8 ms·

Neil Howe: Trust in US Institutions Continues to Decline

47 points by johntfella 3y ago

cryotopippto 3y ago
[flagged]
roenxi 3y ago
Alternative spin being that Americans are at their most informed state in recorded history. Preserving faith in the US institutions requires earnestly trusting to the US institutions opinions of themselves. I'm not seeing the evidence that the institutions themselves have declined - if anything, they are more reliable than normal. Political corruption is really hard to hide these days and the power structures are well traced out. The inability of the US powers that be to keep things like Epstein's Island or the global spying apparatus out of public consciousness is really telling. Names like Wikileaks and OpenSecrets couldn't have existed outside this century. 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.
- frankfrankfrank 3y ago
  The good old days never existed? Of course they existed, as is evident by the better days that followed. You’re simply mismatching things and are affected by the toxic gaslighting and abusive psychopathic lies that have denied the reality and turned the abuser into abusers who say things like “the good old days that never existed”. 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.
  - landoftheice 3y ago
    [dead]
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  I actually think "informed-ness" peaked about a decade ago. The rise of fox news, partisanship and "alternative facts" etc has reduced the amount of actual, factual information the average person has since then (maybe before that too). The golden age of information is behind us.
  - JackFr 3y ago
    So 25 years ago Fox News was a legitimate and reasonable news source. It had a slight right editorial bent which distinguished from the other networks and they drew a decent audience, to sone extent because of that. 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.
    - Kye 3y ago
      People are surprised every Presidential election to learn Fox News' election desk is one of the most reliable. I think 2020 might have been the last where it isn't compromised.
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      I don't have hard facts, but this feels incorrect. As someone who remembers 9/11 and the run up to the Iraq War, Fox News was already happily selling fear and outrage back then. Perhaps the level of hyperbole has changed, but not the basic strategy.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    It’s easy to blame Fox News for everything but it’s really the internet that scaled it all out to where it’s hard to know what to trust
    - LatteLazy 3y ago
      Fox is shitty. But it's just giving people what they want in a system where that is rewarded. 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.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Let's say the US government is 90% competent and effective, and 10% incompetent and corrupt. And let's say that you're right, that Americans are the most informed they've ever been. That means they see more of that 10% than ever before, even if the 10% hasn't increased. And they can tell that they see more corruption and incompetence than they did before. So it feels like the country's falling apart, even if it's just like it always was. 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.
frankfrankfrank 3y ago
[flagged]
high_5 3y ago
1. It's harder to build trust than to demolish it. Judging from the timeline, it would take about 2 decades like the 90s to rebuild the three sharp declines. 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.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > I fail to see what occurred in the late 80s 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.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > but I fail to see what occured in the late 80s * Savings and loan scandals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis#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 https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids ETA: * Iran-Contra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair
msandford 3y ago
There's two ways to look at this that others commenters have hinted at: 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.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  We are in the third scenario: institutions are flawed like everything humans do and would need continuous criticism and fixing, but at the same time they are being targeted by partisan propaganda which target them not for their actual flaws (for which you need to understand how they operate) but make things up in a grotesque but effective way (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).
  - jtbayly 3y ago
    So, you choose option 1, but decided to call it option 3…
    - openweb 3y ago
      I don't think his comment implied that all institutions are capable and trustworthy which option 1 did.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Don't you see the difference between: > 1. The institutions are tremendously capable and trustworthy And this: > institutions are flawed like everything humans do and would need continuous criticism and fixing ?
everdrive 3y ago
Nearly every mainstream movie that comes out is some permutation of “this institution is corrupt, we have to tear it down!” Some of this lack of trust seems to be a cultural movement in itself, where people are bending over backwards, looking for _any_ problem so that can declare the entire thing to be a wash.
kryogen1c 3y ago
Notable recent institutional events: - 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.
- JackFr 3y ago
  > 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.
- QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
  I would like to point out your clever rhetorical trick where you take two decades of anger about a pointless war and point it at the guy who stopped the war. And every right wing post in this thread repeats that concept, lending legitimacy to an otherwise insane line of reasoning. Good show!
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    You make it sound like the current guy in charge who “stopped” the war a) didn’t screw up the withdrawal, and b) wasn’t a part of the power structure that started and perpetuated the war. Dude was vice president for 8 years and a senator since before the dinosaurs.
trabant00 3y ago
I think we can safely say that about most of Europe and Asia too. Don't know about other parts of the world but I don't think there's any significant part where trust in institutions is significantly rising. 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.
- landoftheice 3y ago
  [dead]
xqcgrek2 3y ago
[flagged]
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > ethnically inhomogeneous population Weren't the days when the US was "ethnically homogeneous" before chattel slavery? This isn't something that suddenly changed in the last 50 years.
  - Georgelemental 3y ago
    Chattel slavery was confined to certain geographic areas, and those areas had less trust and more inequality.
- vaidhy 3y ago
  When was US ethnically homogeneous? Before the europeans came? Even then, there would have been ethnic differences amongst the tribes in southeast vs northwest. This is such a bad take on history. The problem is that US never trusted its institutions and has made wild west kind of anarchy as its form of government.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
boppo1 3y ago
I wonder how this will affect the dynamic if/when the draft is reinstituted. There's been lots of acknowledgement lately of the US Mil's recruitment crisis.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  The Military was one of only two institutions with a 50%+ trust rating, according to the poll in the article.
glimshe 3y ago
Much has changed in the last 50 years. We jumped quickly on the bandwagon of change and criticized the decisions of our grandparents. And here you can see the results. 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.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  This seems like a free floating rant unrelated to the article. As noted in the article the police are one of the top three trusted institutions. > 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.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    The police is trusted by 43% in 2023 according to the article. Being top three at 43% just confirms my "rant".
    - vaidhy 3y ago
      Why would you trust the police when the police does not earn the trust the population? What has changed is that their behavior is now more in the public eye.
    - bilbo0s 3y ago
      I think many are missing what I believe may be a material point here. 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.
ChatGTP 3y ago
I think the stems from the fact that everything is just so hard to grok nowadays. 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.
grammers 3y ago
Trust in institutions depends on two factors: 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.
motohagiography 3y ago
The question to me from the data is, have new institutions formed in the last 20 years that people trust more? The 'large technology companies' entry is indicative, but not a strong signal to me. 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.
foxyv 3y ago
It's telling what they consider US Institutions: Small Business, The Military, The Police, The Medical System, The Church, The Supreme Court, Banks, Public Schools, The President, Large Tech Orgs, Organized Labor, Newspapers, The justice system, TV News, Big Business, and Congress. 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.

