To Save Democracy, We Need to Rebuild Trust in Our Institutions

The use of "we" and the phrase "our institutions" begs the question somewhat, because people don't necessarily perceive public institutions to be theirs or acting in their interests. Someone who doesn't trust an institution likely feels that way because it doesn't appear to be "our institution" in the first place; it looks like somebody else's institution, doing what it likes according to the logic of those other people who it actually serves.

Nor do people who mistrust institutions necessarily feel a sense of identity with any group who could meaningfully be said to exercise control over them; so who's the "we" who need to be rebuilding anything?

I think these analysis are optimistic but get the chicken and the egg wrong. We look at our institutions badly because we’ve lost trust in them, not the other way around and we’ve lost trust in them because there is a lot of power in being able to convince people institutions are broken.

I actually think the problem is people’s sense of who to trust is different and for a large number of people, Transparency and honesty is a contra indicatory signal. That what you want to trust is confidence and certainty, and Trump and other politicians capitalize on this big time. That too many institutions expose people to the complexities of modern life. I also think the author, in the list of things that institutions have gotten wrong, makes the mistake of assuming everyone will respond similarly. His own list is just a regurgitation of right wing grievances over the past ten years. For example, he could have mentioned healthcare since that’s been in the media recently and is relatively bipartisan, but nope, it’s trans, DEI, Fauci and Russia. How can we restore trust in institutions when we can’t even diagnose the problems without bias?

I personally think the problem with the Russia investigation is that it didn’t go far enough. It should have been non partisan, and it should have looked at Russian influence broadly, not focused on Trump. But because Russian influence is seen to be partisan, the person’s conclusion is we should have just swept it under the rug? How can we restore confidence in institutions if we just ignore any facts that might happen to have a partisan lean.

But I think the most humanistic take on this is that fundamentally no one is going to trust an institution that says something that is contrary to their life experience.

For example, from everything I can tell, coal is not coming back, and in extension towns that are built in a coal economy are not coming back. But most people in those towns are not going to accept that diagnosis. They’ll vote for the institution that supports their life experience.

Matthew Yglesias wrote about this recently saying that basically institutions are probably no better or worse then they’ve ever been, look at Vietnam, look at I dunno, all of history. If the solution is we will have infallible institutions, that’s not a solution at all. We have to be resilient to the types of failures described in the article, not eliminate them, and that is near impossible when anyone with a platform will exploit any human error they can find in our institutions.