How mistrust explains all those frustrating things about US politics

If you don’t think trust is important, take a look at Sicily. Yes, the birthplace of the Mafia. Shocking as it may seem, the Mafia was not created at the behest of Oscar-hungry Hollywood directors. It emerged because of a complete lack of trust.

Ignored by imperial rulers and gripped by a collapse of law and order, Sicilians turned to local power brokers. Want to sell a cow and you don’t trust the buyer? The Mafia arose as the answer to this problem, multiplied hundreds of times over. 

It’s a story author Ethan Zuckerman tells in his most recent book, “Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.” When trust fails, societies founder. Security, economic growth, and personal freedoms all suffer as trust becomes a commodity for sale. And it underscores why we should look at the story of modern America through the lens of trust, he says. 

In today’s deeply antagonistic politics, it often seems that one side couldn’t sell a cow to the other, much less pass complex legislation. The decline in trust explains a lot.

Mr. Zuckerman was an entrepreneur at the dawn of the 1990s dot-com boom – a true believer in the power of the internet to address humanity’s woes. Since then, he’s worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied the nexus of media, social media, society, and politics. Now he’s a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

The book explores why Americans have lost faith in their institutions, and what that means. The numbers are stark. America’s trust in government, for example, has fallen from 77% to 16% since 1964. That general downward trend applies to virtually all American institutions. Mr. Zuckerman and I talked recently in conjunction with the Monitor’s Rebuilding Trust project. What’s going on in the United States, and what might the steps forward be?

When did the “trust crisis” start?

The fact is, the “trust crisis” is hardly a new thing. The decline in trust in the American government took its biggest dive decades ago – after Watergate and Vietnam. It’s never recovered. Why? Mr. Zuckerman suggests the reasons might not be all bad. The average American of today is far more educated and better informed than the American of 50 years ago. “Some of this mistrust, I argue, is well placed,” he says.

But beneath the skepticism of a better-informed population lies a deeper, more toxic mistrust that Mr. Zuckerman says is connected to the dizzying pace of change in America, from immigration to employment to artificial intelligence to LGBTQ+ issues. That puts the country’s institutions under enormous strain.

“When we mistrust an institution it is because, rightly or wrongly, we feel that that institution has not changed to react to the circumstances that we find it in,” Mr. Zuckerman says. “So restoring trust becomes a matter of figuring out, ‘How do you balance change and not-change?’

“If you just change everything the moment someone gets unhappy, that’s its own set of difficulties,” he adds. “But how you manage change ... that’s where trust comes from.”

How government has changed

How the American government addresses change has itself changed. Mr. Zuckerman points to the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which found laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional. At the time, fewer than 20% of Americans supported interracial marriage, according to Gallup. Contrast that with the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage was protected by the Constitution. At that moment, nearly 60% of Americans supported same-sex marriage.

“We go from law leading norms to norms leading law,” Mr. Zuckerman says.

In that way, the old model of political and legal change might not work either. The Civil Rights Movement, for instance, was based on the premise that moral persuasion could force law and politics to take steps beyond what many voters were ready for. Now, at a time when law and politics stay in line with what partisan voters want, change is harder. Institutions seem brittle and resistant to evolution.

It might be time for a new model, Mr. Zuckerman suggests. It might be that voting – and government – is no longer the best way to create change.

Different ways to be heard

He cites an idea put forward by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. It says there are four main ways we regulate society. First, we can pass laws. This is the classic model. But we can also use economic markets, we can use technology, and we can use social norms.

For instance, Elon Musk changed how we view electric cars by making them a sought-after luxury item and creating a new, robust market for them. He used economic markets to create change. But it’s the power of norms that intrigues Mr. Zuckerman most.

He points to a movement against femicide in Latin America called Ni Una Menos or Not One [Woman] Less. The determination and moral force of their advocacy awakened society first, and then came the laws. “That’s another example where the norms lead, and then the laws follow,” Mr. Zuckerman says. “In that case, you now have a wave of anti-femicide laws throughout Latin America. But it’s coming from a popular movement that’s emerging first on social media and then broader in society.” In the U.S., #MeToo had a similar effect.

“All those four forces become ways you can make change in society,” he continues. “So absolutely, you can make change in society through laws. But you also have at least three other channels that you can go through.”

In his book, he says rebuilding trust could start with a new model of good citizenship.

He quotes friend and fellow activist Quinn Norton. Beyond voting on election day, she wrote once in a blog, “vote with every dollar, in every relationship. Vote in how you work and how you speak. Vote in how you treat others and what you will accept from them. Vote your dignity and the dignity of others.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the movement against femicide in Latin America to Ni Una Menos, or Not One [Woman] Less.