47 points by johntfella 3y ago

[flagged]

Alternative spin being that Americans are at their most informed state in recorded history. Preserving faith in the US institutions requires earnestly trusting to the US institutions opinions of themselves. I'm not seeing the evidence that the institutions themselves have declined - if anything, they are more reliable than normal. Political corruption is really hard to hide these days and the power structures are well traced out. The inability of the US powers that be to keep things like Epstein's Island or the global spying apparatus out of public consciousness is really telling. Names like Wikileaks and OpenSecrets couldn't have existed outside this century. 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.

frankfrankfrank 3y ago
The good old days never existed? Of course they existed, as is evident by the better days that followed. You’re simply mismatching things and are affected by the toxic gaslighting and abusive psychopathic lies that have denied the reality and turned the abuser into abusers who say things like “the good old days that never existed”. 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.
- landoftheice 3y ago
  [dead]
LatteLazy 3y ago
I actually think "informed-ness" peaked about a decade ago. The rise of fox news, partisanship and "alternative facts" etc has reduced the amount of actual, factual information the average person has since then (maybe before that too). The golden age of information is behind us.
- JackFr 3y ago
  So 25 years ago Fox News was a legitimate and reasonable news source. It had a slight right editorial bent which distinguished from the other networks and they drew a decent audience, to sone extent because of that. 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.
  - Kye 3y ago
    People are surprised every Presidential election to learn Fox News' election desk is one of the most reliable. I think 2020 might have been the last where it isn't compromised.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I don't have hard facts, but this feels incorrect. As someone who remembers 9/11 and the run up to the Iraq War, Fox News was already happily selling fear and outrage back then. Perhaps the level of hyperbole has changed, but not the basic strategy.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  It’s easy to blame Fox News for everything but it’s really the internet that scaled it all out to where it’s hard to know what to trust
  - LatteLazy 3y ago
    Fox is shitty. But it's just giving people what they want in a system where that is rewarded. 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.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Let's say the US government is 90% competent and effective, and 10% incompetent and corrupt. And let's say that you're right, that Americans are the most informed they've ever been. That means they see more of that 10% than ever before, even if the 10% hasn't increased. And they can tell that they see more corruption and incompetence than they did before. So it feels like the country's falling apart, even if it's just like it always was. 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.

