本月初,美国司法部长巴尔(William
Barr)接受媒体问时表示,未有发现大选出现大规模欺诈及舞弊。然而,总统特朗普随后再次指控大选舞弊,不承认落败。有民调指,七成共和党人不认为今次大选自由及公平。这表面上是一场选举之争,其实是美国社会存在一种不健康的「痉挛症状」(convulsion)的反映。
由于新冠肺炎疫情打击,继近年出现的「美国衰落论」和「美国过度衰落论」的辩论后,美国近月又开始出现「痉挛论」(convulsionism)论述。本文尝试梳理美国社会正在经历的「道德痉挛」危机的历史轨迹和深层面向,进而探讨其文化根由,并研判未来发展。
10月初,美国《大西洋》(The Atlantic)杂志出版题为《美国正患有道德痉挛》(America Is Having a
Moral
Convulsion)的文章,剖析当前美国政治和制度信心危机的发展周期、不同面向和历史根由。作为结合历史社会学、心理学和政治学的跨科际理论,「道德痉挛论」指一个社会正经历着普遍性文化失序局面,导致社会撕裂、衝突,甚至内战。身处其中的民众因而对政府和各种现存制度极度不信任,使得国家和社会各领域陷于不断失控抽搐的状态。而且,由于国家和社会痉挛自我复原需时,要推断其复原时间长短,抑或痉挛是否为长期衰落的一个阶段,殊不容易。
每隔六十年「发作」一次
其实,美国历史已出现过多次痉挛「病发」,差不多每隔六十年便「发作」一次。首次痉挛出现于十八世纪六十至七十年代,并引致1775至1783年的「独立战争」。
第二次是十九世纪二十至三十年代的杰克逊式民主起义运动(Jacksonian democracy
uprising)。当时,杰克逊式民主主义者受欧洲的「唯农论」(farmerism)政治社会思潮影响,批评以工业资本主义为组织核心的精英垄断制度只给予精英投票权,忽略平民百姓的政经权利和诉求。运动最终导致多州政府立法通过白人全民公投、政治任命和轮替制度,以及反对政府授权银行进行金融垄断等民本主义措施。
第三次痉挛是十九和二十世纪之交的「进步时代」(Progressive
Era)。随着工业资本主义经济的深化和发展,进步主义运动针对当时「臣僕派系政治」(patron-client
factionalism)中的贪腐问题及其最大得益者。进步主义运动粉碎政经垄断,导致工会和工人组织的崛起。
第四次痉挛是上世纪六十至七十年代的社会抗争运动,示威浪潮席捲全国。这几次运动的共同点是美国人民对社会现状感到不满,不信任制度和鄙视建制,导致道德沦亡。
儘管特朗普已败选,美国社会的「抽筋」现象仍会继续。(路透社)
1981年,美国政治学者亨廷顿(Samuel
Huntington)便已预测第五次痉挛将于本世纪二十至三十年代出现。笔者认为,美国在过去这十年里已出现痉挛症状,而特朗普所代表的民粹主义政权只不过是美国正式抽筋的开始,新冠肺炎疫情便使美国全面陷入痉挛。即使特朗普败选,美国抽筋现象仍将持续。
痉挛的核心问题是美国民众已失去信心,美国也正在透过这动盪过程尝试重建社会共识、制度和秩序。但究竟美国是正在转型抑或衰落,现时仍很难判断,因为现在跟过去四次痉挛的内外部环境有很多差异。
America Is Having a Moral Convulsion
Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail. Can we get it back before it’s too late?
Story by David Brooks OCTOBER 5, 2020
American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s.
These moments share certain features.
People feel disgusted by the state of society. Trust in
institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread. Contempt
for established power is intense.
A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new
modes of communication to seize control of the national
conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take
over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement,
frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would
hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st
century—that is, right about now. And, of course, he was correct.
Our moment of moral convulsion began somewhere around the
mid-2010s, with the rise of a range of outsider groups: the white
nationalists who helped bring Donald Trump to power; the young
socialists who upended the neoliberal consensus and brought us
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; activist students on
campus; the Black Lives Matter movement, which rose to prominence
after the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice.
