#WTH: Trust in American institutions is collapsing
The Wall Street Journal's Gerry Baker on why.
Three things from our pod this week with Gerry Baker — talking about his new book, and great column on the cratering trust Americans have in our vital institutions:
It’s not just you. Trust, hope, optimism — it’s all in the dumps.
Newspapers, the criminal justice system, TV news, big business, and Congress have the confidence of fewer than 20 percent of Americans.
The solutions are two: America must restore dynamism to its economy. And America needs better leaders.
The answers aren’t that tough. It’s finding people to do what’s necessary to restore confidence, dynamism, and hope to the United States that seems so difficult right now. And yep, the angry left has something when it talks about inequality. And the angry right has something when it talks about stagnant wages and elite privilege. That stuff is real. Boring factoids like the rich are paying a way higher percentage of taxes than the poor, and that government income from taxes is shooting up every year… those things don’t make a difference in people’s lives.
The secret to returning to dynamism isn’t income redistribution or communism or socialism or getting rid of Amazon (tempting as that sometimes seems) or Google (ditto). It’s broadening opportunity and re-incentivizing work and all the fine things that AEI scholars write about all the time. And again, it’s finding someone who has the leadership qualities to make those changes.
One of the greatest things about the United States of America was its optimism, the sense that every family, if it worked hard enough, would bequeath a better life to its children. That the world was a better place because America was there. That, sure, we have problems, but we believe in each other and our leaders. How these qualities have evanesced is hard to stuff into one substack. But some things are very clear:
If Congress did its job, Americans would have more confidence in Congress.
If leaders of both parties didn’t refer to their opponents in derogatory, demeaning terms, there would be more confidence in our leaders.
If the press stopped serving its worst partisans and worked for all, more Americans would trust the press.
Sure, some of these genies can’t be stuffed back into the bottle. It would be nice to see some effort, however. Surely, we can stop incentivizing bad behavior? Because — forgive the maudlin note — when Americans stop loving their neighbors and trusting that tomorrow will be better, it means very bad days ahead.
HIGHLIGHTS
What prompted you to write this book?
GB: I've lived in this country for 25, almost 30 years. Came here in the 1990s when America was right at the peak, the pinnacle of its power post-Cold War, everything end of history. We were all going to be like, we're going to be liberal democrats and be one version or another of American democracy. And it was great. I agreed with most of that. And then since as a journalist here, I worked for the Financial Times and ultimately for the Wall Street Journal, I got a sort of close hand look at the decline, should we say the decline from that pinnacle. And I wanted to write a book which would try and analyze this, figure out what had gone wrong, what's taken us from a situation 30 years ago where again, America was the acme of human achievement and success to this position we're in today
You used a lot of polling data?
GB: There's a tremendous amount of polling data, survey data, Gallup does a poll every year. Pew does too, which measures the level of public trust in the major institutions in America.
Gallup have been measuring this since the 1970s. In the last 10 years, 15 or 16 major institutions — the government, the federal government, the judiciary, big business, the media, universities, education generally various other institutions — and in every single one, with the exception of two, which we can talk about, public trust in those institutions has not only declined, it's collapsed in almost all of them.
[In the 1980s] more than three quarters of Americans said they trusted the news. Today, that number is down at about 15%. But it's the same with big business, with the federal government, with education, higher education, with technology companies, with the technology that we use with public health, with science and medicine, all of these key institutions that make up obviously the civic and political and cultural leadership of the country. People don't trust them anymore. They've gone from being trusted to untrusted in the space of a generation. And that's what I look at it. And by the way, one other thing very alarmingly too is that Americans don't trust each other anymore.
Is this a partisan thing?
GB: What's interesting, Marc and Dany, is that it's not just that Democrats don't trust the federal government when the Republicans are in charge or Republicans don't trust the federal government when Democrats are in charge, both of them. I mean they have higher levels of trust when their party's in charge, but both parties record much lower levels of trust in their government than they did 30, 40 years ago
So… why?