frankfrankfrank 3y ago

[flagged]

high_5 3y ago

1. It's harder to build trust than to demolish it. Judging from the timeline, it would take about 2 decades like the 90s to rebuild the three sharp declines. 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.

drewcoo 3y ago
> I fail to see what occurred in the late 80s 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.
flyinghamster 3y ago
> but I fail to see what occured in the late 80s * Savings and loan scandals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis#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 https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids ETA: * Iran-Contra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair

msandford 3y ago

There's two ways to look at this that others commenters have hinted at: 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.

littlestymaar 3y ago
We are in the third scenario: institutions are flawed like everything humans do and would need continuous criticism and fixing, but at the same time they are being targeted by partisan propaganda which target them not for their actual flaws (for which you need to understand how they operate) but make things up in a grotesque but effective way (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).
- jtbayly 3y ago
  So, you choose option 1, but decided to call it option 3…
  - openweb 3y ago
    I don't think his comment implied that all institutions are capable and trustworthy which option 1 did.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Don't you see the difference between: > 1. The institutions are tremendously capable and trustworthy And this: > institutions are flawed like everything humans do and would need continuous criticism and fixing ?

everdrive 3y ago

Nearly every mainstream movie that comes out is some permutation of “this institution is corrupt, we have to tear it down!” Some of this lack of trust seems to be a cultural movement in itself, where people are bending over backwards, looking for _any_ problem so that can declare the entire thing to be a wash.

kryogen1c 3y ago

Notable recent institutional events: - 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.

JackFr 3y ago
> 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.
QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
I would like to point out your clever rhetorical trick where you take two decades of anger about a pointless war and point it at the guy who stopped the war. And every right wing post in this thread repeats that concept, lending legitimacy to an otherwise insane line of reasoning. Good show!
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  You make it sound like the current guy in charge who “stopped” the war a) didn’t screw up the withdrawal, and b) wasn’t a part of the power structure that started and perpetuated the war. Dude was vice president for 8 years and a senator since before the dinosaurs.

trabant00 3y ago

I think we can safely say that about most of Europe and Asia too. Don't know about other parts of the world but I don't think there's any significant part where trust in institutions is significantly rising. 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.

landoftheice 3y ago
[dead]

xqcgrek2 3y ago

[flagged]

AlexandrB 3y ago
> ethnically inhomogeneous population Weren't the days when the US was "ethnically homogeneous" before chattel slavery? This isn't something that suddenly changed in the last 50 years.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  Chattel slavery was confined to certain geographic areas, and those areas had less trust and more inequality.
vaidhy 3y ago
When was US ethnically homogeneous? Before the europeans came? Even then, there would have been ethnic differences amongst the tribes in southeast vs northwest. This is such a bad take on history. The problem is that US never trusted its institutions and has made wild west kind of anarchy as its form of government.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

boppo1 3y ago

I wonder how this will affect the dynamic if/when the draft is reinstituted. There's been lots of acknowledgement lately of the US Mil's recruitment crisis.

HWR_14 3y ago
The Military was one of only two institutions with a 50%+ trust rating, according to the poll in the article.

glimshe 3y ago

Much has changed in the last 50 years. We jumped quickly on the bandwagon of change and criticized the decisions of our grandparents. And here you can see the results. 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.

AlexandrB 3y ago
This seems like a free floating rant unrelated to the article. As noted in the article the police are one of the top three trusted institutions. > 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.
- glimshe 3y ago
  The police is trusted by 43% in 2023 according to the article. Being top three at 43% just confirms my "rant".
  - vaidhy 3y ago
    Why would you trust the police when the police does not earn the trust the population? What has changed is that their behavior is now more in the public eye.
  - bilbo0s 3y ago
    I think many are missing what I believe may be a material point here. 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.

ChatGTP 3y ago

I think the stems from the fact that everything is just so hard to grok nowadays. 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.

grammers 3y ago

Trust in institutions depends on two factors: 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.

motohagiography 3y ago

The question to me from the data is, have new institutions formed in the last 20 years that people trust more? The 'large technology companies' entry is indicative, but not a strong signal to me. 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.

foxyv 3y ago

It's telling what they consider US Institutions: Small Business, The Military, The Police, The Medical System, The Church, The Supreme Court, Banks, Public Schools, The President, Large Tech Orgs, Organized Labor, Newspapers, The justice system, TV News, Big Business, and Congress. 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.