Systems lost legitimacy. The earthquake had begun.
The events of 2020—the coronavirus pandemic; the killing of George
Floyd; militias, social-media mobs, and urban unrest—were like
hurricanes that hit in the middle of that earthquake. They did not
cause the moral convulsion, but they accelerated every trend. They
flooded the ravines that had opened up in American society and
exposed every flaw.
Now, as we enter the final month of the election, this period of
convulsion careens toward its climax. Donald Trump is in the
process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking
every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable
to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country
the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic
credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every
word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he
threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November
and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a
charred and shattered nation. Trump is the final instrument of this
crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him
so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those
conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
From the July/August 2020 issue: History will judge the
complicit
This essay is an account of the convulsion that brought us to this
fateful moment. Its central focus is social trust. Social trust is
a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people
and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their
promises and work for the common good. When people in a church lose
faith or trust in God, the church collapses. When people in a
society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each
other, the nation collapses.
This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America
became a more untrustworthy society. It is an account of how, under
the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social
order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still. We
had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build
trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society
caught in a distrust doom loop.
Read: Trust is collapsing in America
When moral convulsions recede, the national consciousness is
transformed. New norms and beliefs, new values for what is admired
and disdained, arise. Power within institutions gets renegotiated.
Shifts in the collective consciousness are no merry ride; they come
amid fury and chaos, when the social order turns liquid and nobody
has any idea where things will end. Afterward, people sit blinking,
battered, and shocked: What kind of nation have we become?
We can already glimpse pieces of the world after the current
cataclysm. The most important changes are moral and cultural. The
Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family
stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The
mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since
was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from
institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and
liberation.
The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of
security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed,
financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children
can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents,
the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is
vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety. Thus
the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will
dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not
liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not
individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim
meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice. Once a
generation forms its general viewpoint during its young adulthood,
it generally tends to carry that mentality with it to the grave 60
years later. A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is
here.
One question has haunted me while researching this essay: Are we
living through a pivot or a decline? During past moral convulsions,
Americans rose to the challenge. They built new cultures and
institutions, initiated new reforms—and a renewed nation went on to
its next stage of greatness. I’ve spent my career rebutting the
idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six
years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a
broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital
organ.
Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and
construction difficult to see. The problem goes beyond Donald
Trump. The stench of national decline is in the air. A political,
social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain
whole if we can build a new order in its place.
The Age of Disappointment
the story begins, at least for me, in August 1991, in Moscow, where
I was reporting for The Wall Street Journal. In a last desperate
bid to preserve their regime, a group of hard-liners attempted a
coup against the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.
As Soviet troops and tanks rolled into Moscow, democratic activists
gathered outside the Russian parliament building to oppose them.
Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, mounted a tank and stood
the coup down.
In that square, I met a 94-year-old woman who was passing out
sandwiches to support the democratic protesters. Her name was
Valentina Kosieva. She came to embody for me the 20th century, and
all the suffering and savagery we were leaving behind as we
marched—giddily, in those days—into the Information Age. She was
born in 1898 in Samara. In 1905, she said, the Cossacks launched
pogroms in her town and shot her uncle and her cousin. She was
nearly killed after the Russian Revolution of 1917. She had
innocently given shelter to some anti-Communist soldiers for
“humanitarian reasons.” When the Reds came the next day, they
decided to execute her. Only her mother’s pleadings saved her
life.
In 1937, the Soviet secret police raided her apartment based on
false suspicions, arrested her husband, and told her family they
had 20 minutes to vacate. Her husband was sent to Siberia, where he
died from either disease or execution—she never found out which.
During World War II, she became a refugee, exchanging all her
possessions for food. Her son was captured by the Nazis and beaten
to death at the age of 17. After the Germans retreated, the Soviets
ripped her people, the Kalmyks, from their homes and sent them into
internal exile. For decades, she led a hidden life, trying to cover
the fact that she was the widow of a supposed Enemy of the
People.