GB: [Among the factors,] I do think the rise of economic inequality. I think a country that has seen the kind of inequality that has arisen in the United States in the last 30 years is intrinsically, it's creating tensions. It's creating gaps between gaps essentially in the way in which people relate to each other, review each other. And I think it does create mistrust. What interesting, in quite a lot of interesting polling data in the past, Americans broadly tolerated the inequalities we had in the past because they thought it was justified. It was deserved. If you made a lot of money in America, it was the American dream. You deserved it, you worked hard, you had talent, you got educated or you made a business, you built a business, you went and you were successfully deserved it. Now polling suggests people do not see that, do not have the same level of trust in the system itself. They think the system is rigged
Rigged how?
GB: I think the most important reason, and neither of you will be surprised to hear this, and I've written about this a lot, is the fact that most of these institutions have been captured by an ideological elite. They call themselves progressive, an ideological elite, which actually doesn't really believe in the values that actually made America great, made America the country that it is and actually aren't the values that most Americans actually espouse. And we've seen this particularly in the last few years.
But it's true whether it's big business, whether it's the media, whether it's colleges, whether it's the permanent government, whether it's science and technology, this new establishment if you like, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, but particularly after the end of the Cold War, committed to a set of values that are actually fundamentally not just un-American, but actually anti-American. They actually believe, and I'm not putting words, I'm not being unkind to them there. They don't really believe in America the traditional American ways, the right way. And I think it's that more than anything, people see that these institutions have just become so far detached from the values and the ideals that they hold. That means very understandably that they don't trust them anymore.
Talk about the cratering of trust in the media?
GB: I'm struck still by the way in which the media cover Trump, in particular. Many of them as though he is this monster that came out of nowhere without realizing their own role in having basically created the conditions in which he could arise. They continue to do. I don't see any signs of self-awareness on the part of the media, most of the media. I should, obviously, except my own organization, the Wall Street Journal, which I think very largely sticks to a conservative editorial page, obviously, but the news pages continue to work very hard to be objective.
By the way, you hear all this talk in the media, but they even reject the idea of objectivity. They don't even think they need to be objective anymore. It's all that moral clarity. They're in a very, very, very deep hole. I think it's exacerbated by the commercial conditions that they find themselves in. I don't have any doubt that as advertising fell away as a major source of revenue for newspapers particularly, but obviously for television too, but newspapers sought to replace that. Certainly the big newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, sought to replace that revenue, that advertising revenue with subscriber revenue.
When you have subscribers, you're setting up a product, particular product directly to a group of people who have a particular reason that you want to give them a particular reason to buy that product. Whereas in the past, advertising was just you were funded by advertising, which everybody saw, and it didn't really require a particular viewpoint. Subscribers really require a viewpoint. If they subscribe to the New York Times ... The New York Times has capped into the 5, 7, 8 million people in America who want a daily dose of progressive, liberal, left, anti-Trump journalism.
What does it all come down to, really?
GB: I think one of the other problems, frankly, we've seen in the last 20 years is a poverty of leadership, a real poverty of leadership. If you go back and look at who we had, whether it was, again, you may not like all their politics, but FDR, Harry Truman, Eisenhower, you can take or leave John F. Kennedy, if you like, with LBJ. These were enormously... Nixon for all his flaws, and then of course Ronald Reagan. These were enormously, enormously virtue, not virtues, but they had tremendous political virtues. They had great experience, they had great skills, they had great leadership capability. They had an ability to talk to and represent the country. We really haven't had that for the last 20 years, and I do think there is a good chance that someone will emerge because America is good at producing these people
Lefties and young people blame capitalism for America’s ills…?
GB: I'm a capitalist. I firmly believe in capitalism. I firmly believe it's the best system that's ever been created. It's lifted more people out of poverty. But I think, right now, American capitalism… I do side with some of those people on the right who think that American capitalism has kind of gone off the rails a little bit. We have too much concentration of power in the hands of too few companies. Too much concentration of power results in massive rewards, massive rewards for those who've done well and then, does tend to leave the rest of the country behind. We've had very little real wage growth.
