Tearing down institutions is far easier than building them

Americans’ trust in core institutions has been dropping for decades, according to Gallup. It dropped from almost 50% in the late 1970s to about 40% in 1990, where it stayed until 2006, when it plunged down to the mid 30s. Around 2020, it plunged again and now overall trust in core institutions sits around 27%.

Gallup notes that these two major drops coincide with the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic and shutdowns. And there were plenty of reasons for everyday people to lose trust in institutions and their “experts” during these times. So it’s not just an irrational loss of faith in competent authority. When we looked for adults in the room, too often, they were not around.

Gallup has asked about 14 institutions since 1993 — “seven public sector (the presidency, Congress, the public schools, the Supreme Court, the military, the criminal justice system and the police) and seven private sector entities (banks, big business, organized labor, the medical system, newspapers, television news, and the church or organized religion).”

They now ask about three additional ones: “small business, higher education and large technology companies.”

Small business (67%) and the military (61%) were the only two that had majority support. There was a clear partisan difference on a lot of these institutions though, with the military, police, presidency, organized religion, and the US Supreme Court much more popular with Republicans and higher education, public schools, and not much else, trusted by Democrats.

Many of them, though — like big business, big tech, the criminal justice system, Congress, newspapers, and television news — weren’t very popular with anybody.

We clearly live in a cynical age, where trust is hard to come by. We’ve been burned by “fake news,” bad science, coverups, woke professors, and scandals on all sides.

But as someone who believes that the best political arrangement is a small government tasked largely with protecting our rights (and providing some basic safety nets and public goods when absolutely necessary), the collapse in trust is a real problem. We need these institutions to function and to carry most of the weight. The alternatives historically are either anarchy or tyranny, which, as the French Revolution showed, often follow one another.

Edmund Burke, considered the father of conservatism, critiqued the French Revolution by pointing out the chaos of “leveling” all institutions to the ground in order to improve society and even the playing field. Instead of solving the (very real) problems motivating the revolutionaries, it left them in a pile of rubble. That’s because the default human state is not utopia; it is being naked, hungry, cold, and in danger. We have been gifted a civilization with institutions that took centuries to build. Tearing them down just invites that chaos that Burke warned about and brings us back to the beginning.

“We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they are descended,” Burke said in his famous “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” “Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished.”

Just like with modern Americans, the French had lost all trust in their economic, spiritual, and political leaders. Rather than demanding reforms, they put the business owners, priests, and royals to the guillotine. And instead of peace and prosperity, they found themselves in decades of a chaos we now call “the Reign of Terror,” where even the original revolutionary leaders lost their heads.

Americans likewise see nothing of value in the institutions that hold our nation back from chaos. But a lot of these views comes from exaggeration, conspiracy theories, social media frenzies, and click-bait headlines, leading to the sense that it would probably just be easier to burn it down and start over.

The Democratic Socialists of American on the left and “woke right” figures on the right (like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes) thrive off of creating distrust in our traditional institutions, by telling you that nothing can be salvaged. And they even have the answers on what we should replace them with — failed big government authoritarian models like Marxism and fascism.

If we buy into their arguments and abandon trust in the institutions that built and sustained our nation, those actors and their models will have the perfect opportunity to offer their alternatives.

Here are just a few of the exaggerations and lies we are all exposed to if we engage in popular discourse:

• America’s border control agents are terrorists who are kidnapping people and bringing them into concentration camps. We need to abolish ICE.
• Only progressives are welcome on American campuses, and all professors are woke frauds. College is a waste of time, and no conservative should send their kids to one of these campuses.
• Our police officers are racist killers who shoot unarmed black men every day. The system can’t be reformed. We need to defund the police and abolish prison.
• Libraries are run by far-left nuts who set up drag-queen story hours to subvert parents. I’m never going to step foot in my local library and will push for them to have their funding cut.
• There are no good guys/girls left anyway, which is why most marriages end in divorce. I’m not getting involved in that scam.
• War is just how the military-industrial complex makes money off our government. All our wars are orchestrated by the elite. We should just close all our bases and slash the military budget.
• Big business is the wealthy getting rich at the expense of the little guy. We need to tax them and redistribute their ill-gotten gains.
• Kids don’t learn anything in public schools, other than the latest woke political trend. No conservative would send their kids there.
• The news media are nothing but liars. They get their narrative from their corporate overlords, or maybe even from nefarious governments overseas. I only listen to anonymous TikTok and Twitter accounts.

As I said, many of these have some truth to them. But if we are going to have a stable society to pass to the next generation, we should seek to reform things where they’ve gone wrong, as Burke suggested, rather than burn them all to the ground.

If you have a problem with one of these institutions, treat it like a body you want to keep alive. It may need an operation, but it’d be much more likely to survive if you used a scalpel rather than a hatchet to perform the task.

If law enforcement or border enforcement seems overly harsh to you, make sure you have all sides of the story and offer some solutions. If public schools, libraries, and universities seem infiltrated by inappropriate political and cultural messaging, work on getting that removed. If your family, church, and community seem to be breaking down, be a part of making them healthy again.

It’s much easier to restore something than to rebuild it from scratch. Ask the French.

“Tearing down institutions is far easier than building them” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.