire influence campaign probably funded by the oligarchs from the wealthy city-state 300 miles away who want to use an area of your city for waste dumping or something.
There's no quick easy way out. We really do need to actually fix the problem. Restructuring the corruption won't help here. Mostly because it's still corruption.
Secondly, the idea that professional influence campaigns won't work because, "the target 'knows' everybody" is naive in the extreme. It betrays a lack of knowledge about what it is you're up against. These campaigns work, and they work well. That's the reason everyone from corporations to intelligence agencies put so much resource into them.
Lastly, none of what you said actually makes the mayor and the sheriff "not corrupt". Which is the fundamental issue. How do you ensure non-corrupt officials? Or at a minimum, decrease corruption. Your idea probably doesn't even shift the corruption, because corruption is already there. It just gives the corrupt local officials more money to steal in the end. Them knowing everyone increases the opportunity and possibilities for corruption. It doesn't decrease them, which is what you want.
What we need are ideas on how to be more effective in decreasing corruption. So less, "shift it to the local level" and more "reignite and reallocate more human resources to the public corruption segment of the FBI". But people will not want to do the latter, because it would catch their corruption. Whereas they would want to do the former, because it gives them more opportunities to participate in corruption.
If my favorite politician was elected at the head of my home country he probably would not be able to implement his program.
Also: state have rights in the US and they do use them.
It was a terrible/name slogan.
”Yes I'm talking about Fox News and a big part of the GOP since Trump, they're not the sole culprits of that, but definitely the worse because they are the most mainsteam”
Institutions are in many cases just names for necessary functions: if you got rid of the institution then you would need to recreate something like it with a different name (i.e., if you abolish the police/irs you still need people to enforce laws, collect taxes).
Abolish is a stronger claim than reform therefore it requires much more evidence, however, reform is apparently less sexy in our current cultural context. It seems the default view for any problem (and there will be problems) is abolish.
People who say that go to Washington then vote to start new wars. Being a well known member of the military industrial complex works is not a selling point. There may be a need to understand the system, but the consequences of America's forever wars are getting so disastrous that smashing things is starting to look like a sensible option. The financial burden of the ongoing death and destruction is starting to bleed the US out soviet-style.
"Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies" may not be the whole truth, but it is a lot closer to useful than the people who want tweaks around the edges to the US foreign policy.
Government is particularly bad as inherently if an exception to a rule is required for society to function well that's where it has to happen.
An active process to strive to be better and to fix problems, constant vigilance, is the best stance for a high quality organization. To strive for that (reasonable) perfection.
> 1. The institutions are tremendously capable and trustworthy
And this:
> institutions are flawed like everything humans do and would need continuous criticism and fixing
?
I've never said that they do poorly because their job is hard. I said that they are flawed because all humans endevor is, and need to be actively criticized and fixed. Even though they will nevers be perfect no matter what, that doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.
The real worry I have is that people will break something important chasing an illusory good-old-days that never existed. The proper answer is to reduce the power of government so the corruption doesn't spread as far.
Then you add in that the news is mostly about the failures. "Things working like they should" doesn't draw many eyeballs.
Then you add in CNN on one side and Fox on the other, each trying very hard to find things to criticize in administrations and politicians that it doesn't like. (We had way-out-there politicians who said really weird stuff before, but we didn't have major networks triumphantly making their craziest statements headline news.)
Then you add in the bungled response to Covid (bungled repeatedly, by two administrations, in ways that set fire to much of the credibility of health care institutions). And then you add in media on both sides, shining a spotlight on the other side's mistakes.
Then you add in the amplification effects of social media.
Then you add in a side helping of Russian agitprop campaigns (and, to a lesser extent, Chinese and Iranian).
Everyone is far more aware of mistakes and incompetence in government. Or at least, they are far more aware of a subset of mistakes and incompetence - the subset that makes the other side look bad.
There were a number of areas where Trump ran a decent, effective administration. There are a number of areas where Biden is running a decent, effective administration. You don't hear much about either one.
