OPINION:
Americans’ precipitous loss of faith in American institutions is an important story — and a long-running one, at this point — but it isn’t the whole story.
Americans aren’t losing trust only in their justice system, higher education, legacy media organizations, one another, their religious leadership, scientists, banks or corporations. They are losing faith in the institutions empowered to directly change the social, economic and political order we all occupy.
They are losing faith in their ability to meaningfully alter or improve America through normal political means.
The Supreme Court, Congress and our primary political parties are subject to increasing skepticism. This poses a unique and dangerous problem because it only further separates the government from the governed.
We must restore the trustworthiness of our institutions and learn to trust them again, at least at a basic level.
Without such trust, there can be no common spaces, either literally or politically. Without these common spaces, the characteristic American political order and its entailed liberties will continue to degrade.
Although President Trump is often lambasted as a polarizing figure, his administration is uniquely well-positioned to play a role in this work. The Trump administration has a chance to make American institutions trustworthy again and help unify the American people around commonsense solutions.
The solutions to our present problems are, in fact, common sense. Americans don’t trust the government because it repeatedly fails to serve them in many ways.
They see forest fires swallow up thousands of acres partly because red tape prevented routine preventive measures. They see children propagandized and covertly alienated from their families by some local teachers and school staff. They see ballooning incarceration rates that seem not to make any impact on rising criminality. They see private property confiscated without reason by law enforcement. They see legacy media outlets that lie, obscure the truth and actively campaign to suppress viewpoints they don’t share. They see an increasingly narrow-minded elite illegitimately controlling higher education and much of the American workplace culture.
Tens of millions of Americans see these things. The more difficult but still possible project is developing the best political response to the problems in question.
Of course, developing real political strategies requires that we talk to one another in good faith. Thankfully, unity and goodwill political negotiation in America don’t require sameness or even agreement.
Our differing political perspectives and interests do not have to alienate us from one another as citizens. The “factions” into which we organize ourselves are essential to the healthy function of our government. We are designed to be a nation full of men, women and families who disagree, even about some of the most important things, but we work through those differences to ameliorate problems.
“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 10.
Our freedom is precisely what makes us capable of differing politically.
“There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests,” Madison said.
Neither of these solutions is viable to him, and they aren’t for us.
What Madison seems capable of imagining — that we might struggle to conceive today — is that these factions can be reconciled successfully, even pitted against one another fruitfully.
In other words, we can learn to trust one another even if we disagree. The reforms we make moving forward must be motivated by love for our nation and the fragile and precious liberties it affords its citizens.
Interestingly, the recent polling that revealed our crumbling sense of trust also revealed tremendous hope. About 9 in 10 Americans think we can learn to trust one another more.
About 8 in 10 say we can return to higher confidence in the government.
Let the untrustworthy institutions languish. Let their subscribers and patrons dwindle until they are finally irrelevant. Ignore them as they slowly and inevitably fall away from the public sphere.
Intentionally reward the people and institutions that deserve your trust. Buy from them. Promote them to friends and family. Vote for them. Spend time building up your community: Watch, buy, work and play locally whenever possible.
Over time and with the help of sound policy, we can hope that people and organizations will begin doing what they are supposed to, no more and no less.
If we do this right, our reservoirs will hold water again, our water supply will be drinkable and functional, our policing system will be just and effective, and our neighborhoods will foster friendship again.
Our universities will once again educate, not propagandize.
America was designed at its founding to protect its citizens from usurpations of their God-given rights and to protect the citizens from its expansion and degradation.
We can restore our nation, communities and families — one good policy at a time.
• Timothy Head is the president and CEO of Unify.us and former executive director at the Faith & Freedom Coalition.
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