Every trauma of Soviet history had happened to this woman. Amid the
tumult of what we thought was the birth of a new, democratic
Russia, she told me her story without bitterness or rancor. “If you
get a letter completely free from self-pity,” Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn once wrote, it can only be from a victim of Soviet
terror. “They are used to the worst the world can do, and nothing
can depress them.” Kosieva had lived to see the death of this hated
regime and the birth of a new world.
Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was
falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming
down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United
States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave
way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill
Clinton. The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap
narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working:
capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It
seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of
History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory
for economic and political liberalism.”
We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false
summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos. The
first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming
down. Everybody was coming together. The second theme was the
triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a
philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual
freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist
world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was
the great embodiment and champion of this liberation. The third
theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were
liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had
the freedom to be true to themselves.
For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan
Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he
described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had
been for generations. Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to
suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called
moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual
finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists
on individual freedom.
When you look back on it from the vantage of 2020, moral freedom,
like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a
core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything
will work out for everybody. If everybody pursues their own
economic self-interest, then the economy will thrive for all. If
everybody chooses their own family style, then children will
prosper. If each individual chooses his or her own moral code, then
people will still feel solidarity with one another and be decent to
one another. This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum
sacrifice.
It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized
economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet
would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people
would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up
the ladders of opportunity behind them. We didn’t predict that
oligarchs would steal entire nations, or that demagogues from
Turkey to the U.S. would ignite ethnic hatreds. We didn’t see that
a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all
of childhood into elite travel sports where a few privileged
performers get to play and everyone else gets left behind.
Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to
unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was
being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts
broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the
outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to
the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a
decade.
We are living in the age of that disappointment. Millennials and
members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment,
knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced
a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young.
It has produced a crisis of trust.
The Trust Fall
social trust is the confidence that other people will do what they
ought to do most of the time. In a restaurant I trust you to serve
untainted fish and you trust me not to skip out on the bill. Social
trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It
consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we
are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the
assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of
what is the right thing to do in different situations. As Kevin
Vallier of Bowling Green State University argues in his forthcoming
book, Trust in a Polarized Age, social trust also depends on a
sense that we share the same norms. If two lanes of traffic are
merging into one, the drivers in each lane are supposed to take
turns. If you butt in line, I’ll honk indignantly. I’ll be angry,
and I’ll want to enforce the small fairness rules that make our
society function smoothly.
High-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous
sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate
action, and sacrifice for the common good. When you look at
research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback
loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust.
In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship
is catalyzed. Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality,
because people feel connected to each other and are willing to
support a more generous welfare state. People in high-trust
societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in
social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and
Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies. Nations with
low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling
economies. As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever
matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it
thrives.”
During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars,
Americans expressed high faith in their institutions. In 1964, for
example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal
government to do the right thing most or all of the time. Then came
the last two moral convulsions. In the late 1960s and ’70s, amid
Vietnam and Watergate, trust in institutions collapsed. By 1994,
only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the
right thing. Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and
the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained
pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of
people who were actively and poisonously alienated—who were not
only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is
not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it
is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive
distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not
just wrong but illegitimate. In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a
great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their
fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.
Falling trust in institutions is bad enough; it’s when people lose
faith in each other that societies really begin to fall apart. In
most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But
for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around
them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say
so—the numbers have actually risen.
In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In
2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at
the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed
that “most people can be trusted,” the lowest number the survey has
recorded since it started asking the question in 1972. Today, a
majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they
first meet them.
Is mistrust based on distorted perception or is it a reflection of
reality? Are people increasingly mistrustful because they are
watching a lot of negative media and get a falsely dark view of the
world? Or are they mistrustful because the world is less
trustworthy, because people lie, cheat, and betray each other more
than they used to?
There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic
cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but
it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of
society—how honest people are, and how faithful. The evidence
suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a
distorted perception. Trust is the ratio between the number of
people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful
to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than
there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports
around people than there used to be. Hundreds of books and studies
on declining social capital and collapsing family structure
demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less
likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can
trust.