> The proper answer is to reduce the power of government so the corruption doesn't spread as far.
Absolutely. But that isn't one of the places where competence shows up. The government is very bad at decreasing the power and scope of government.
Everyone wanted to come to America precisely because the good old days existed and the rest of the world has what it has precisely because America’s good old days existed.
Whether you are doing it on purpose or not, you are spreading the spite and jealousy of abusive toxicity that gaslights America about its achievements, no different than a common abusive person says “I’m the only one that loves you”.
It is precisely because America and the Constitution was such an affront to the abusive psychopathic ruling class that hates having its powers to abuse being restrained for the first and only time in human history, that they’ve leverage every single force they can over centuries now, to dislodge America and the Constitution to set their absolute and tyrannical powers free again.
It will be too late, but when America and the Constitution finally falter, humanity will have to face the reality of what it was tricked into, unless that’s not even possible in the dystopian nightmare the ruling class has in store for humanity that makes 1984 seem like a quaint story.
The golden age of information is behind us.
Personally I think we just have to wait out a generation who lack the skills for fake news etc until they gently die out. Then we can go back to facts and expertise 90% of the time.
They later drifted a little further right, I believe as a business strategy. But I think they completely went off the rails when they realized they were competing with Facebook and not CNN and just began full on selling outrage.
2. One could identify the sharp declines with significant events (Covid lockdown 2020, War on Terror campaign from 2003, but I fail to see what occured in the late 80s)
3. Still, there is an overall decline and I would look at the hierarchy of trust that exists in a society. Institutions are abstractions of different aspects of the living communities. But since individualism is rampant in our way of life, the whole chain of trust starts to slowly crumble.
* Savings and loan scandals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis#Scanda...
* AIDS crisis and government response: https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
ETA:
* Iran-Contra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair
By the late 80s, the US gov't was finally acknowledging and trying to raise awareness about the AIDS crisis.
'89 probably had a brief sigh of relief as the Berlin wall came down and the Cold war was clearly drawing to an end.
On a positive note, the early 90s were the end of the USSR. But it also meant Bush the senior and the first war declared on former US puppet Saddam Hussein. It was the largest hot war the US had had since Vietnam and there were even rumors at the time of reinstituting the draft.
Those things affected my confidence in the government at the time. I assume that the numbers are at least partially attributed to them.
For a lot of objective metrics the institutions are doing better than ever in history. Life expectancy, human rights, reduction of extreme poverty, etc. Sure you can find some higher peaks in the post WWII decades but the trend on a larger time scale is for improvement.
So what's going on? I don't think there's an single and easy answer and I think anybody presenting one is misguided if not intentionally misleading. To me it looks like a cultural problem. What sort exactly I could not say. But I see some signs: individualism, skepticism about institutional missions, people having an ever harder time swallowing hierarchies, cynicism about taking part in society, an increasing sense of doom, pop culture is very anti establishment and other things like that.
All of the above also form a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. If there's no trust in institutions the only people that are going to join them will tend to do so with cynical self interest in mind. Which damages the institutions image further and so on.
A good example, the Fukushima Nuclear disaster and the decision to release the water into the sea.
I mean, the whole accident was caused by negligence and corruption, not really a tsunami, and now the same agencies, at least the same types of agencies who allowed the negligence that caused the meltdown to happen, are likely the same agencies telling people it's safe to dump all the treated water into the sea.
What are average people supposed to do here? They were lied to, or at least let down in step 1, and now in step 2, just trust the institutions ?
Deepwater Horizon, another disaster, really shouldn't have happened, do we just trust the institutions that it's all fixed?
In my opinion, the world is too complex now, we're struggling to understand it.
To be clear, I'm absolutely not trying to argue that institutions shouldn't be trusted, but we should be able to see why people have lost trust.
The only ones I can think of that would be deserving of any trust would be Organized Labor and Small Business. Even then it's thin ice considering abuse of the CARES act and the dilution of Unions by corporations.
