The Trust Deficit
My thoughts on the severe deficit of trust facing the United States on its 248th birthday and the urgent need to correct course.
“Trust is the foundation of society. Without a basic level of trust regarding the intentions and expected behavior of other human beings, our modern civilization would very quickly disintegrate into total chaos.”
— The Paradox of Trust, October 31, 2019
In the context of the history of the United States of America, which celebrates its 248th birthday today, five years is a tiny blip, but the past half decade has featured a dramatic turn for the worse.
The health of American society has rapidly degraded since 2020, something that can hardly be ignored by any objective citizen. Trust in government and in our fellow citizens was already on a long downward trajectory at the onset of the pandemic. Rather than uniting the country at a time of national trauma, the pandemic exposed divisions that our politicians were more than happy to exploit for personal gain. The result is that America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a national reckoning is clearly in order.
In March 2020, the United States went through a period of denial followed by an unprecedented lockdown of society, resulting in surreal scenes as restrictions went into place.
It was immediately obvious that the pandemic would change society permanently given that the world has no pause button. Rather than coming together as a nation and putting a national emergency above political gain, politicians quickly set the tone for discord and this was followed by a “red vs blue” divide that first revealed itself in the mask wars before spreading to countless other issues. As these links demonstrate, I was grappling with the issues like everyone else, but I retained hope for national unity for several months.
Living in New Orleans during the early months of the pandemic, I witnessed scores of small businesses shut down while large businesses were largely exempt from lockdowns. The local hardware stores were shut down while Home Depot and Lowes were permitted to remain open. The same was true of mom and pop corner stores facing shutdowns while large grocery chains, including Whole Foods Market, remained open. Government programs that were supposed to assist small businesses obviously helped keep some afloat, but as weeks turned into months, the inevitable closures were announced. Bars and small music venues were particularly hammered, along with the entire local music scene.
The vapid talking point adopted by politicians that “we are all in this together” was seen for the utter lie it was. The political class as well as the professional class were able to isolate themselves at home while the working class could not. Schools were shut down, in some cases for well over a year, with “virtual learning” being a mockery of the real thing. Wealthy parents could afford private tutoring. The working class could not. But “we’re all in this together,” parroted the intellectually bankrupt, self-serving politicians. The learning deficit caused by the shutdowns will clearly have a permanent effect on millions of Americans from lower socioeconomic groups who will never be able to catch up.
When the vaccines were announced in late 2020, shortly after the election, there was a brief period of national thanksgiving and I experienced palpable relief when the vaccine ended over year of voluntary isolation made necessary to protect vulnerable family members. This relief turned to horror as it became increasingly evident that the vaccines were only partially effective.
While the shots made COVID less severe for those who contracted it, they did not prevent transmission to others, so I resumed voluntary isolation again in the middle of 2021, again to protect vulnerable family members. Just as the ineffective nature of the vaccines was revealed with respect to transmission, the government doubled down on mandates. The only public policy defense for mandates is to prevent transmission. In America, we should not force people to accept medical treatment solely for their own benefit. There must be an externality to justify mandates. Those who chose not to comply were subject to shaming, loss of employment, and restrictions on their movements in society.
Anyone who dared to question anything about the vaccines was accused of not “trusting the science” as if the scientific method prohibits challenging the consensus narrative. The reality is that the scientific method not only encourages challenging the consensus but mandates doing so, no pun intended. Eventually, the coercive mandates fell, domino by domino, but not before public trust was even further eroded.
The pandemic is far from the only example of the decline of trust in America.
Americans now expect our politicians to lie to us. Members of both political parties routinely lie to the people, considering their fellow citizens to be uneducated fools who will believe just about anything so long as the lies are aligned with their preferred political goals. It is not even necessary to make lies seem plausible anymore. Lies are obvious, yet told anyway, and the flurry of “fact checks” that result are lost in the noise.
Both President Trump and President Biden have routinely lied to the American people.
The Presidential Debate that took place on June 27, 2024 is one that will be discussed in history textbooks a century from now. The spectacle of President Biden utterly failing to demonstrate mental competence was so sad that, at times, I was tempted to stop watching. Mental decline is not the President’s fault and it is typical for the person experiencing such decline to be the last to notice. However, the American people certainly have noticed his many lapses over the past two years. Every time this has been brought up, the White House, the majority of the Democratic Party, and most of the mainstream media has dismissed concerns as “right wing talking points” or “disinformation.” There were even insinuations that videos of the President’s mental lapses were “cheap fakes” generated by artificial intelligence.
I have long believed that government can successfully gaslight the American people on many complicated issues, but when it comes to pocketbook issues like inflation, it is impossible to get away with lies. The same is true for observations of cognitive decline. Millions of Americans have witnessed this sad decline in family members who have exhibited many of the same symptoms as President Biden. It is up to the family of these individuals to kindly take actions to prevent harm. For the majority of elderly people, this might involve changes in tasks of daily living in retirement. When the person affected is the President of the United States, the situation is far more grave. But rather than protecting the President’s dignity and reputation, his wife and children have apparently encouraged him to remain in the race.
