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In my last post I noted American’s declining faith in democracy and offered six possible reasons. These are:
- Failure of Western democracies to sustain the post-WWII growth rates
- Globalization and automation
- The increased income inequality in Western societies
- The sense that government is broken and corrupt
- The search for meaning through group identity
- The failure of the older generations to pass on their values to the younger generations.
I’ve already discussed the decline in economic growth in Western democracies and the impact of globalization and automation on employment, especially on traditional blue-collar jobs. Let’s turn to the next three reasons for increasing distrust with democracy.
Increased Income Inequality. I have already written about the growing economic inequality in the United States. The top one percent of American income earners had over 20% of pre-tax income in 2018 compared to 9% in 1980. This has had two important impacts on Americans’ attitudes toward democracy. First, many Americans consider the existing system to be unfair to them. Second, richer Americans are seeing the increased interest by the Left in imposing wealth taxes and other remedial measures as a danger to their welfare. This fear may be an important reason that the wealthy are increasingly interested in authoritarian government (figure 1).
Declining faith in political institutions. Gallup has been conducting polling on Americans’ confidence in its institutions (See figure 2). The blue columns represent data collected in 1989, while the orange bars, data collected in 2019. In 2019, only the military and the police had trust levels over 40%. (This is not a great sign for democracy). These same institutions saw their levels of trust increase over the past three decades, while four institutions (the Presidency. The Congress, the Supreme Court and public schools) saw significant declines in trust.
What is driving this erosion of trust, which has been going on for forty years? According to a report by the Aspen Institution there are five reasons for the decline in trust in public institutions, namely:
- Poor institutional performance
- Large-scale global “shocks”
- Political polarization
- Increasing economic inequality
- Decreasing economic mobility
What’s interesting is the way these issues are intertwined, being both cause and effect. The bottom line is that the world has become increasingly difficult economically for many people today and our political institutions are seen as part of the problem, rather part of the solution.
Moreover, a lack of trust in the information we receive from both the media and the government, exacerbates the overall trust problem. The Aspen report identifies the following as resulting in declining trust in the media:
- Proliferation of news sources
- Media disintermediation (the fact that the sources of information on the internet and in social media are not clearly specified)
- Confusion between news and opinion
- Spread of misinformation and disinformation
- Decline of local news
- Politicized criticism of the media
As a result, it is not only our state institutions that are in crisis, but also our private institutions. No private institution in the Gallup poll evinced trust levels above 50% in 2019.
The search for meaning through group identity. I discussed the problems of identity politics in an earlier post. As I wrote there, “For many years, Republicans have accused Democrats as being purveyors of “identity politics.” According to the blog Philosophy Talk ‘Identity Politics’ is “when people of a particular race, ethnicity, gender, or religion form alliances and organize politically to defend their group’s interests.” …[Today,] however, the oppressed are not only minorities or the typical aggrieved groups; the white majority in America also feels aggrieved.” The growing importance of group identities divides us as Americans, leads to an increasing inability to put ourselves in the “other’s shoes,” and increases distrust. A successful democracy requires a willingness to accept majority rule as well as a commitment to protect minority rights.
Francis Fukayama, in a 2018 book, writes, “Modern liberal democracies promise and largely deliver a minimal degree of equal respect, embodied in individual rights, the rule of law and the franchise. What this does not guarantee is that people in a democracy will be equally respected in practice, particularly members of groups with a history of marginalization.” In Western democracies today, perhaps as a response to the increase and militancy of cultural diversity, we are seeing the rise of white nationalism. This nationalism, by elevating certain groups over others is divisive and a threat to the comity that is needed in a democracy.
We will discuss the problem of passing on the values of one generation to another in a future post.