Trust as the Foundation of Democracy

Every day we organize our lives around trust in people we have never met. Listening to the weather report, waiting for a bus, asking for directions, eating at a restaurant, putting money in a bank or accepting someone else’s check, giving out our credit card number on the internet, and in dozens of other ways, our daily lives are based on trusting that people will be honest and do what they say they will. Without high levels of trust in other people and the institutions they represent, the free flow of goods and services on which we depend would stop, and our social interactions would shrivel.

During my lifetime, trust in public institutions has fallen. Trust in government was very high in the postwar period, remaining at nearly 80% during the Kennedy years. My generation is partly responsible for increased skepticism about what government tells us. During the 1960s the unprecedented suspicion of young Americans toward people in power turned out to be justified. The government lied to us about the war it was waging in Vietnam. LBJ’s fabrication about the Tonkin Gulf incident was only the most egregious example. Year after year, official military reports about the war consistently painted a false picture of success. The dogged and dangerous reporting of print and TV journalists eventually brought us a truer image of endless stalemate. President Nixon’s dishonesty served as further proof that our government was not to be trusted to tell us uncomfortable truths. I remember devouring the daily news as the Watergate scandal developed. Government lied and covered up, media uncovered and revealed what we deserved to know.

Trust in government fell precipitously after 1965, varying between 20% and 40% (except for a brief jump right after 9/11) until recently, hitting only 17% earlier this year. This plunge was common to both parties, all generations, blacks, whites and Hispanics.

The self-congratulatory myths about American society as uniquely free and equal drilled into our heads at school were exploded by the realities brought to light by the civil rights movement. The American past had been whitewashed by generations of authorities in schools and colleges, media and government. High school history texts and college courses portrayed slavery as a beneficent system. The mass murder of Native Americans, the persistence of lynching into the 20^th century, the ubiquity of discrimination in North and South were hidden from view. Again the media took the lead in revealing the truth about systematic discrimination, displaying for all to see the violence behind segregation.

Although the unpleasant revelations of the late 1960s and 1970s damaged popular trust in leading institutions, the skepticism they engendered is healthy. No government should be trusted to tell the full truth about how well its policies are working. Taken as a whole, the media tend to provide a rosy picture of our society. But while “Father Knows Best” embodied the white myths about American life, news broadcasts and articles brought the disturbing information about war and racism into our homes.

The series of Gallup polls shows the broad decline in trust in major American institutions since 1975. The proportions of Americans who said that they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in organized religion fell from 68% to 36%, in Congress from 40% to 11%, in the presidency from 52% to 38%, in public schools from 62% to 29%, in the medical system from 80% to 36%, in banks from 60% to 30%, in television news from 46% to 18%, and in newspapers from 39% to 23%. These are startling numbers. Trust in the military and the police has not fallen.

A Pew survey at the end of last year demonstrates the current widespread distrust of people in power in America. 17% of those surveyed believe that members of Congress act unethically “all or most of the time”, and another 64% think this happens “some of the time”. Leaders of technology companies, journalists, and religious leaders are also mistrusted by two-thirds of Americans. The best ratings are given to military leaders and public school principals, but more than half of the public thinks they, too, act unethically more than “a little”.

What has further eroded trust is the concerted partisan attack on the institution that has most consistently delivered the information we desperately need – the media. In response to more openly critical news coverage of the American status quo, conservatives made the news itself into the enemy. Nixon was the first President to make the press into a significant target, even though an amazing 93% of American newspapers had endorsed him in 1972. Once the Watergate scandal began to dominate the news, Nixon attacked the media as unfair. In late 1972, he told Henry Kissinger, “Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy…write that on the blackboard 100 times.” Vice President Spiro Agnew had been attacking news reporting since he took office in 1969.