Thus the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam argues that it’s
a great mistake to separate the attitude (trust) from the behavior
(morally right action). People become trusting when the world
around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who
live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as
a fair place. As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of
the moral condition of a nation at any given time. I’d add that
high national trust is a collective moral achievement. High
national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be
suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s
virtue.
Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America
are among the most marginalized. Trust, like much else, is
unequally distributed across American society, and the inequality
is getting worse. Each of these marginalized groups has seen an
additional and catastrophic decline in trust over the past few
years.
Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in
American history; their distrust is earned distrust. In 2018, 37.3
percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted,
according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of
Black Americans felt the same. This is not general misanthropy.
Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the
wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons. And
Black perceptions of America’s fairness have tumbled further in the
age of disappointment. In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were
very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in
the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to
Gallup.
The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the
lower-middle class and the working poor. According to Tim Dixon, an
economist and the co-author of a 2018 study that examined
polarization in America, this group makes up about 40 percent of
the country. “They are driven by the insecurity of their place in
society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of
technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy
theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is
trying to trick them, that the world is against them,” he says.
Distrust motivated many in this group to vote for Donald Trump, to
stick a thumb in the eye of the elites who had betrayed them.
This brings us to the third marginalized group that scores
extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people
who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they
know.
In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can
be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In
contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be
trusted. Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that
“most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according
to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young
adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if
they got a chance.”
Many young people look out at a world they believe is screwed up
and untrustworthy in fundamental ways. A mere 10 percent of Gen
Zers trust politicians to do the right thing. Millennials are twice
as likely as their grandparents to say that families should be able
to opt out of vaccines. Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67
percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of
people who are not like them. Fewer than a third of Millennials say
America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64
percent of members of the Silent Generation.
Human beings need a basic sense of security in order to thrive; as
the political scientist Ronald F. Inglehart puts it, their “values
and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.”
In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away. Some
of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist
attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home
that leaves young people incapable of handling real-world stress.
But the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.
First, financial insecurity: By the time the Baby Boomers hit a
median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s
wealth. As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of
35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s
wealth.
Next, emotional insecurity: Americans today experience more
instability than at any period in recent memory—fewer children
growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent
households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
Then, identity insecurity. People today live in what the late
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called liquid modernity. All the traits
that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now
determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender,
your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging.
Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young
adulthood.
Finally, social insecurity. In the age of social media our
“sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are
seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I
affirmed? Why do I feel invisible? We see ourselves in how we think
others see us. Their snarkiness turns into my self-doubt, their
criticism into my shame, their obliviousness into my humiliation.
Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think
without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think
about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has
written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as
your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other
people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a
personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next
person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”
In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.
The Distrust Mindset
distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile
Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from
society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you
are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you
can really trust is yourself.
Distrustful people try to make themselves invulnerable, armor
themselves up in a sour attempt to feel safe. Distrust and
spiritual isolation lead people to flee intimacy and try to replace
it with stimulation. Distrust, anxiety, and anomie are at the root
of the 73 percent increase in depression among Americans aged 18 to
25 from 2007 to 2018, and of the shocking rise in suicide. “When we
have no one to trust, our brains can self-destruct,” Ulrich Boser
writes in his book on the science of trust, The Leap.
People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t
there; they become risk averse. Americans take fewer risks and are
much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate
of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early
1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year
has dropped by 56 percent. People lose faith in experts. They lose
faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of
modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice
versa,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes in his book Morality.
In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the
ideology of those who feel betrayed. Contempt for “insiders” rises,
as does suspicion toward anybody who holds authority. People are
drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who
tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more
political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems
that give them a sense of security. As Hannah Arendt once observed,
fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel
naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust
shrinks, and they only trust their own kind. Donald Trump is the
great emblem of an age of distrust—a man unable to love, unable to
trust. When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who
looks at the world as they do.
By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the
plague arrived.
