Americans Mistrust Government. Is That a Bad Thing?

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Half of all Republicans, at least according to pretty recent polling still don't believe that Joe Biden won the 2016 election, that's from a recent Fox and data for progress poll in particular. With that startling stat, it's a long and difficult road to any sort of unity among the parties, regardless of Joe Biden's earnest intentions. For many, what many are calling a rigged election to a catastrophically bundled, pandemic response, and many, many things before them, faith and trust in our government and other public institutions is at an all time low.

My next guest has written what we might call a very prescient book about this topic begun before the pandemic or a unpeaceful transfer of power. It's about how societies act when they lose faith in public institutions, but also about how mistrust can sometimes be a force for good and social change. He even uses the word insurrection in a positive way in this book though, not applying it to things like at the Capitol in a positive way.

We'll talk about that with Ethan Zuckerman, professor of public policy information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Institute for digital public infrastructure. He's the author of the new book Mistrust; Why losing faith in institutions provides the tools to transform them. Professor Zuckerman, great to have you again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ethan Zuckerman: Brian, it's always great to be with you and thanks so much. It really is an interesting time to be putting this book out here in the world at a moment where there is so much mistrust and we have so much questions about how our institutions are functioning and not functioning.

Brian Lehrer: You want to give us a thumbnail history because according to stats you cite, four out of five Americans trusted public institutions in the 1960s, now it's less than one in five. What happened?

Ethan Zuckerman: This is really the figure that got me thinking about this whole topic. We've been asking Americans whether they trust the government in Washington to do the right thing since the early 1960s, and that number peaks in 1964 at 77% of Americans. When my father is graduating from college, if you ask most Americans, whether the government is going to do the right thing, four out of five of them are going to tell you that it will do the right thing most of the time.

By the time I'm in college, that number is down around 30%, and now, really over the last decade or so, that number has been stuck at 15% or lower. That happens in both administrations. The Obama administration has about a 15% confidence in government. Under the Trump administration, we have similarly low numbers. What's really interesting is when you dig into it further, it's not just a collapse of trust in government.

It's a collapse of trust in institutions of all types. Anything that doesn't have a face where you're dealing with a bureaucracy, rather than dealing with humans, we lose trust in the health system. We lose trust in media. We lose trust in banks and in big business and in the church. What happens over all is this portrait really from the 1970s onwards of people, feeling like the institutions in their lives in the United States are working most of the time to a place where we are right now, where most people think a whole lot of the systems that we deal with are broken and failing us at all sorts of different turns.

Brian Lehrer: Ironically, I think you're right, that the only major institution that has earned greater American trust in these past four decades, and I've seen this polling through many, many years now, is the military. How is that possible after so much death and destruction in Vietnam, which I think was one of the causes for the beginning of the era of distrust in institutions and in America's forever Wars in the middle East?

Ethan Zuckerman: Indeed, it's pretty chilling. The notion that the military is the most trusted institution in society is the thing we expect to here in Egypt. It's not what we expect to hear in the United States. I think there's two reasons that happens. I think the first is exactly what you said. We started the polling during the Vietnam war and during Vietnam, there's enormous mistrust in the military. There's lots of systemic misinformation coming out of the military. I think part of it is to the military is credit. I think we recognize that in an all-volunteer military, there's enormous numbers of very principled people who are working very hard.

I think a lot of the blame gets being put on the political system rather than on the military for the endless force that we're involved with. Even if what this reflects is a professionalized and ethical military, it's still not a good look for a democratic society. That is not the one institution you want everyone to have trust in the hope is that people have trust in a wide variety of institutions, and particularly, in government institutions.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe you should lay out the breadth of the kinds of institutions that people have lost trust in, because I think the first thing people's minds go to is Congress and maybe the presidency, but you're also talking about religious institutions. You're also talking about the press it's pretty wide, right?

Ethan Zuckerman: That's right. In almost case you can look to a precipitous decline that has to do with some long-term scandal. Competence in the church has an awful lot to do with the Catholic church sex abuse scandal. We can see the Boston globe reporting on abuse within the Catholic church. We can see a slide in confidence in the church as an institution. we see a huge fall of confidence within the medical system. My hypothesis on that is that it has a lot to do with HMO's and healthcare getting bureaucratized and people interacting more with insurance companies rather than interacting directly with doctors.

