A Matter of Trust

Doing a better job or even making things better often isn't enough to restore it

My friend and fellow-Sub stacker Damon Linker had a piece in The New York Times earlier this week arguing that a key reason why President Biden is suffering from surprisingly low approval ratings given any number of good economic indicators is that there is a pervasive sense that America is “broken.” Beginning with the Iraq War and continuing through the financial crisis and down through COVID, Americans have experienced repeated failures by the country’s leadership, yet that leadership has almost uniformly refused to admit error and has largely escaped accountability for their failures. As a consequence, trust in American institutions has collapsed, and Biden, as the consummate Washington insider, can’t plausibly present himself as the guy who can restore that trust, fix that brokenness.

The piece has deservedly gotten a strongly positive response, but also some firm pushback. Here, for example, is Kevin Drum pointing out that, while people may complain that the country is on the wrong track, when asked about their own lives they express considerable satisfaction—a mirror of the way in which Americans complain about the economy while expressing confidence in their own finances and, for business-owners, the prospects of their businesses. And here is Matt Yglesias, explaining that contradiction by basically blaming the internet. We know about our own lives directly, after all, but we know about the world outside largely through the media, and contemporary news distribution mechanisms allow us to choose what to click on—and we reliably click on negative news much more than positive news. No wonder we all think things are going to hell even though our own lives are mostly going fine.

I don’t want to pooh-pooh Drum’s and Yglesias’s critiques, because I think they have some bite. From a political perspective, of course, it’s hard not to see how irritating they would surely be to someone who does think America has gotten way off track. “You don’t know how good you have it” is hardly a winning political message. But I’m also not sure how good we have it is the real question anyway. The “brokenness” Linker is pointing to isn’t the same as impoverishment or terror. America is, indeed, an extraordinarily prosperous and safe society. But that isn’t inconsistent with declining trust, a lack of faith that the institutions that we rely on can be relied on. A wealthy person can still believe that everyone is trying to scam them out of their money; a secure person can still believe that the police won’t be any help if trouble comes.

How can trust be restored? One obvious way would be by learning from mistakes and delivering results. But this isn’t always straightforward. Consider foreign policy. Linker—correctly, I think—identifies the failure of the Iraq War as a key hinge point for Americans’ declining trust in our government. Was the Iraq War a failure? I think it clearly was. Was anyone held accountable? Well, at the level of the foreign policy bureaucracy, probably not—but at the electoral level, it’s worth noting that Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in 2008 substantially because he opposed that war, and that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by running against the war as well. It would be hard to name a foreign policy perspective with less public support today than the Bush-era enthusiasm for invading countries in the Middle East to turn them into democratic allies. Isn’t that learning from mistakes?

But have things gotten “better?” America’s foreign policy hasn’t exactly been a parade of successes since Bush departed the scene. On the contrary: it feels more like Obama failed to extricate us from the Middle East (and even got us involved in new conflicts in Libya and Yemen while letting Syria fester), and like Trump’s bluster mostly alienated our allies while leaving rivals like Russia and China distinctly unimpressed. Meanwhile, on Biden’s watch our main rivals have drawn closer together, major wars have broken out in Ukraine and Gaza, and despite forthright American support for our allies in both conflicts neither is going well. Most ominously, all three presidents have correctly identified China is America’s primary challenge, and tried to reorient our foreign policy in response, but that challenge has only grown over their tenures, and alarms are sounding increasingly loudly about our lack of preparedness for the global-scale conflict that may be looming.

So how should this record be evaluated? Should we trust our government more because it has learned since the Bush years and adapted to the new geopolitical reality? Or should we be increasingly dismayed that, objectively, things aren’t going well? Personally, I think our foreign policy challenges are genuinely hard, and I grade accordingly. But whatever we should do, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for ordinary voters to do the opposite, and judge based on results. Is it that surprising that their judgment is mostly negative?

What about the economy, usually uppermost in voters’ minds? Linker is unquestionably right that the financial crisis dealt a major blow to Americans’ trust in our governing elites. And I understand why Americans were frustrated by how long and slow the road to recovery was, and even more so why they might be angry that not only wasn’t there a parade of malefactors ushered to prison, but many institutions that were implicated in the crisis were bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes. All of that having been said, the Obama administration did respond to the crisis with real changes in policy: a new raft of regulations on finance, a substantial (though inadequate) stimulus, and a bailout of the auto industry. There’s a reason Obama was reelected, and the contrast between the Democratic response to the financial crisis and the Republican critique thereof is a big part of why.

Meanwhile, America’s governing class clearly learned from the financial crisis because they responded differently when COVID hit. Both the Federal Reserve and the national legislature sprang into action, pulling out all the stops both to keep the economy afloat and to help individuals weather the storm. Poverty collapsed during the crisis and Americans’ balance sheets came through in historically phenomenal shape. The government’s response was not only extraordinary in historic terms, it was also substantially more generous than most peer countries—and, in consequence, the United States returned to strong growth and full employment much more quickly than our competitors did.