The Failure of Institutions
from the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with
sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April,
Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the
share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low
point as during the Great Recession. These kinds of drops tend to
produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian
well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab
Spring.
The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the
hardest. Pew found that “low trusters” were more nervous during the
early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping,
more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public
authorities were responding well to the pandemic. Eighty-one
percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed,
lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared
to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.
Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe.
And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them. The
president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily
disaster area. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on
infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a
scared public. The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow
private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval
process.
The sense of betrayal was magnified when people looked abroad. In
nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of
interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic
states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan,
and count on citizens to comply with the new rules. In low-trust
nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning,
less compliance, less collective action, and more death. Countries
that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and
Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their
leadership. South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say
they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to
build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31
percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the
government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance
with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system
was never really implemented.
For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional
decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback
loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become
ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend
not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They
become more ineffective still. In 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan
made this core point in a memo to his boss-to-be, President-elect
Richard Nixon: “In one form or another all of the major domestic
problems facing you derive from the erosion of the authority of the
institutions of American society. This is a mysterious process of
which the most that can be said is that once it starts it tends not
to stop.”
On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as
hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise,
authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic
infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system.
In state after state Republican governors sat inert, unwilling to
organize or to exercise authority, believing that individuals
should be free to take care of themselves.
On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as
a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the
power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a
vetocracy. Power to the people has meant no power to do anything,
and the result is a national NIMBYism that blocks social innovation
in case after case.
In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics
wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of
them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic
structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid
addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.
From the October 2020 issue: Can American democracy be saved?
In high-trust eras, according to Yuval Levin, who is an American
Enterprise Institute scholar and the author of A Time to Build:
From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How
Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream,
people have more of a “first-person-plural” instinct to ask, “What
can we do?” In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there
is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see
ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s
hard to get out of.”
Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to
loathe them, even to think that they are evil. A Democracy Fund +
UCLA Nationscape survey found that 55 percent of Americans believe
that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and
59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true
number of deaths. Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill
Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track
people. This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced
that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but
was being withheld by the government. When Trump was hospitalized
for COVID-19 on October 2, many people conspiratorially concluded
that the administration was lying about his positive diagnosis for
political gain. When government officials briefed the nation about
how sick he was, many people assumed they were obfuscating, which
in fact they were.
The failure of and withdrawal from institutions decimated America’s
pandemic response, but the damage goes beyond that. That’s because
institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the
family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form
the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions
provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to,
social roles to fulfill.
By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they
entered to be morally formed, Levin argued. Instead, they see
institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their
splendid selves. People run for Congress not so they can legislate,
but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can
build their personal brand. The result is a world in which
institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep
us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our
structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
The Failure of Society
the coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A
social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina
Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a
higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but
everyone in the group is better off if all group members further
the common interest.” Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many
low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain
(unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask
wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and
keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the
curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off.
It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.
In March and April, vast majorities of Americans said they
supported social distancing, and society seemed to be coming
together. It didn’t last. Americans locked down a bit in early
March, but never as much as people in some other countries. By
mid-April, they told themselves—and pollsters—that they were still
socially distancing, but that was increasingly a self-deception.
While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going
out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet.
There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate
bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed. By May,
most people had become less strict about quarantining. Many states
officially opened up in June when infection rates were still much
higher than in countries that had successfully contained the
disease. On June 20, 500,000 people went to reopened bars and
nightspots in Los Angeles County alone.
You can blame Trump or governors or whomever you like, but in
reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats
and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a
failure to look out for each other.
Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body.
Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they
shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed,
produce common action. They could form a social body. Over time,
those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system
that put personal freedom above every other value. When Americans
were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for
months without any of the collective resources that would have made
it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of
community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of
trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting
patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the
group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.
By August, most Americans understood the failure. Seventy-two
percent of Danes said they felt more united after the COVID-19
outbreak. Only 18 percent of Americans felt the same.