Beyond the President’s family, dozens of people within the White House must have observed incidents like what Americans witnessed during the debate. Cognitive decline does not happen all at once. But the White House insists that the President’s poor performance was due to a “cold” or the effects of “jet lag” from a trip that concluded a week before the debate.
They think we are stupid.
The fact is that there are dozens of political operatives in any White House who derive their power from proximity to the President and who would lose much or all of their power if he loses his office. Even more sinister is the possibility that individuals close to the President prefer this state of affairs because they can achieve their own policy objectives by manipulating a cognitively impaired man. No politician or other insider who has covered up this state of affairs should be trusted in any position of power ever again.
The same people who have been telling us that Donald Trump is an “existential threat” to American democracy have been lying to the American people about the cognitive abilities of the current President of the United States for months, if not years.
Either these people do not actually believe that Donald Trump is an “existential threat” or they do believe it but failed to admit the obvious and present the American people with an alternative candidate who was likely to perform more competently in the general election.
These political operatives are now in the unenviable position of admitting the obvious and nominating another candidate or proceeding with an obviously impaired President. The problem is that if President Biden drops out of the race for reelection due to mental incompetence, how can he continue to serve as President at all for the next six months? Calls for resignation or invocation of the 25th amendment will be inevitable. This could have been avoided with a graceful exit in early 2024, followed by a competitive primary process in which the American people could have chosen the Democratic nominee for President.
The same people who throw around terms like “existential threat” when referring to Donald Trump use the same language when speaking about climate change. During the debate, President Biden told the country that climate change is the “only” existential threat to humanity, one of his frequent talking points. Even if we acknowledge that climate change is a threat, how can it be more of an existential threat than the flirtation with nuclear war due to American involvement in the Ukraine War?
When it comes to the war in Ukraine, anyone who dares to suggest that we should turn down the temperature through peace talks or other dialogue is accused of being a “Putin sympathizer”, just as we were told to “trust the science” blindly with respect to COVID vaccines. The same people who have lied to us repeatedly about the President’s mental competence now declare that our march toward a nuclear World War III is not even a debatable topic.
It is not even permissible to question whether it is morally defensible to provide Ukraine with enough weapons to achieve a stalemate, resulting in the deaths of countless thousand Ukrainian and Russian young men, but not enough weapons to win the war. We are told that much of the aid flows through our military industrial complex and “creates U.S. jobs” and that it is better to sacrifice Ukrainian lives than send Americans to war, as if this is a binary choice.
Anyone who raises the nuclear risk is summarily dismissed. Comparisons to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler prior to World War II are made without mention of the obvious fact that nuclear weapons were not a factor in geopolitics in 1939. We are told that if Putin wins in Ukraine, he would inevitably invade Western Europe, ignoring the fact that the Soviet Union never did so due to the realities of mutually assured destruction.
Again, the political class thinks we are stupid.
I was born in the United States over a half century ago and have had the great privilege of living through over twenty percent of our history as an independent country.
Over the years, I have witnessed an unmistakable decline in the political and social fabric of the United States. Life was hardly perfect during the 1970s and 1980s, and per-capita GDP was far lower than it is today, but I will assert that society was far healthier. One key factor is that Americans were almost uniformly proud of their country and its history. Schools had students recite the pledge of allegiance at the start of every day. American history was taught as something to be proud of. Our many blemishes, including slavery, were not hidden or glossed over, but we were taught to love our country.
All functional societies require a set of common beliefs, a national creed that transcends political parties, race, socioeconomic status, and other factors. America’s national identity has always been based on the example of the Founding Fathers. For all of their flaws, our founders were great men who came together in a remarkable generation and set in motion an experiment that still endures nearly two hundred and fifty years later. I think that our success would have surprised most of the founders. The fact is that the system of government put in place in 1789 endured so many national traumas because it was built to last.
Despite all of our problems today, the American experiment is not dead.
There is still an opportunity to correct course and rebuild the trust required for our society to flourish but this will require a political earthquake. The corrupt two party system, which is really two sides of the same coin, assisted by a mainstream media that acts more like publicists for one political party than objective journalists, needs to be entirely upended. I have no idea what our path to upending the current system might be, but if we do not at least try it is likely that our generation will be held responsible for betraying the sacrifices of the Founders and triggering the collapse of the republic.
This might not be an uplifting message to send on America’s 248th birthday. But when a family member is going off the rails due to dysfunctional behavior, the kind thing to do is to stage an intervention, not to recite undeserved praise. The same is true when writing about our country in troubled times.
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