It's more nuanced than that, and probably deserves its own essay. One of the fun things about "trust" is the Pew, Gallup, and others have rich datasets stretching back decades, which allows a lot of analysis. But here's the rough trend.
From ~1980 through the early 2000s, distrust clustered by a combination of party identification, race, education, and age cohort (Vietnam/Watergate effect, post-9/11 effects). Financial strain mattered but as more of a background condition, not as a primary sorting variable. So in simple terms, when I was growing up, people distrusted institutions because of who they were and what they believed, not because they were financially squeezed.
From the ~mid-2000s through the late 2010s, ideology emerged as the dominant frame, particularly drive by Iraq War credibility failures, the 2008 financial crisis, and the partisan sorting of media. This manifested into WHICH institution you trusted and which failures you attributed to malice vs incompetence. So to simplify Ds distrusted the military and business. Rs distorted "the media" and government. Again, in plain terms, ideology/partisanship was often the dominant predictor of institutional distrust.
So what's new is not that ideology has disappeared as a factor but that material conditions have started to overwhelm it as a primary predictor. So today people of different ideologies but similar financial stress report similar levels of distrust, abandonment, and expectations of failure. And you're seeing a lot more "I don't trust anything" as a factor rather than distrust that you can disaggregate into ideological sorting.
The reason this is important is that persuasion, messaging, and coalition-building would an effective lever if distrust were still primarily ideological. But rhetorical alignment is now much less likely to restore trust without material relief. In short, we gotta actually fix the system.
And the people most skeptical now tend to be equally skeptical of private and public sector institutions based on their lived experiences.
“Financial strain is now a stronger predictor of systemic distrust than ideology.” This is such an eye opening line. Does that mean that ideology used to be a better predictor of systemic distrust?
The experience of arbitrary punishment is hard - a feature in psychological abuse.
But let’s remember that the American dream of work hard, get prosperous (or however you guys put it) was always a bit of a psychological tool. It was never meant to work for everyone. Only those with capital get truly prosperous (they need the labourers to stay poor to clean their homes).
So yea, agreed that that feeling of personal shame when you don’t ‘win’ keeps people blaming themselves, not the system.
Even if it all feels arbitrary to the individual, the unravelling/ crumbling of these systems is not arbitrary, I feel.
Rather than ‘a structural shift that has been compounding for years’
I view it as a debt that’s been compounding for years.
It was entirely predicted. I think it just feels arbitrary as it’s so complex.
An simpler analogy:
You’re at a lovely log cabin Air BNB in the middle of a snow storm. The welcome page of the owners manual says to burn wood in the fire to keep warm.
You have a lovely few days, reading next to an open fire, but eventually run out of wood.
‘Burn wood to keep warm’ you think, looking around, teeth chattering. Ah ha!
you spot an assortment of old walking sticks in one corner.
No one here needs those and I have to stay warm, so I’ll burn those’. You chuck a few more on for good measure and enjoy extra the warmth.
When the sticks are gone, you look around again. ‘Ah brilliant, table and chairs, that’ll do for wood, it’s only me here anyway and I’m just using the armchair’.
This yields so much wood that you even decide to light a fire on the porch and toast marshmallows. Joy!
But you still need more.
‘Hmm. That skirting will do.’
Next the inner doors
The the window sills.
A bit of snow blows into the gaps around the windows, but it’s fine, you can manage it. Just shove some blankets over it.
Still need more wood.
You spot the bed frame.
It’s ok, sleeping on the mattress on the floor, but it is a bit cold without enough blankets.
Still need more wood.
You look up and see the wooden beams. Hmm that’s not a good idea probably, but ‘I need wood’
So you burn them. And hear the creaking of the house. A section of roof falls in, narrowly missing you but bringing in a huge dump of snow and icy wind.
You grab the owners manual, thinking you should call them and ask for emergency repairs.
You turn the welcome page and read:
‘Another way of keeping warm is the ground source heat pump. The switches and manual are located in the utility cupboard’
‘But the fire’s already going, I don’t have time to figure that out, plus, it’ll take a while to get going’ you say, chucking a piece of floorboard on the fire.
You carry on flicking through the manual, looking for the owner’s phone number.
More snow is coming into the house and you can hear creaking from another room now.
Finally you see a phone number.
It’s yours.
We can’t see we’re destroying our own home. As it’s all packed up neatly in marketing and cultural conditioning .
We distance ourselves from the damage to the rainforests in peanut butter, or the indentured slavery in fast fashion, or the emissions in our beef.
We forget that crop failures drive wars, and drive up prices. The link between heat and aggression, resource scarcity and things getting shitter.
We used up all the wood, thinking it was infinite, and refused to look at the manual .
I feel that were we went wrong is twofold 1) in taking the manual (western extractive capitalism) as read/ gospel in the first page. This is the ‘trust’ you talk about. why tf should we trust our systems? We should question then and be able to evolve them.
2)in thinking that we are not custodians of the house. Here the analogy breaks down, as we’re not owners. We are the house.