The Crack-up
in the spring and summer of 2020, six years of moral convulsion
came to a climax. This wasn’t just a political and social crisis,
it was also an emotional trauma. The week before George Floyd was
killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data
showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of
clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death,
the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of
depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent.
Depression and anxiety rates were three times those of the year
before. At the end of June, one-quarter of young adults aged 18 to
24 said they had contemplated suicide during the previous 30
days.
In the immediate aftermath of his death, Floyd became the
emblematic American—the symbol of a society in which no one,
especially Black Americans, was safe. The protests, which took
place in every state, were diverse. The young white people at those
marches weren’t only marching as allies of Black people. They were
marching for themselves, as people who grew up in a society they
couldn’t fully trust. Two low-trust sectors of American society
formed an alliance to demand change.
From the September 2020 issue: Is this the beginning of the end of
American racism?
By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time
since Gallup started measuring, in 2001. American happiness rates
were at their lowest level in nearly 50 years. In another poll, 71
percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the
country, and just 17 percent said they were proud. According to an
NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 80 percent of American voters
believe that “things in the country are out of control.” Gun sales
in June were 145 percent higher than in the previous year. By late
June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of
legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the
existing order.
Years of distrust burst into a torrent of rage. There were times
when the entire social fabric seemed to be disintegrating. Violence
rocked places like Portland, Kenosha, and beyond. The murder rates
soared in city after city. The most alienated, anarchic actors in
society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events.
The distrust doom loop was now at hand.
From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q
The Age of Precarity
cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when
reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion,
to completely shake off the old norms and values.
The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life
over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of
threat. This new culture values security over liberation, equality
over freedom, the collective over the individual. We’re seeing a
few key shifts.
From risk to security. As Albena Azmanova, a political theorist at
the University of Kent, has argued, we’ve entered an age of
precarity in which every political or social movement has an
opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality,
risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk
mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from
downside dangers. In this period of convulsion, almost every party
and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.
Republicans have gone from Reaganesque free trade and open markets
to Trumpesque closed borders. Democrats have gone from the
neoliberalism of Kennedy and Clinton to security-based policies
like a universal basic income and the protections offered by a
vastly expanded welfare state. Campus culture has gone from soft
moral relativism to strict moralism. Evangelicalism has gone from
the open evangelism of Billy Graham to the siege mentality of
Franklin Graham.
From achievement to equality. The culture that emerged from the
1960s upheavals put heavy emphasis on personal development and
personal growth. The Boomers emerged from, and then purified, a
competitive meritocracy that put career achievement at the center
of life and boosted those who succeeded into ever more exclusive
lifestyle enclaves.
In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks
more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast
majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second
class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go
lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy. In the emerging
value system, “privilege” becomes a shameful sin. The status rules
flip. The people who have won the game are suspect precisely
because they’ve won. Too-brazen signs of “success” are scrutinized
and shamed. Equality becomes the great social and political goal.
Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem
hateful.
From self to society. If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated
self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves.
Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group.
Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a
national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see
individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or
sexual-orientation identity group. Each person speaks from the
shared group consciousness. (“Speaking as a progressive gay BIPOC
man …”) In an individualistic culture, status goes to those who
stand out; in collective moments, status goes to those who fit in.
The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is
who I am.”
From global to local. A community is a collection of people who
trust each other. Government follows the rivers of trust. When
there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift
power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows
away from Washington to cities and states.
Derek Thompson: Why America’s institutions are failing
From liberalism to activism. Baby Boomer political activism began
with a free-speech movement. This was a generation embedded in
enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the
role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason.
Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.
Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that
we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere
already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an
open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is
justice and moral certainty. Moreover, liberalism’s niceties come
to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their
systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s
a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle. Civility
becomes a “code for capitulation to those who want to destroy us,”
as the journalist Dahlia Lithwick puts it.
The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the
individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are
embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust,
groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously. The shift
toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing,
but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of
trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a
way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.
How to Rebuild Trust
when you ask political scientists or psychologists how a culture
can rebuild social trust, they aren’t much help. There just haven’t
been that many recent cases they can study and analyze. Historians
have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that
have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health.