Yet, in the wake of that extraordinary success, Americans remain distinctly dissatisfied. Why? I’ve tried to answer that question repeatedly (here, here and here, for example), and I don’t want to rehash all the possible answers, but I do want to highlight two. First, inflation has refused to come down to target (though it’s down substantially from its highs) and, in consequence, interest rates remain higher than in recent memory, and may remain high. Second, the pandemic-era government largesse has ended, including the short-lived expanded child tax credit. The punchbowl has, perforce, been taken away—and, indeed, we need more of that same medicine to stay economically healthy. But that medicine tastes terrible, and there’s no obvious sugar to help it go down. Why wouldn’t Americans feel sour about that, even those who are doing reasonably well themselves?

Moreover, it’s easy to see how those dissatisfactions could acquire a sharp political edge. Liberals can ask themselves why the government could afford to build a massive safety net during COVID only to take it away once the crisis ended; conservatives can look at hundreds of billions of dollars in aid lost to fraud and abuse and ask why they should foot the bill through taxes or inflation. There are good answers to those questions: pandemic spending was deficit-financed, which would be hugely inflationary in current conditions, so keeping that expanded safety net would require huge tax increases; the correct priority during the pandemic was shoveling aid out the door to keep businesses and families solvent, and effective procedures to prevent fraud and abuse would have significantly slowed the process down with potentially dire economic consequences. But those answers will only be convincing if you are already inclined to trust the people offering them. They won’t build trust where it is lacking.

Linker suggests that the way to rebuild trust is to admit error and adopt a reform agenda. But do Americans really want a reform agenda? I’m not sure. I’ve already pointed out that bringing the budget back into balance is unlikely to be popular because it means either tax hikes or spending cuts. Take another item on Linker’s list, though: cutting regulations that stymie the construction of new housing. Most of those regulations are local, and empower local majorities in ways that benefit the locality in question while beggaring the commons. How popular is overriding those regulations going to be? There’s a reason why the GOP has been trending in a NIMBY direction: because loss-aversion is a more powerful motivator than the opportunity for gain. Reform in this area may well be good policy; it may even be possible to make it good politics. But is it going to increase trust in government? I don’t think so.

The problem is a genuinely difficult one. It also extends well beyond government. Alana Newhouse’s piece from Tablet about how everything is broken, which Linker references early in his piece, doesn’t just talk about government. It talks about the medical system, about journalism, about higher education, about large corporations. Fellow Substacker Ted Gioia recently wrote a convincingly depressing post about the brokenness of our culture that has barely anything to do with government. The sense that things simply don’t work as well as they used to has substantial truth to it; even more so the not-unrelated fact that we are increasingly disempowered to make things work, because the “things” can increasingly only be fixed by professionals, if they can be fixed at all rather than replaced. Matthew Crawford has been harping on this for his entire career, and he’s onto something. Why wouldn’t an increasingly dependent population get increasingly irritated whenever anything doesn’t work?

For all of these reasons, it’s a problem more ripe for exploitation by nostalgists (like Trump or, in a different way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) who may have no solutions but connect to the emotional heart of the problem, than for earnest reformers with plans for how to make everything better. But it behooves the nostalgists to remember not only how things were better but how things were worse—and how some of the ways things were worse were intimately bound up with the higher sense of trust we had then.

Consider, in that regard, the very personal anecdote with which Newhouse begins. She had a difficult birth and her son has lasting and serious cognitive problems in consequence. The medical system was singularly unhelpful to Newhouse and her husband, but they doggedly refused to accept the system’s failure and eventually, by dint of their own efforts, they found out what their boy was suffering from, and how to help him. (As an aside, I’ve met their son, and he’s a singularly delightful child, and his parents deserve a medal for their advocacy on his behalf.) It is, of course, entirely reasonable for her to see in her family’s ordeal a synecdoche for the system as a whole. Why was it so incredibly hard to get proper attention, to say nothing of relief?

What, though, would have happened to her son back in the good old days of things that worked and trusted authority? How would the system have treated him? We don’t have to ask; we know. He would have been sent to somewhere like Willowbrook, because parents back then trusted when doctors said that was what was best for their children.

There are a lot of downsides to our society’s declining level of trust. But it’s not a bad thing if authorities feel they can’t count on the public’s trust, but have to earn it, every day. And it’s not a bad thing if we, the public, remain skeptical, so long as we also remain open to honest efforts at persuasion. I worry much more about our penchant for transmuting distrust in official authority into unearned trust in outright quackery than I do about a healthy level of skepticism fairly applied.