Certainly, confidence in the press has gone way down. Some of that is synthetic, You've had president Trump systemically attacking the press for the last four years. The press has become a real whipping boy for the right, but that can work. That can actually work to depress confidence within institutions. What I find interesting is that sometimes there are falls in institutions where you look at it and you go. I can't come up with an immediate reason.

Obviously as an educator, I tend to trust universities. We've seen a fall in covenants in those as well. You have to start looking for broader systemic factors. What is it that isn't working for us as a country right now that is leading people to this position of a very low trust?

Brian Lehrer: What do you think the answer is with respect to universities since you brought that up?

Ethan Zuckerman: I think in many cases when we get more familiar with institutions, we get to know their good points in their bad points more clearly. One of the big theories for why trust is eroding over this period of time is that we're becoming more critical. We have better information. More people are getting educated, many more people are finishing high school and going to college or university than were doing so in the 1960s and 1970s. I think familiarity, in some cases, leaves people the ability to look more critically at a system. They feel like now it's not as mysterious. It's not as shrouded in secrecy and they can see the strengths and weaknesses of it and find ways to react to it.

The other thing that I would say is in general, whatever explanations you can come up with for mistrust, Occam's razor suggests that an institution not working particularly well is almost always but the real reason for mistrust. Oe of the reasons why Congress is the least trusted institution in the United States is that it is so often paralyzed and that it's been factionalized to the point where often seems incapable of doing things. I think there's lots of legitimate reasons to criticize the university system at this point. I suspect that that's what more polling would get you to.

Brian Lehrer: Let me go to that question about insurrection, which comes up a lot in the book, but not as a bad thing. You've said that what happened at the Capitol gives insurrection a bad name. How are you defining it and how has it been used as a response to mistrust in a way that you want to praise?

Ethan Zuckerman: Sure. Let's back up here. The book is about this idea that in many cases we're losing faith in institutions, most books would then say it's time to rebuild faith in those institutions. Our institutions need to be stronger than ever. Let's put our shoulder to the wheel and do it. That's not the book that I'm trying to write. I actually think that in some cases, our institutions are just flat out failing us. We need an alternative to institutionalism.

I borrowed terms that Chris Hayes uses in one of his earlier books. He says, institutionalists want to become part of those institutions, make them better. Insurrectionists look at those institutions and say, “Maybe this institution is no longer fit for purpose. Maybe it's time to try something different.” This book is really about taking insurrectionism seriously. When I’m talking about insurrectionism, I'm not talking about the terrorists who were in the capital. That’s violent insurrection, and they're not actually trying to build new Institutions. Frankly, their mistrust has been created by right-wing media and Donald Trump that it's been weaponized. I do think there's a versions of looking at an institution and saying, “This is no longer fit for purpose and we need something new.”

There I look at something like defund the police and essentially say, “Look, there's perfectly legitimate reasons for people of color in America to be mistrustful of policing.” After many years of unsuccessful policy reform, it is not at all unreasonable to look at that and say maybe what we actually need to do is imagine an entirely different institution. That's what the book really wants to provoke people to do, is to say, “We don't always need just to fix the institutions.” In some cases, maybe it's time to actually examine whether we need to do something, like policing, radically differently.

Brian Lehrer: Don in Teaneck, you're on WNYC with Ethan Zuckerman. Hi, Don.

Don: Hi, how are you doing? How's everybody?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Good to have you.

Don: My point was as amount of information increases, the availability of that information, more people know the more they can base their trust or mistrust on. I just think that the crisis of trust is really a crisis just the flow of information.

Brian Lehrer: Are you saying, Don, that if more information leads to more distrust that these institutions really don't deserve our trust? The more we know about them, the less we trust them?

Don: As it turns out to be, I would hope that there would be the other side of the coin where the more you know, the more is good reason to trust. I think, generally speaking, I'd rather have the information to make a decision rather than not.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Don, thank you very much. Two tears for transparency, Ethan. I guess what Don also raises is the suggestion that more information about institutions may not be more accurate information about institutions. Therefore, may falsely lead to mistrust.

Ethan Zuckerman: One of my favorite stories in the book is about my friend Luigi Reggie who was working with the Italian government. He was an open data advocate. He built these beautiful open data portals to let people see how government money was being spent. It turned out that people would use the portals and they would have even lower trust in government. He tried doing something different. He started organizing these tours for groups of people to come and audit projects that have been funded with lots of government money.