For a long time, it appeared that this Republican strategy had little effect on Republican voters. Surveys from 1990 through 2005 showed that the difference between Republican and Democratic respondents about their trust in the media was relatively small. Between 60% and 70% of Democrats thought that news organizations tended to favor one side in their reporting, as did about 75% of Republicans. After 2006, as the Bush administration lost popularity, more and more Republican voters turned against the news. The mistrustful Republican proportion jumped to about 85%, where it has remained. When Sarah Palin based her 2008 campaign on attacking the “lamestream media”, she was preaching to the Republican base.

Most recently the mistrustful Democratic proportion fell to 52%. Overall, trust in the news is very low, but with significant partisan differences: 35% of Democrats, but only 12% of Republicans say they trust the information they get from national news organizations “a lot”. Less than half of Republicans think journalists “provide fair and accurate information” and less than one-third think they “cover all sides of an issue fairly”, while these percentages for Democrats are 84% and 74%.

This partisan lack of trust in the news is not healthy. Conservatives who mistrust national news organizations have shifted their attention to openly biased and often untruthful internet sources, like Breitbart News and Alex Jones’ Infowars. There they absorb packaged nonsense which reinforces their prejudices, along with more claims that the real news is “fake news”.

Skepticism about those who wield power, including news organizations, is healthy when it encourages careful criticism, fact-checking, an unwillingness to take opinion as fact. Conservatives hate the mainstream media which reveals what they don’t want to know, especially when their President is constantly shown to be a liar, and perhaps a traitor to the Constitution.

Blind trust is foolish. Blind distrust is dangerous.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

September 24, 2019

Democrats Tell Personal Stories and Explain Policy Ideas and Sometimes, Debate

After greeting the crowd at Texas Southern University, Julián Castro opened the Democratic debate last week with this important insight: “There will be life after Donald Trump. But the truth is that our problems didn’t start just with Donald Trump, and we won’t solve them by embracing old ideas.” All the Democratic candidates agree on Castro’s analysis of the past, that our American problems which need to be solved have been developing for a long time. They agree that we will go on, perhaps to a bright future, after Trump is gone. The fundamental disagreements among the candidates center on Castro’s rejection of “old ideas”: how much progressive change is the right amount in this election?

Joe Biden represents the most moderate positions, although his ideas are hardly old. In fact, he has had to repudiate many of his old ideas during this campaign: working with segregationists in Congress was a good thing; Obamacare as it was enacted was good enough; harsh sentencing did less to control crime than to put a generation of mostly African Americans behind bars. Politicians from the 1960s have had to change many fundamental ideas, but are very bad at admitting that positions they took long ago are not right for today.

Castro, and many of the other candidates who appeared at the 3^rd debate, as well as others who still believe they have a chance, criticize Biden, hoping to peel off the moderate Democratic voters who support him. On health care, which has taken center stage as the crucial issue of 2020, Castro magnified a minor difference with Biden, but took what has become the moderate position, arguing for the retention of private health insurance plans: “If they choose to hold on to strong, solid private health insurance, I believe they should be able to do.” He claimed to be fulfilling the legacy of Barack Obama, a key clue that he stands with the more moderate candidates.

At the other end of the field, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to eliminate private health plans entirely in favor of Medicare for All. Sanders and Warren hold up the private insurance industry for ridicule as siphoning off billions of dollars in profit. Their differences between them lie less in policy than in approach. Warren has plans for structural reform in favor of the neglected little guy, while Sanders thinks instead of a revolution against the oligarchy.

Many of the more moderate Democratic candidates have already fallen by the wayside: John Hickenlooper, Steve Bullock, Seth Moulton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney. The latest poll from yesterday, like all last week’s polls, show Biden in the lead, but the very progressive Sanders and Warren combined have significantly more support. Among the rest, only Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O’Rourke consistently get more than 2%. The field is thankfully shrinking, and will gradually become more manageable. The election is still nearly 14 months away.

As a prelude to the actual debate, ABC chose a sentence from each candidate’s earlier speeches to play in the order that the candidates were ranked. I found it notable that all these excerpts except Biden’s (“I will be a president for every American.”) talked about “we”. Who knows how that came about? Did someone pick these clips to demonstrate the fundamental unity among all Democratic candidates? I don’t know if we’ll ever find out.

