Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers, “Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Judith sees distrust as a sign of cultural maturity:

I believe that the widespread loss of trust in institutions is a combination of two equally strong forces. The first is our culture’s maturing beyond facile acceptance of what we are told by those institutions into a more confident posture of questioning what we are told based on what we know and believe.

The second force is the universal availability of information about every topic of interest in every country and every culture on Earth.

The second force feeds the first, and vice versa, leading to a noisier and more active populace.

The more naive an individual, the more trusting; the more knowledgeable the individual, the less trusting. As our society has matured over time, and as knowledge has spread exponentially, as a culture we have come to understand that institutional malfeasance is nothing new.

The mature within a society will naturally question institutional dominance and more responsibly and openly hold those institutions to higher standards of trustworthiness. Today more people are more knowledgeable than in all of history, and institutions have not quite caught up to that reality.

M. argues that “it is not the institutions that people distrust, rather it is the individuals who represent, work for, or act in the name of those institutions who have lost the public’s respect and trust.”

For example:

So many of our leaders across business, politics, religion, and social organizations see a leadership role as a way to enrich themselves or their families in the short term, regardless of the long-term cost to their organizations. It is much more difficult than in the past to do so without getting caught. Additionally, incremental changes that bring long-term gain are no longer considered success. We have to get everything we want immediately or we have failed, as reflected in short-term-ism for quarterly results in business and passing legislation only when you hold the White House and both houses of Congress in politics. That results in people cutting corners or working in the gray to get theirs while they can––and a decrease of trust in the institution, which is an innocent victim.

NK is “unbearably horrified with what has been happening to academia,” and explains:

I call it social-justice fundamentalism, or SJF. The pursuit of truth has been replaced with the pursuit of one faction’s preferred power dynamics. While this tendency has metastasized throughout our society (an example being that if I signed this email using my full name, I would undoubtedly lose my high-paying job due to the “harm” I cause to my peers with it), the battle over it should start and end in academia. The experiment done by Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay where they managed to get bogus papers into prestigious journals, combined with the DEI litmus tests that weed out social-justice fundamentalism’s critics, mean that academia cannot be trusted.

Gary perceives double standards and urges procedural fairness:

Americans love the idea of fairness. Institutions lose trust because they are viewed as playing favorites. Institutions that want trust from the nation need to rise above the political fray and latest social-media frenzy. Well-publicized standards and transparent execution of processes are essential to trust. We seem to be lacking all of that currently.

Errol is disappointed in public-health officials and media outlets:

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William says the question doesn’t quite apply to him:

I guess I don’t really think about trust; I try to analyze a shifting web of facts, policies, and motivations and try to understand why things happen. Then if something happens that I don’t like, I don’t necessarily feel betrayed but more resigned.

Peggy shares her professional background:

I have trust in institutions because I was once part of the most trusted: the military. I spent 35 years in the Army. I understand the training and the values that we embrace when taking on the mission. These things inculcate trust. The idea that suddenly people aren’t to be trusted is a fantasy––a willful, petulant, childish fantasy wrought by people who have everything. Journalists go to J-school to learn standards and their editors, supervisors, and fact-checkers hold them to account. Judges and lawyers go to law school where the Constitution, the laws, and their peers hold them to account. Officers and noncommissioned officers go to military-leadership schools designed to maintain readiness, and that includes diversity training because experts in readiness say it’s important to understand each other if we are to fight and win wars. And then our Uniform Code of Military Justice holds us to account.

The broadcast media, the internet, social media, and other permission structures have led the masses to distrust institutions. Our billion-dollar outrage machines pander to intellectual toddlers in order to make money. What don’t those things have? Standards and accountability.

WJM has similar frustrations:

Yes, I have a lot of trust in governmental institutions. What I don’t trust is the people that make it their mission to erode this trust by weakening those institutions to make them seem ineffective and counter to popular will, thus making a self-fulfilling prophecy of their decline.

Andrew is pessimistic about the future:

My faith in American institutions has never been lower. Like the printing press before, the communication revolution of social media has continued to chip away at the old paradigm where information was disseminated from leaders down to their constituents. Now misinformation spreads like wildfire across platforms and leaders are forced to indulge the passions of the mob. The printing press ignited a century of warfare in Europe and I fear that social media will continue to have a similar destabilizing effect in our current era.

Gordon, however, is optimistic:

I have about the same trust in our institutions as 10 years ago. Our nation has gone through a great test these past six years. And it has withstood all challenges. Today our nation better realizes that the voters are the ones in charge. Also, due to those recent challenges, office holders, bureaucrats, and people serving in the military are all more aware of the oaths they took: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I think by the end of next year, after the election results are in, this nation will be more unified and its positive feelings about institutions will be even stronger.

RS felt cynical about institutions for a long time, but two things changed that:

First, air travel. It’s gotten safer and safer year after year. When you reflect on how incredible air travel is—from planes to flight systems to air-traffic control to flight administration to FAA safety regulations—it’s an astonishing achievement. And if you think along these lines, you realize that a lot of institutions work really well.

