An invisible consensus evaporates
The Bears, one of Adrian Belew’s bands, play a joyous set of guitar-driven songs that stick with you. Reading Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s offering in The Atlantic immediately evoked one of their most memorable: “Trust.”
The Duke Law School professor considers the breakdown in mutual trust fueling what feels like a breakdown in the democratic spirit that birthed this country, powered its resolve to form a more perfect union, and held it together, more or less, since its founding:
In 2019, 73 percent of those under 30 agreed that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” and almost as many said, “Most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance.”
Trust in government has taken an even greater hit. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. In 2022, that number was 22 percent, and it has been languishing in that neighborhood since 2010. In 1973, amid riots, domestic terrorism, the Watergate scandal, and clashes over the Vietnam War, majorities trusted Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Majorities (in many cases substantial ones) mistrust all of those institutions now. Trust in newspapers and public schools has traveled the same trajectory.
Why is that? Britton-Purdy suggests:
Some—probably a lot—of the fracture comes from social media and, before it, the rise of partisan cable and talk radio. (There is inevitably a lot of conjecture in saying what causes what in huge, interwoven changes. Let me know if you find a large and fiercely divided democracy without social media to serve as a control in this experiment.) Some of the fracture comes from social segregation: Liberals live in liberal neighborhoods, conservatives among conservatives, and education, which sorts people into workplaces, now closely tracks politics.
“The Big Sort,” Bill Bishop named it in his 2008 book by that name. But self-segregation is a downstream effect that predates the rise of social media, a phrase that echoes the title of one of the Terminator films. Jerry Mander warned us in 1978 when he published “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” that “television is a medium of summary or reductionism – it reduces everything to slogans.” It wasn’t the programming so much as the technology itself that was hazardous to our health.
Are there no basketball coaches?
With the rise of AI, we see again another world-changing technology barreling down the tracks with little concern for its downstream cultural effects. It doesn’t help that somewhere over the past 50 years we stopped asking high school basketball coaches to teach classes in civics. But I digress.
Whatever forces ate away at the social contract undergirding our democracy, they acted while we slept, not completely unnoticed but not unchecked either, until one day we had a reality-show president, QAnon, horse dewormer, and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. It was as if one day Americans asked, “Hey, where’d this grand canyon come from?”
Britton-Purdy injects a modicum of academic both-sidesing in analyzing the breakdown in our ability to tolerate democratic disagreement. “Trust and skepticism, if not cynicism, are two sides of a delicate balance. The goal is not some kind of harmonious community, but for citizens of an intensely diverse country to be able to coexist in a time when our problems need political solutions; not to love one another, but to get along enough to wrestle with climate change, immigration, public safety, child care, budget deficits, war—together.”
We took for granted “an invisible consensus” of trust, there until it wasn’t. But what Britton-Purdy is really talking about behind the breakdown of trust is the rise of MAGA epistemology:
Only through trust can anyone ever know much of anything. Almost all of what anyone treats as knowledge is not part of their own experience, but the upshot of a social process—reporting, teaching, research, gossip—that they have decided to trust. I don’t personally know that Antarctica exists, that my vaccine works, or how many votes were cast for each candidate in 2020, and except for Antarctica, which requires only a long journey at great expense to verify, those facts are basically impossible for me to observe. When I say I know them, I mean I trust the way they came to me. I trust those who told me, and I trust how they learned what they say they know.
This point, that most knowledge is indirect and social, might have seemed a philosopher’s conceit just a few decades ago. Yes, René Descartes pointed out that our lives might be illusions woven by an evil demon, and David Hume observed that just because bread tastes good today, that’s no guarantee it won’t poison you tomorrow. (Both examples have pretty clear applications to vaccine conspiracy theories.) But so what? The sun rose every day, the trains ran on time, and Walter Cronkite came on at 6:30.
That complacency was the privilege of an invisible consensus, in which most people’s trust was, so to speak, facing in the same direction. Those who believe Trump’s stolen-election fables or anti-vax theories are not refusing to trust: They are trusting some other mix of reporting, research, teaching, and gossip. The polls showing collapsing trust in “newspapers” or “television news” don’t really show a decline in trust; they show a fragmentation, trust displaced. But from the perspective of a democracy that relies on a common set of facts, acute fragmentation might as well be a collapse.
As perceptive observers have always understood, democracy is extremely demanding. It requires the qualities of mind and character that sustain a healthy and balanced political trust, such as the willingness to listen to others and to doubt one’s own side. It also requires the commitment to build a world of citizens, not just consumers or spectators or even protesters, but people who expect to exercise power and responsibility together.
Stealing history
I’ve been less generous. As white supremacy has eroded, those who assumed it as their American birthright have become people of the lie. Supporters of The Lost Cause lie of the Confederacy have all but died off. Monuments erected to redefine treason as heroism are being dismantled. So with Trump’s 2020 election loss, a new Lost Cause has arisen to replace it. David Blight, the Yale historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era recognized it before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
At Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on Monday, Biden remarked:
We saw something on January 6th we’d never seen before, even during the Civil War. Insurrectionists waving Confederate flags inside the halls of Congress built by enslaved Americans. A mob attacked and called Black officers, Black veterans defending the nation those vile of racist names.
And yet, an extreme movement of America, the MAGA Republicans, led by a defeated President, is trying to steal history now. They tried to steal an election. Now they’re trying to steal history …
“Economic stress is an important reason that Trump might win reelection,” Britton-Purdy writes. But we survived the economic stress of the Great Depression and World War II with a sense of common purpose missing now. The world’s largest middle class has fallen behind the investor class, and those under 30 see no reason to trust the decay will reverse in time to benefit them.
Beyond 2024, it’s also a lesson that the country is set up to benefit other people who don’t care about you. Countries with lower levels of economic inequality tend to have higher levels of social trust, and individuals with less money tend to be less trusting. Rebuilding a middle-class economy is a way to buttress democratic trust.
[…]
And that old idealistic favorite, universal national service, is still worth trying to achieve. Nothing builds trust more successfully than doing important work with people who might otherwise be worrisome strangers.
And one man pulls the string
Bring down the whole damn thing
But not with a pampered, amoral narcissist — 91 felony indictments to his name, so far — injecting xenophobia directly into the MAGA bloodstream at every opportunity.
“Trust”