Everything is Downstream of Social Trust

And an anecdote about why it is broken.

One thing that’s so painful about this political moment in the US is that, in my opinion, none of the old frameworks seem to fit anymore. We lack a satisfying theory of what is broken and an actionable playbook on what needs to be done.

Screaming about how bad Trump is I’m not sure accomplishes much of anything (we’ve been doing that for eight years and look where it’s gotten us.) I don’t know if blaming the voting public — a favorite response of some partisan Dems — is very productive either.

So it was refreshing to read this post this week by Charles Olney who offers an explanation that makes a lot of sense to me. He says that a crisis of social trust is at the heart of America’s political dysfunction. Olney, who is fresh from a political symposium focused on US politics in Sweden, says the economy is not the core problem but “a crisis of faith” “driven by a sea-change in social relations. Specifically, the rise of social media and the associated loss of real-world ‘villages’ to sustain our social worlds.” Even polarization around education, he says, is not so much about education per se but trust in institutions.

To me this theory is spot on. This week I came across something I think is emblematic of the scale of the problem. I was reading an article about how Tesla’s Cybertruck sales were disappointing in the Wall Street Journal. It wasn’t until the middle of the article that the reporter mentioned — in a discussion about the number of recalls attached to the vehicle — that there were problems with the accelerator and that multiple Tesla employees knew about it before the launch but rolled it out anyway because they were under pressure to release the design.

I just had to sigh reading that, at how auto companies now can endanger and rip off consumers with relative impunity now. People could be killed. This used to be the kind of thing that was a little bit of a scandal, at least sometimes. In the 1990s, for example, Ford executives underwent hours-long critical cross examinations over this kind of thing in Congressional hearings related to Explorer rollovers.

Now, this kind of scandalous corporate malfeasance doesn’t even make the first third of an article in the Wall Street Journal. It’s not even the headline of the story. We expect this kind of treatment from these companies. At least there was a recall in the Cybertruck case. Who knows if that would happen under Trump (I’m guessing no).

The New Yorker has an excellent article recently about trust in expertise and institutions and how that has become a big polarizing issue in our politics. They note, interestingly, it used to be more Democrats who were the party of skepticism toward authority. The article about the “the revolt against expertise” centers Robert F Kennedy, who they note he was, until not that long ago, Democrat aligned, giving speeches against corporate power for eg at the DNC a few years ago.

Obviously, all that has changed. Kennedy is a professional skeptic, and a lot of his ideas are conspiratorial or just wrong and very out there. This week Kennedy disbanded the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Panel, which a horrifying escalation in this partisan tug-of-war around science and expertise, and included heroes like Paul Offit who I consider to be extremely trust worthy, an exemplar of professional ethics in medicine.

What’s revelatory about the New Yorker is they don’t just dismissing Kennedy as a total crank, which is the standard partisan response. Instead, they engage with some of his ideas and criticism. The article fairly evaluates imo how the expertise sector — public health for one — made some key tactical errors opened the door to these kinds of efforts to discredit their work.

For example, I believe, that the censorship or coverup (call it what you want) of legitimate scientific questions about whether Covid-19 emerged from a lab in Wuhan (the lab leak theory) did tremendous damage to social trust in science. When the scientific establishment is too censorious of opposing viewpoints (including viewpoints that can’t be fairly ruled out, like questions about covid’s origins) it can embolden critics and skeptics like Kennedy, the New Yorker writes. While some of Kennedy’s ideas are complete nonsense and super dangerous (like vaccines causing autism) some of his criticisms -- that the pharmaceutical industry held too much sway over government bodies — have more than a kernel of truth.

I have written here, I think a certain level of distrust is natural, given our recent history. Covid missteps and muddled messaging come to mind. That also comes on the heels of a devastating opioid epidemic, for which the medical community has never properly atoned, imo.

We should keep in mind that attitudes about social and institutional trust, like Olney said, are very dependent on social status. Poorer people (the kind of folks who have been shifting right) might be less inclined to trust political actors or institutions for a lot of rational reasons I wrote months ago. Well off people, people with college degrees etc. (this is me, roughly) we are used to be catered to by public officials and institutions. It’s natural that these same folks would have more trust in institutions. We (not me individually but people in my “class”) have a lot of power over these institutions, and in many cases, they run them.

In the big political realignment we’re having, Democrats have captured this group, the ones putting signs in their front yards saying “science is real.” Dems have made trust in institutions and upholding procedural norms a key campaign issue and point of differentiation. Many times these voters may be heading these institutions themselves, so it’s natural that they would be defensive of them.

But we have to remember that some from a poorer background might be having a totally different experience with government power. The example I used is the singer Jelly Roll, who spent time in prison as a juvenile. Distrust in government and institutions comes as the result of bitter experience. These are the kinds of folks Trump has been consolidating.

I have been reading “We Have Never Been Woke” by Musa Al-Gharbi which dwells on many of these themes and is extremely incisive about questions of institutional power.