Next: I’ve come to realize that so much of the mistrust we experience is because it serves political interests to make us feel bad all the time. Rage and fear fuel mistrust, which is used to propel us into action. Once you realize that, the mistrust begins to fade and you realize that a lot of things do in fact work, especially on the ground level. Criminals get caught. Doctors aren’t always beholden to drug companies. Deciding NOT to get manipulated into feeling bad helps one to see the things that do work, which are a lot.

John is down on SCOTUS:

I’m in my mid-70s and have experienced quite a number of events that could lead one to mistrust our national institutions, but until Mitch McConnell denied President Obama the ability to put a Supreme Court nominee before the full Senate for an up-or-down vote, I had felt that our federal justice system was trustworthy. During their confirmation hearings, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, when asked about Roe v. Wade, answered [ambiguously] and then when the first opportunity came to overturn it, they did. I will not trust there will be a good-faith constitutional ruling from this Court as long as those three and Alito and Thomas (who should be impeached) are on the bench. I expect Congress and the president to be political, not the Supreme Court.

Ben is down on business:

I’ve become a lot more politically engaged in the last eight years, and I’m much more apt to be suspicious of American institutions based on how they act, rather than just trusting or distrusting them writ large. For example, I tend to get frustrated with “mainstream” news outlets for the way they cover the news sometimes, but that’s quite a bit different than mistrusting say, Fox News, when they were cheerfully spreading 2020 election misinformation. I tend to view government agencies like the DOD, FBI, and CIA favorably regardless of who sits in the White House, because they’re staffed by career professionals. But when they misbehave, I feel they should be held to account. By contrast, the DHS, which is a post-9/11 creature, has not in my view maintained the same standards of lawfulness and professionalism as its peer agencies.

But if there’s one American institution whose trust has “bottomed out” with me, that would be our business community. The movie Erin Brockovich came out 23 years ago, detailing a story about a California utility company that willfully poisoned a huge number of innocent Americans. In the decades that followed, it seems to me that American corporations have become more unaccountable, not less. Oil companies lying about climate change, tech companies lying about privacy and social harms, food manufacturers squeezing out safety precautions and devastating the farmers who rely on them—the list goes on.

The behavior of America’s 21st-century business community calls to mind the behavior of big monopolies in the early 20th century. It took some huge steps from labor activists and eventually the federal government to rein them in, and decades of deregulation, Borkian antitrust policy, lax campaign-finance laws, and overall consolidation seems to have returned us to the dynamics of that miserable era. I feel extremely firmly that this is the biggest systemic issue facing our country, and breaking up a very large number of these huge conglomerates would do an incalculable amount of good.

Ryan muses on living in interesting times:

The institutions held, just barely, in the face of Trump’s incompetent attempt to be an autocrat. That’s a point for trust. And yet the institution (or system) of our two parties is failing. A point against trust. While no one beyond the age of 10 years old could ever trust either party, both always spinning for their advantage, we now have a fully anti-democracy party that cannot help but degrade all other institutions, some more than others. One thing we can say with certainty is that things change. Are these the growing pains of a young democracy (which actually begins in practice with the end of Jim Crow)? Are these backlashes against institutions part of a cycle that exposes systemic racism and the vilification of poor people by (mostly) those who are trying to destroy our institutions? Is this anti-democracy party in its slow death throes, leading to an era where genuine common ground can be reached? The easy answer to the question you pose is obviously “less trust.” But have we not seen our current administration use institutions very effectively to create new laws that will actually help many people who need it and change the way we use energy (Inflation Reduction Act)?

So the answer is my trust is more fragile than 10 years ago, not less or more, because I can see very easily how our institutions could be completely destroyed in a matter of months, and yet I can also see how our institutions might be strengthened by enduring this period of great stress, and emerging with two (mostly) pro-democracy parties. I mean, the Cold War 2.0 has already begun. I wish there was a better motivating force (like saving the planet, ending needless suffering), but that very well might be what aligns people’s interests and shores up institutions in the near(ish) future.  

And Robin harkens back to the first viral video of police misconduct:

There used to be an adage that “seeing is believing.”  The day that notion died was March 3, 1991, over 32 years ago, when the LAPD were videoed beating up Rodney King … yet a subsequent jury found them not guilty. Since then there have been numerous examples of the public being disappointed and let down by institutions that they had always trusted: widespread sexual abuse throughout the Catholic Church, abuse within school systems, fraud on Wall Street and in the mismanagement of insurance and pension funds. I could go on, but, since 2016 and his arrival on the political scene, Donald Trump (and his many lies) has accelerated American delusion with just about everything, including the Supreme Court.

It’s fortunate that somebody filmed George Floyd being beaten up and justice was served. But the damage was done over 30 years ago and nothing has been the same since.

Back in 2014, I published “Video Killed Trust in Police Officers,” a thesis that held up well in ensuing years.