That message of unity is my “takeaway” from the campaign so far. The cohesion and shared values are hard to see, though. The nature of a campaign is that everyone is competing with everyone, and against everyone. The media compulsion to broadcast conflict shapes the whole process, for candidates and for us all. That was apparent in the moderators’ questions: instead of asking “what do you believe?” or “what would you do?”, they demanded discussion of disagreements.

To see how the media shapes our impressions of the campaign, it is instructive to see two attempts to summarize the debate in a few clips, by ABC News, as fact, and by Stephen Colbert, for laughs.

Right after the debate, ABC produced 4 minutes of “Moments That Mattered”. The selection was a serious exercise in media repackaging. Every heated exchange was included: Biden and Sanders arguing about health care; Castro castigating Biden about the small differences in their health care plans and about his memory, and all of the other conflicts involving Castro; Klobuchar versus Sanders about health care. Harris was shown criticizing Trump, Booker only got to talk about his early electoral failures, Buttigieg only to complain about the emphasis on conflict. The more extreme proposals were highlighted: Yang’s philanthropic offer of $1000 a month to some needy families; Beto O’Rourke saying he would take away assault rifles. Elizabeth Warren apparently did not matter to ABC and was not shown at all, because she spent her time explaining rather than attacking.

Stephen Colbert’s monologue later that night tells a different story, not only because he is much funnier. For 12 minutes, he used excerpts of what America had just seen to get laughs after laughs. Colbert’s principles were clear: portray every candidate truthfully, and then make fun. He made fun of Sanders’ voice, Biden’s age, Harris’s vagueness on what to call the unmasked little Wizard of Oz, and Klobuchar’s movie reference.

Colbert began by talking about “fireworks” and gleefully displayed a few moments of real one-on-one conflict. But by the time Colbert wound up, most of the candidates had their say about something important, even when he fantasized something funny in response. Klobuchar expressed the “existential threat” to our environment. Beto told the world he would take away assault rifles. Bernie said that Medicare for All would cost our society much less than we’re spending now. Yang made his remarkable philanthropic offer. Harris showed off her plan on how to deal with Trump – laugh at him. Biden emphasized his link to Obama. Warren got a brief moment of real American family á la Norman Rockwell, which is a staple in her campaign. Buttigieg summarized a universal, but ever ignored wisdom about our never-ending wars – don’t start them. Castro said everybody would be covered under his health plan. Only Booker was left out.

Age is playing a surprising role in this campaign. It certainly matters, but it’s hard to say how it matters. Laughing at old men was in lots of Colbert’s jokes about Biden and Sanders. The clip of Castro and Biden interrupting each other was about age. But Buttigieg, the youngest candidate since the beginning, said nothing disparaging about the older candidates.

Warren is 70, but she gets left out of the public laughter about the elderly. Maybe because her age is not apparent in what she does. But it’s notable that everybody finds her hard to criticize. That may be a hidden advantage for her campaign.

Maybe a difference in purpose led to these differences in reportage. Although Trump incessantly whines about the mainstream networks as “fake news” trying to defeat him, ABC was much more interested in promoting conflict as significant, who’s ahead, who’s desperate, who is nasty about whom. All the networks and all the print media try hard not to put themselves on one side or the other, even as they pick and choose what to tell us.

Colbert was clear about his purpose in his monologue. Toward the beginning, he called Trump a non-violent criminal. At the end, he said: “What did we get? . . . hopefully, one person who can beat Donald Trump.”
 

The news isn’t fake, but it is spun, not false, but often misleading about important things. Colbert tells obviously fake stories, but gives us a better picture of reality. Unfortunately, this election is not a laughing matter.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

September 17, 2019

The Divine Right Presidency

Trump’s latest use of our government to cover up his mistakes, this time about weather forecasting, is revealing about the nature of his Presidency.