The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between
1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.
People in these eras lived through experiences parallel to ours
today. They saw the massive economic transitions caused by the
Industrial Revolution. They experienced great waves of migration,
both within the nation and from abroad. They lived with horrific
political corruption and state dysfunction. And they experienced
all the emotions associated with moral convulsions—the sort of
indignation, shame, guilt, and disgust we’re experiencing today. In
both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was
replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.
But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own,
at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic
action. As Richard Hofstadter put it in The Age of Reform, the
feeling of indignation sparked a fervent and widespread desire to
assume responsibility, to organize, to build. During these eras,
people built organizations at a dazzling pace. In the 1830s, the
Clapham Sect, a religious revival movement, campaigned for the
abolition of slavery and promoted what we now think of as Victorian
values. The Chartists, a labor movement, gathered the working class
and motivated them to march and strike. The Anti-Corn Law League
worked to reduce the power of the landed gentry and make food
cheaper for the workers. These movements agitated from both the
bottom up and the top down.
As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their
forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that
began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations:
the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the
Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the
settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the
American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and
on. These were missional organizations, with clearly defined
crusading purposes. They put tremendous emphasis on cultivating
moral character and social duty—on honesty, reliability,
vulnerability, and cooperativeness, and on shared values, rituals,
and norms. They tended to place responsibility on people who had
not been granted power before. “Few things help an individual more
than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you
trust him,” Booker T. Washington wrote in his 1901
autobiography.
After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political
reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which
widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces;
and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local
government. The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of
reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman
Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic
life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became
profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and
social-science expertise were valued.
Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of
the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic
renaissance and a legislative revolution? I’m not so sure. If you
think we’re going back to the America that used to be—with a single
cohesive mainstream culture; with an agile, trusted central
government; with a few mainstream media voices that police a
coherent national conversation; with an interconnected, respected
leadership class; with a set of dominant moral values based on
mainline Protestantism or some other single ethic—then you’re not
being realistic. I see no scenario in which we return to being the
nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear
national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a
pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same
shows and talked about the same things. We’re too beaten up for
that. The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and
the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us
with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized
pluralism.
A model for that can be found in, of all places, Houston, Texas,
one of the most diverse cities in America. At least 145 languages
are spoken in the metro area. It has no real central downtown
district, but, rather, a wide diversity of scattered downtowns and
scattered economic and cultural hubs. As you drive across town you
feel like you’re successively in Lagos, Hanoi, Mumbai, White
Plains, Beverly Hills, Des Moines, and Mexico City. In each of
these cultural zones, these islands of trust, there is a sense of
vibrant activity and experimentation—and across the whole city
there is an atmosphere of openness, and goodwill, and the American
tendency to act and organize that Hofstadter discussed in The Age
of Reform.
Not every place can or would want to be Houston—its cityscape is
ugly, and I’m not a fan of its too-libertarian zoning policies—but
in that rambling, scattershot city I see an image of how a
hyper-diverse, and more trusting, American future might work.
The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to
one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that
address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and
Americans did in the 1890s? Personal trust can exist informally
between two friends who rely on each other, but social trust is
built within organizations in which people are bound together to do
joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust
to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings
of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in
rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when
their commitments might otherwise falter. Social trust is built
within the nitty-gritty work of organizational life: going to
meetings, driving people places, planning events, sitting with the
ailing, rejoicing with the joyous, showing up for the unfortunate.
Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the
American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them
with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild
trust depends on our ability to join and stick to
organizations.
From the June 2020 issue: We are living in a failed state
The period between the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in
the summer of 2014 and the election of November 2020 represents the
latest in a series of great transitional moments in American
history. Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on
our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build
organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any
guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two
decades.
For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a
nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing
international power. That story threatens to end on our watch,
crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of
social trust. But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of
small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending
vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other
people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms
when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be
dropped. It ripples across society as multiplying moments of beauty
in a storm.
DAVID BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a
columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of The Road to
Character and The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral
Life.
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