1. They need to be honest.
2. They need to be fair/treat everyone equally.
I'm not sure myself if this is still the case (for all institutions?), but with scandals as well as fake news making the headlines again and again, trust declines. It's natural, but don't know what we could do to stop this trend.
Look at everything we've done with our core national values, our moral values and our traditions. For instance, nowadays it's considered outdated and even racist to be patriotic. Family values are seen as old school and outdated. The police is seen as the enemy. Disciplining children or letting them roam can land you on child protection services.
If we want strong institutions, we need strong values. Our ancestors discovered much through blood and tears and left us a legacy of how to have a society. Let's remember that before jumping on the next flashy trend. Let's move ahead but carefully.
> For instance, nowadays it's considered outdated and even racist to be patriotic.
And this isn't true. Even if you assume half the country believes this, the other half certainly does not. Neither half seems to trust the government though.
The institutions are not as trusted today as they were for our grandparents or great grandparents. This is true.
At the same time, the institutions operate in a significantly different fashion today, than they did in our grandparent's or great grandparent's day. The police are a good example. 60 years ago a cop would have been walking a beat so to speak. Nowadays, that form of policing is thought to be laughable. Today our police operate in a manner that is more familiar to people who have done a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan.
the difference being,
they dispense with the Civil Affairs guys.
So from the perspective of an observer with a bit of military training you can see an enormous difference between those two methods of practice. And the collapse of confidence in the contemporary environment would, frankly, be kind of expected by most military observers.
The police are just a for instance here. Many of our institutions are, yes, less trusted, but also operating significantly differently than they operated when they were more trusted.
And I think a lot of us get stuck on the "there is no trust" while losing sight of the "resource constraints oblige operational change" part of the issue.
Can you point out what changed in 50 years? The only thing I can figure out is the constant news cycle that has made everyone paranoid and makes them see boogeyman everywhere.
Police are seen as the enemy because they’ve stopped doing their jobs and allowed power to corrupt the entire institution. Bad cops are shuffled between locations like trading cards.
Platforms are institutions. You likely trust your ISPs (but not phone companies), and you absolutely trust some of the platforms you use, even if that trust is tragically misplaced. Networks formed from conferences are defacto shadow institutions (defcon/BH, CCC, burning man, SXSW, WEF, etc). It suggests that new institutions can form pretty spontaneously. You just have to want them.
- bag of cocaine found in Whitehouse, extensive investigation, no suspects
- two decades of war and occupation in Middle East. After a year of agreeing to leave, US literally runs to planes and abandons millions in military gear in the hands of our enemies
- definitely not CIA kompromat sex trafficker commits suicide in prison during a guard change while the cameras malfunction. definitely not CIA kompromat sex trafficker's aide gets arrested, given deal to absolve all unnamed co-conspirators. No further suspects.
- Government intentionally lies about pandemic policies its putting in place about masks and their effectiveness.
- key members of government intelligence services author open letter about hunter bidens laptop, calling it russian disinformation. This letter is intentionally a lie for the express purpose of influencing the election.
I'm not convinced I won't see civil war in my lifetime.
You lost me here. There’s not gonna be a civil war. They’re just grifters left and right.
Marjorie Taylor Green isn’t leading a movement, she’s just using populism to promote Marjorie Taylor Green.
Meanwhile compare today with the political violence of the late 1960’s. Bombings, assassinations, organized groups advocating violence against the government. Those were actual movements. And yet the republic survived. No civil war.
> - bag of cocaine found in Whitehouse, extensive investigation, no suspects
You lost me already. How is this notable?
The White House has a lot of visitors, including tours. This is how people make a mountain out of a molehill. It's a nothingburger. The President isn't snorting coke.
Your conspiracy makes exactly zero sense. Grasping at straws.
Can you elaborate on this point? I'm not sure what it's referring to.
Dude was vice president for 8 years and a senator since before the dinosaurs.