A democracy can only survive if the people in it believe the government works for them. There are certain functions only a government can provide, for example, to defend its shores, collect taxes from the people, provide benefits to the entire population like safety and health care, etc. These are necessary in a modern society, but it seems that corporations and business are often focused on the bottomline and shareholder value. When the government doesn’t provide basic services for its people, what are those people supposed to do?
One of the advantages of government civil service is that it attracts people who want to give back and who are leaders in their particular field. Expertise has historically been admired and relied on in this country. However, as a result of the current administration and its messaging, a hatred towards people with expertise has been growing. This peek happened when the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron Doctrine, which stated that the courts are supposed to determine the meaning of statutes and not the actual governmental agency. This means in practice a judge now needs to be all knowing in every aspect of every case they take instead of relying on the experts at the actual agency. Expertise in general is no longer needed just what a judge can understand and interpret.
During the Vietnam War, the oil shock and the Iran hostage crisis, people started to feel that they could no longer trust what the Federal government said because they lacked transparency to the people. For example, the Gulf of Tonkin led people to believe that this was used as an excuse to escalate the Vietnam war. President Reagan made sure one of his biggest slogans was the scariest phrase to any American, “I am from the government and I am here to help.” With the mistrust of the government already in place from the late 1970’s this just kept fueling the fire that so-called experts are lying to us. This grew to a chasm between the people and experts in the lead up to the United States invasion of Iraq after our government stated that they had weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be completely and utterly false. Just as Americans were seeing through those lies they were then hit with the Great Recession that started in late 2007. The stock market kept rising and people kept buying homes due to them thinking the price of a home would never go down and nobody would have to make any mortgage payments. Finally, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 there was constant changing of rules, regulations and guidance that occurred which ended any belief or trust in government and institutions.
Within the past 50 years people stopped believing in the institution and experts which has made it difficult for people to talk about issues on anything from the same fact pattern and base. This has created a vacuum which has now been filling up with information from non-expert and/or non reputable sources. This is why conspiracy theories are so easily spread. It is also why people want “a change election” because they don’t trust and blame the party who is in control for all of the ills.
This can be seen with the difference in Presidential approval ratings from 2024 to 2026. The main reason that President Trump won the 2024 election was due to affordability and voters felt that prices were too high, which they blamed former President Biden for. One year later the prices are still too high and they now blame President Trump. Even though both Presidents tried to sell that they had turned around the economy. If the so-called experts can’t fix the problem then how can anyone truly trust an expert?
Due to the lack of trusted experts and resources, the public is not able to spend the time necessary to sift through what is true and what is false. Therefore, this has caused people to check out and no longer engage and participate in the civic process. This is why people are so angry and frustrated. This feeling is a key component to how a democracy dies because there is so much they have to sift through that it makes no sense to even try anymore.
Experts and the government need to gain trust back from the people and this can be accomplished if promises made are actually promises kept. The experts have to set a realistic bar so the people who listen to them can develop trust again. If one over-promises and under delivers it provides more anger and fodder. America needs a deep and structural reform that could take years or even decades to correct. Real conversations at the grassroots level need to happen first to allow permission for the experts to come back to the table and implement necessary changes. In this current climate, there is too much anger, distrust and the want for quick fixes and the need for deeper conversations and rethinking is the way back to expertise and trust.
Jack Jones says
Great topic, I definitely don’t trust this autocratic/ oligarchy. It’s a shame I like many love this country. It just fells like the jerks are in charge, heartless jerks. I’ve lost the ability to trust, only seething hatred runs through my veins now, towards these parasites of the donor class and their political whores.