No government weather maps showed Hurricane Dorian threatening Alabama. On Thursday, August 29, Trump was briefed in the Oval Office on the Hurricane by the head of FEMA, which released a photo of him looking at a map of where Dorian had been and where it was headed. A white curved line showed the areas that Dorian might possibly hit. Not Alabama.

Early Saturday morning, August 31, the National Hurricane Center realized that Dorian was not going to hit Florida directly, and threat projections were shifted further east. The next morning, Sunday, at 7:51 AM Trump tweeted the following: “In addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

The National Weather Service’s Birmingham office reacted in 20 minutes, tweeting at 8:11: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”

For Alabamans, whew. For Trump, though, emergency – he had made a mistake. Nobody died, his tweet perhaps scared some people, but he had been wrong, and that was impossible. At noon on Sunday at FEMA headquarters, he repeated that Alabama remained in the path of the storm, based on “new information”.

As the Hurricane moved north, doing tremendous damage but having nothing to do with Alabama, the storm in Washington about Alabama intensified. On Monday Trump repeated his clam that Alabama was in danger. By then, it was clear to everyone that Alabama would remain untouched, and the controversy shifted to whether Trump was correct that Alabama had been part of earlier forecasts. On Wednesday, Trump brought out the map from his briefing 6 days earlier. Somewhere in the White House, a new black Sharpie line had been added, extending Dorian’s “threat” another 100 miles west into a corner of Alabama.

On Thursday, Rear Admiral Peter J. Brown, Trump’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, released a statement that Alabama had been in the path of the storm. Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce who oversees NOAA and the National Weather Service, threatened to fire any employee who contradicted Trump. On Friday afternoon, NOAA disavowed the Birmingham NWS office’s statement that Alabama would not be hit.

We all might soon forget this saga of Dorian and Alabama when the next outrage emerges, but its details display the character of our current government. Right-wing populist politicians and parties in democratic systems across the globe are being examined for their similarities to 20th-century fascists. Trump however is no strongman, he commands no armed militia of followers, who brutalize opponents. He acts more like the unelected monarchs who ruled for hundreds of years by divine right. Trump is the state and “L’état, c’est moi,” as Louis XIV is supposed to have said.

Trump’s equation of himself with the state emerges in many of his statements. When the prime minister of Denmark curtly rejected Trump’s notion of buying Greenland, he said, “She’s not talking to me, she’s talking to the United States of America. You don’t talk to the United States that way.”

Let’s add up some individual instances where Trump has identified the USA with himself, made the government into his personal servants, and claimed unprecedented powers to do whatever he wants. As soon as he was inaugurated, he enlisted the National Park Service to crop photos of the inauguration to pretend that his crowd was larger than Obama’s. He ordered by tweet all US companies to stop doing business with China. He claimed he had the right to end the Constitutional provision of birthright citizenship by executive order. He threatened to close our southern border with military force to stop migrants. He deployed the National Guard and active-duty troops to the southern border to deal with the “emergency” that he had created.

In response to Robert Mueller’s investigation, Trump’s lawyers created an argument that the President cannot commit obstruction because he can do anything he wants: “the President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations. Thus as a matter of law and common sense, the President cannot obstruct himself or subordinates acting on his behalf by simply exercising these inherent Constitutional powers. This led Trump to claim that he has the “absolute right to PARDON myself.”

King George III said during the American Revolution that “A traitor is everyone who does not agree with me.” Trump has often characterized his critics as traitors: when Democrats did not applaud his State of the Union speech in 2018; any Jews who vote for Democrats; congressional Democrats for opposing his anti-immigration policies. The website AXIOS counted 24 times by this past June that Trump had accused other Americans of treason.

Things didn’t turn out so well for George III, when the American colonists decided that he did not represent them. To prevent Trump from crowning himself King Don I, Americans will again have to reject divine right pretensions.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

September 10, 2019