Diversity Is A Strength: Societal Distrust Edition

"America doesn’t trust itself: Faith in US institutions and each other takes dangerous drop" writes Gerard Baker at the New York Post. He observes:

    The Gallup Organization has been measuring trust among the public in the most important American institutions for 50 years. 

    In its latest survey, conducted in July, Gallup found that across nine key institutions, the average proportion of Americans who said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in them was 26%. 

    That was the lowest number ever recorded; in the 1970s, when Gallup started measuring the number, it was close to 50%.

* * *

    In the last two years, trust in the presidency, the criminal justice system, television news, newspapers, the Supreme Court, organized religion, Congress, the police, public schools, large technology companies and big corporation of all sorts — have recorded their lowest ever levels of public trust.

    You won’t be surprised to learn that the institution that has seen the biggest decline in trust has been the media. In the 1970s, after Watergate, more than half of Americans said they had a high level of confidence in newspapers.

    Last year that number was just 16%. Only 11% now trust television news.

    Other surveys matched these findings. The Pew Research Center has conducted similar surveys for 30 years, and it finds that the public’s trust in most of the cornerstone American institutions has dropped sharply.

    The General Social Survey conducted by NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago and the American National Election Studies at Michigan and Stanford, have found the same broad decline in levels of trust Americans have in their institutions.

It is not exactly a surprise what might have happened. As Baker notes:

A media that consistently promotes an ideological agenda, pushing politically useful stories like Russian collusion hoaxes and ignoring inconvenient ones like Biden family corruption; social media companies that suppress information that doesn’t line up with the ideological views of their bosses and employees; universities and schools that bar speakers and ideas they regard as unacceptable; public health officials who told us gathering in large crowds during COVID-19 would kill us unless we were protesting on behalf of Black Lives Matter; big businesses that shipped jobs overseas, kowtowed to the Chinese Communist Party and then lectured Americans about how evil this country was and how we needed to atone for our sins; scientists who insisted there is no such thing as biological sex and to argue with that was bigotry.

But it isn't just a decline in trust in institutions--people in the United States also have less trust in each other.

    Perhaps even more troubling, Americans have not only stopped trusting their leading institutions. They don’t trust each other. 

    When asked, in the words of the General Social Survey, “generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” the proportion of those saying people can be trusted has dropped from about a half to less than a third in the last 50 years. 

    This plummeting social trust is doing irreparable damage to the bonds that tie Americans together.

Baker doesn't address this issue because to do so would be so politically incorrect he would be cancelled. But we don't have to wonder about it, because Robert D. Putnam, the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and a former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as the author of Bowling Alone, did the research and found that it is diversity--primarily racial diversity--that leads to this mistrust or declining "social capital".