Rebuilding Trust
Kevin Schmiesing is research director at the Freedom & Virtue Institute and editor of the Freedom & Virtue Review.
Provoked in part by grim poll findings and in part by lurid anecdotes, lamentations over the decline of trust in American life have become de rigueur. While the diagnoses of the causes don’t always mesh perfectly, there is common ground in a consensus on two points: Americans no longer trust each other or most authorities or institutions as much as they once did, and this is a bad thing. If we accept these conclusions, then an obvious question to ask is how to rebuild that trust. My own inclination is to follow the guideline that is almost always advisable: Start close to home.
Abe Rosenwald’s piece in the recent issue of Commentary is a helpful encapsulation of the problem of declining trust. Rosenwald lays out well the benefits of trust and the perils of distrust. He describes the ugly political scenarios that are a function of trust’s erosion. Importantly, he notes that Americans’ skepticism toward some heretofore admired institutions is rather well justified: “They’ve been lied to—often by establishment figures and institutional authorities.” And he rightly identifies the key factors in the cultivation of trust: the family, religious faith, and civic associations.
Rosenwald tries to end on an optimistic note, which is a practice I can respect, but in the process he overlooks a crucial connection and thereby fails to furnish a strategy for improving the situation. He finds hope in the fact that “Americans are voting for president in record numbers.” This robust participation in the political system, he thinks, belies the expressions of mistrust toward political institutions and signals an abiding faith in our “rugged democratic republic.” This may be right. Or it could be the opposite.
That is, it may be that the historically high level of interest in national politics is an effect of rather than a counterweight to declining levels of trust. The tendency to invest attention, resources, and emotional ballast in national political events—presidential elections in particular—may be a symptom of the very dynamics that have given us plummeting rates of trust.
This theory is founded on the premise that trust is both fostered and maintained most effectively in the context of intimate relationships. The family is obviously of primary importance, but neighbors, faith communities, school personnel, and local legal and political authorities are also crucial. If these relationships are not in order, there is little chance that national institutions can adequately substitute for them. Personal interactions have an irreplaceable role in the building of social capital and the preservation of mental and physical health. It seems unlikely that there is an incidental correlation between a decline of trust, a loneliness epidemic and a friendship recession.
This is why decentralization is one important element in the quest to fix what is wrong in American life. It is hard to build trust between a citizen and a US Representative who serves 800,000 other constituents. It is unrealistic to expect an employee to trust a CEO who oversees 80,000 other workers. But trust can be cultivated between people who see each other every day, every week, or every month at a worship service, an athletic event, or a committee meeting. Even when—especially when—these people have differing political views, they can still come to trust each other in a fundamental way that assumes that they will treat each other as persons rather than as disembodied avatars of “the enemy.”
But the trajectory of American politics has pushed in the other direction. As the reach of state and federal governments has expanded, more and more issues are removed from the purview of local authorities. Parents lose authority in their homes; pastors lose authority in their parishes; and mayors lose authority in their cities. Every issue becomes a national issue, and every policy is decided at a level far removed from anyone we know personally. In this situation, people devote their resources to national politics, because that’s where the action is. It is easier to hate (or adore) a national political figure to whom we have no personal connection than it is to deal with the flesh-and-blood human beings with whom we interact regularly and who therefore cannot be reduced to a caricature—good or evil.
John Grove made a similar point in a recent article on conservative dismay over our disintegrating culture. Allowing that general trends are troubling in many ways, Grove warns that an obsession with overarching political developments redirects our energy away from where we can actually have the most positive impact. “The inordinate focus on aggregate indicators,” he writes, “often leads to a dismissal of particular institutions that are functioning well—be they private schools and universities, faithful churches that continue to teach of sin and repentance, local governments, or voluntary associations—all of which are often seen as irrelevant, because in the national conversation, they are drowned out by the debauchery around them.” In another recent piece, Collin Slowey made an adjacent argument using the principle of subsidiarity: “If our immediate surroundings and concrete responsibilities constitute the arena in which we are most uniquely competent, then we should reserve our attention for those objects.”
Specifically, then, how might we go about improving the situation? It will require baby steps, but almost anyone can take them. Pay a little more attention to your own family and a little less to national trends and statistics. Pay a little more attention to local cultural organizations and a little less to national celebrities or programs. Pay a little more attention to your local house of worship and a little less to national or international religious figures and developments. And pay a little more attention to local politics and a little less to state and national affairs.
By shifting resources in this way, we can change the balance of power and restore the importance of those people and institutions that are closest to us. Among the potential benefits will be creating an environment where trust can thrive.