The Crisis of Trust

Whatever happens in the election, Trump has already done damage enough to the social fabric.

(Bowling Alone: Image generated with Adobe Firefly).

There has been a lot of speculation about what a second Trump term might look like.  A lot of “normal” (i.e. non-MAGA) Republicans argue that it won’t be so bad; Trump says a lot of outrageous things, but he didn’t carry through on many of his plans during his first term, and he won’t be able to do so again if re-elected.

There are a lot of reasons to think that this is not true, having to do with the way the party plans to staff a new administration. But there is a deeper point: the damage that this deranged man has done to the United States has already occurred, and will weigh on the country for years to come regardless of who wins the coming election. For he has succeeded in undermining America’s historically high levels of trust, both the vertical trust that citizens have in their government, and the horizontal trust they have in one another.

In my 1996 book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, I characterized the United States as a “high-trust society.” This view has a long pedigree. Alexis de Tocqueville spoke about the American “art of association” in Democracy in America, and characterized Americans as particularly adept at forming voluntary organizations. He noted that in his native France, you couldn’t get ten people to work with each other on a common project, but that such sociability was prevalent in the US. Max Weber in an essay written after a visit to the US in the late 19th century noted an encounter with a businessman who explained how shared religion allowed him to get strangers to trust him easily. Robert Putnam in his 1995 article Bowling Alone began with the assumption that the American propensity for spontaneous organization had traditionally been high, but that it had declined in the 50 years following the end of the Second World War. Finally, the General Social Survey and the World Values Survey contain questions on whether other people are regarded as generally trustworthy. The United States scored higher in this category than France, validating Tocqueville’s observation, but the statistics also supported Putnam’s claim that trust had declined during the late 20th century.  

Bowling Alone spawned an intense debate over Putnam’s conclusions. Some observers noted that there could be high levels of trust within small groups but low trust between groups; what was desirable ideally was a society with high levels of “bridging” in addition to “bonding” social capital. This debate occurred just as the internet was privatized and made available to mass audiences, something that dramatically changed the nature of American sociability. At the turn of the 21st century it was hard to argue that Americans were less prone to join groups than in earlier decades; the internet spawned a gigantic online culture. But particularly after the rise of social media in the early 2010s, it became clear that tightly bonded online groups were often turning into vehicles for hatred of other groups. The United States was becoming ever more polarized, a process that, as Paul Pierson and Erik Schickler have detailed in their recent book Partisan Nation, had been developing many years before Facebook and Twitter arrived on the scene. The internet allowed anyone to say anything they pleased, with no guardrails to prevent the spread of misinformation and hate speech. And this is precisely what online communication proceeded to do.

While generalized social trust had been deteriorating, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement pushed distrust to truly pathological levels. This was particularly true of trust in government, which Trump and his allies branded as a malevolent “deep state,” a government manipulated by hidden elites to take advantage of ordinary people. Distrust of the state has always been one of the core elements of American political culture, something traditionally shared on both the right and left. But now Americans were told by right wing conspiracy theorists that their government was not simply incompetent, but actively working against them, falsifying election outcomes, lying about statistics, engaging in politicized prosecutions, manipulating the public health system, and conspiring to change the country’s demographics by opening the southern border to illegal immigrants. Certain politicians like Robert F. Kennedy have risen to prominence by trafficking in the most outlandish conspiracy theories, like the assertion that the moon landings were faked or that Covid was bioengineered to target specific ethnic groups.

Trust between groups also disappeared in this toxic stew. In this year’s election campaign, Republicans routinely assert that the very existence of the country hinges on the contest’s outcome, that Democrats hate America and are doing everything they can to undermine it. The journalist Tim Alberta reports that many evangelicals believe that liberals want to end Christianity in the US, and that blue state governors locked down their churches during Covid as an opening shot in a war against religion. Democrats believe, rather more plausibly, that democracy in America is indeed at stake in the contest, given that the Republicans have nominated someone who tried to remain in office despite having lost the last election.  

The damage that has already been done to public trust has been on full display during the recent hurricanes, Helene and Milton. Prior natural disasters have been treated as simple acts of God; while government responses have been criticized for being slow or incompetent, as with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, they did not engender blatant lying to gain partisan political advantage. No longer: from the moment the storms hit, Trump and other right-wing conspiracy mongers were falsely asserting that FEMA had diverted hurricane relief to support illegal immigrants, or that the Biden administration was refusing to provide aid to Republican counties. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that the government could control the weather, and was using the weather to affect the election.  

Generalized social trust depends on large parts of the society being apolitical or depoliticized. The United States has been moving in the opposite direction: companies and their products (like Bud Light) have been denounced for being “woke,” while CEOs who had previously avoided associating themselves with particular candidates or political positions have jumped into the fray.  

It will take a very long time for this deterioration of trust to reverse itself, if that ever happens. The damage inflicted by Trump on the country has already been done. As I argued back in the 1990s, trust is critical to the efficient working of both the economy and the political system. It is hard to see how the economy will prosper if consumers are picking products according to their partisan affiliations, or how the state will function if people have lost faith in the criminal justice system or the routine workings of weather forecasters. A new edition of Trust will need to have a very different chapter on the US as a low-trust society.

Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

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