Trust Issues
Democracy Itself Is Under Siege
It has its shortcomings, but it’s better than any alternative
Trust: It’s never been harder to gain or easier to lose than in 2018. Social media has transformed whom and what we believe, creating echo chambers that present opinion as fact; nationalist politicians have blamed establishment politics for every problem, real and phony, created by globalization and delivered it to voters in a box marked “us vs them.” Democracy — a form of governance that depends on trust in elections, the law, and the institutions of government — hasn’t been this vulnerable in decades.
The trend is most obvious in the country where an ambitious president called, 100 years ago this autumn, for a world made safe for democracy. It’s easy to blame the current president for the loss of trust, but Donald Trump is a symptom rather than a source of this illness.
Between December 2001 and December 2017, Americans’ trust in government plummeted from 49 percent to just 18 percent. The number of Americans who say they trust the president, the Supreme Court, and Congress a “great deal/quite a lot” has fallen by double-digits over the past two decades. The U.S. military is about the only American institution that is now more trusted, an achievement made all the more remarkable by failed…