The median wage in America, in the last 20 years, has been pretty stagnant. And certainly, compared with the compensation of the top one or 5% has dramatically declined. And that you're absolutely right, Dany, that the optimism has been demolished. And you can just see this in polls. Again, I don't want to constantly return to polling surveys, but people ask, "Is America on the right track?" That question, right track, wrong track question, "Is America on the right track or the wrong track?" has been pretty well negative consistently for more than 20 years. It began around 2002, 2003.
Large majorities of people saying now, which is really shocking in American historical terms, their children will have a worse life than they will. Everybody always wants and thinks that their children are going to have a better life than they will. Look, and I think this requires economic reforms to make the economy more dynamic.
Then there’s our economic performance…?
GB: You look at the rest of the world right now, and the US looks pretty good compared with the rest of the world in economic terms. China's in a mess. Europe's stagnant, as it has been. Japan has been stagnant for a long time, but that's not good enough to meet the needs and the hopes and aspirations of the American people. We've had relatively weak productivity growth in this country for 20 years.
Although we have low levels of unemployment, we don't have very significant levels of income growth, as I said. Many people's savings have been depleted dramatically. These people don't have much wealth. American people don't have much wealth. So we've got to do a lot to regenerate economic growth. The growth of the size of government has been enormously important in that, and we've got to rein that back. We've got to do something about the debt that we are building up. We've got to do something about the extent of the lack of dynamism about the level of tax that we have. So I'm in favor of all of those things. I do think, however, we do need measures to address the poverty that we have, but I think that will come about mainly through making America more dynamic. I think a big problem in America right now is not actually that capitalism has failed, it's that we don't have enough capitalism, that we don't actually have enough dynamism,
But we’re truly just becoming Balkanized…?
GB: It's not just that pblue states are becoming bluer and red states become redder, it's actually communities and cities and towns within those states are becoming more concentrated in their political affiliation too. So I live in New York City, there are, believe it or not, parts of New York City that are actually very Republican and they're becoming more Republican, Staten Island and parts of the more suburban parts of New York City. Whereas the urban parts of all these cities are becoming more and more Democrat as more and more conservatives leave. You're right. So we are becoming very, very, very siloized geographically, and increasingly only interacting with people of the same sort of political background.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
DATA:
How American Institutions Went From Trust to Bust (Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2023)
Historically Low Faith in US Institutions Continues (Gallup, July 6 2023)
Public Trust in Government: 1958-2023 (Pew Research Center, September 19 2023)
Few have confidence in financial institutions (AP-NORC, March 22 2023)
America Is Headed Toward Collapse (The Atlantic, Peter Turchin, June 2 2023)
A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Chad Stone et al., January 13, 2020)
Income Gains at the Top Dwarf Those of Low and Middle-Income Households (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)
Wealth distribution in the United States in the first quarter of 2023 (Statista, July 17, 2023)
American Inequality is (Finally) Lessening (Time, Allana Semuels, March 31, 2023)
5 alarming stats on U.S. economic inequality in Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s new book (Annie Nova, March 28, 2023)
Geographic Inequality on the Rise in the U.S. (US Department of Commerce, Jed Kolko, June 15, 2023)
Has Wealth Inequality in America Changed over Time? Here Are Key Statistics (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Ana Hernandez Kent and Lowell Ricketts, December 2, 2023)
10 States People Are Fleeing And 10 States People Are Moving To (Forbes, Deane Biermeier and Samantha Allen, September 4, 2023)
State Taxes Have a Minimal Impact on People’s Interstate Moves (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Michael Mazerov, August 9, 2023)
Stranded! How Rising Inequality Suppressed US Migration and Hurt Those “Left Behind” (IMF Working Paper, Tamim Bayoumi and Jelle Barkema, June 2019)
Dramatic realignment swings working-class districts toward GOP (Axios, Stef W. Kight, April 16, 2023)
It’s Not Your Father’s Democratic Party. But Whose Party Is It? (New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall, August 16, 2023)
It’s Not Your Father’s Democratic Party. But Whose Party Is It? (Newsweek, Saurabh Sharma, August 23, 2023)
Democrats Need to Confront Their Privilege (New York Times, David Brooks, November 21, 2021)
The Coming (Cancel) Culture War (The Message Box, Dan Pfeiffer, April 6, 2021)
Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics (Pew Research Center, September 19, 2023)