It's more nuanced than that, and probably deserves its own essay. One of the fun things about "trust" is the Pew, Gallup, and others have rich datasets stretching back decades, which allows a lot of analysis. But here's the rough trend.
From ~1980 through the early 2000s, distrust clustered by a combination of party identification, race, education, and age cohort (Vietnam/Watergate effect, post-9/11 effects). Financial strain mattered but as more of a background condition, not as a primary sorting variable. So in simple terms, when I was growing up, people distrusted institutions because of who they were and what they believed, not because they were financially squeezed.
From the ~mid-2000s through the late 2010s, ideology emerged as the dominant frame, particularly drive by Iraq War credibility failures, the 2008 financial crisis, and the partisan sorting of media. This manifested into WHICH institution you trusted and which failures you attributed to malice vs incompetence. So to simplify Ds distrusted the military and business. Rs distorted "the media" and government. Again, in plain terms, ideology/partisanship was often the dominant predictor of institutional distrust.
So what's new is not that ideology has disappeared as a factor but that material conditions have started to overwhelm it as a primary predictor. So today people of different ideologies but similar financial stress report similar levels of distrust, abandonment, and expectations of failure. And you're seeing a lot more "I don't trust anything" as a factor rather than distrust that you can disaggregate into ideological sorting.
The reason this is important is that persuasion, messaging, and coalition-building would an effective lever if distrust were still primarily ideological. But rhetorical alignment is now much less likely to restore trust without material relief. In short, we gotta actually fix the system.
And the people most skeptical now tend to be equally skeptical of private and public sector institutions based on their lived experiences.
AI playing into this distrust thing too.
We are literally not supposed to trust things we see and read.
“Financial strain is now a stronger predictor of systemic distrust than ideology.” This is such an eye opening line. Does that mean that ideology used to be a better predictor of systemic distrust?
Yes, nice psychology.
The experience of arbitrary punishment is hard - a feature in psychological abuse.
But let’s remember that the American dream of work hard, get prosperous (or however you guys put it) was always a bit of a psychological tool. It was never meant to work for everyone. Only those with capital get truly prosperous (they need the labourers to stay poor to clean their homes).
So yea, agreed that that feeling of personal shame when you don’t ‘win’ keeps people blaming themselves, not the system.
Even if it all feels arbitrary to the individual, the unravelling/ crumbling of these systems is not arbitrary, I feel.
Rather than ‘a structural shift that has been compounding for years’
I view it as a debt that’s been compounding for years.
It was entirely predicted. I think it just feels arbitrary as it’s so complex.
An simpler analogy:
You’re at a lovely log cabin Air BNB in the middle of a snow storm. The welcome page of the owners manual says to burn wood in the fire to keep warm.
You have a lovely few days, reading next to an open fire, but eventually run out of wood.
‘Burn wood to keep warm’ you think, looking around, teeth chattering. Ah ha!
you spot an assortment of old walking sticks in one corner.
No one here needs those and I have to stay warm, so I’ll burn those’. You chuck a few more on for good measure and enjoy extra the warmth.
When the sticks are gone, you look around again. ‘Ah brilliant, table and chairs, that’ll do for wood, it’s only me here anyway and I’m just using the armchair’.
This yields so much wood that you even decide to light a fire on the porch and toast marshmallows. Joy!
But you still need more.
‘Hmm. That skirting will do.’
Next the inner doors
The the window sills.
A bit of snow blows into the gaps around the windows, but it’s fine, you can manage it. Just shove some blankets over it.
Still need more wood.
You spot the bed frame.
It’s ok, sleeping on the mattress on the floor, but it is a bit cold without enough blankets.
Still need more wood.
You look up and see the wooden beams. Hmm that’s not a good idea probably, but ‘I need wood’
So you burn them. And hear the creaking of the house. A section of roof falls in, narrowly missing you but bringing in a huge dump of snow and icy wind.
You grab the owners manual, thinking you should call them and ask for emergency repairs.
You turn the welcome page and read:
‘Another way of keeping warm is the ground source heat pump. The switches and manual are located in the utility cupboard’
‘But the fire’s already going, I don’t have time to figure that out, plus, it’ll take a while to get going’ you say, chucking a piece of floorboard on the fire.
You carry on flicking through the manual, looking for the owner’s phone number.
More snow is coming into the house and you can hear creaking from another room now.
Finally you see a phone number.
It’s yours.
We can’t see we’re destroying our own home. As it’s all packed up neatly in marketing and cultural conditioning .
We distance ourselves from the damage to the rainforests in peanut butter, or the indentured slavery in fast fashion, or the emissions in our beef.
We forget that crop failures drive wars, and drive up prices. The link between heat and aggression, resource scarcity and things getting shitter.
We used up all the wood, thinking it was infinite, and refused to look at the manual .
I feel that were we went wrong is twofold 1) in taking the manual (western extractive capitalism) as read/ gospel in the first page. This is the ‘trust’ you talk about. why tf should we trust our systems? We should question then and be able to evolve them.
2)in thinking that we are not custodians of the house. Here the analogy breaks down, as we’re not owners. We are the house.