He'd take a bunch of activists and they go in and would they sit down with the person who is running one of these projects. They would try to find waste and malfeasance. Most of the time what they actually found was that these projects were pretty well run and pretty well thought about, and they would write up their findings. That actually ended up increasing confidence. Information in the abstract is funny. More transparency can actually put you in a situation where you're more mistrustful.

Information that you've had a hand in gathering, where you personally have had the chance to go out and finding information, your direct connection to that institution, that seems to be something that's capable of creating trust instead.

Brian Lehrer: What about social media because correct me if my memory is faulty. I remember you and I talking at the inception of Twitter, practically the inception of Twitter. It started to be used as a tool for democracy in the Orange Revolution, I think it was known as, in Iran and then in the Arab Spring, and then it went bad. How has your own perception of social media evolved? Where would you say it started and what's become of it?

Ethan Zuckerman: I think social media is an accelerant of a lot of these different forces. I think it's hard to-- One of the reasons I've looked historically in this book is that it is probably not helpful just to look at the last 10 years. We should probably be looking at 40 or 50 years as far as shifts in trust. I think one of the big things that's happened with social media is that it was first adopted by people who felt like they had no other way of communicating. During the Green Revolution in Iran, during some of the other unrest in the Middle East, we were seeing these accounts on social media from people who felt like they had no other way to get their voice out.

These days social media is as mainstream as it gets. We’ve just spent four years and some ways being governed through social media with President Trump using it as his version of the bully pulpit. I think a lot of the existing dynamics around politics, the factualization, the ways in which social media can now be used to amplify political points of view and also to spread this information. I think all of us who were so hopeful 10 plus years ago are now realizing that social media is just another part of the information environment and that we have to look at these large trends towards mistrust as infecting that space as well.

Brian Lehrer: Jeff in Yorktown, you're on WYC with Ethan Zuckerman. Hi, Jeff.

Jeff: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking the call, and, Mr. Zuckerman, goodto be on with you. I had the dubious good fortune to be at UMass for Ted Kennedy's Memorial at the Kennedy Library in support of network news coverage. This conversation and the last one, my feelings are that it really should be better termed anti-social media given that the platforms have been between consolidation and the chase for eyeballs has shoved everybody into these tunnels with no cheese regarding a multiplicity of viewpoints. I've been shocked in the last couple of weeks given the transition in Washington to discover how many of the people I know are being fed the same misinformation and are swallowing it whole.

Then to your point about disrupting institutions, or insurrection of institutions, I think maybe agility should be more the aim of institutions. Also, to your point on transparency, years ago, I was at a conference for community media. There was a gal who was getting her doctorate at Northwestern, I believe, who actually found that with regard to local government, the more transparency they had, as your point was, the less griping they did about where their tax dollars were going.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Jeff. It's all interesting. To some of his points, Ethan you wrote this book, you say, as a guide book to show people how to make change in their communities and you write that you're taking your own advice. You want to talk about that?

Ethan Zuckerman: Sure. Most of the book is not so much about setting up the problem of mistrust. I spend a little bit of it talking about the issues we’re talking about here. a lot of it is really talking about how people can position themselves with regards to existing institutions. I think you can go within an institution and try to bring it back to its core values. That's what I see what I call radical institutionalist doing. Examples, there are folks like prosecutors who go into the DA's office and say, “My job is not to put people in prison. My job is actually to bring justice to communities.” I need to diversify the toolkit that people are using.

I see people putting themselves outside institutions and trying to hold them responsible. That's everything from journalistic strategies to cop watching, to auditing strategies. Then I see people looking at institutions and saying, “You know what, I want to build an alternative to that.” That's where I'm putting a lot of my energy right now. I think like the caller just said, there's ways in which existing social media systems, in part because of their business model, are creating echo chambers, are leading people towards extremism. I'm someone who's actually been building social media since the mid-1990s.

My new work at UMass Amherst is around trying to build social media systems that work more like public media. Their goal is not to serve hundreds of millions of people. Their goal is to serve small communities of people and to be governed and moderated by those people who are using it. My hope is that as we start moving towards those different versions of social media, they actually help people become small, the Democrats, it helps people participate in the democratic life of running those networks.

That's me trying to eat my own dog food. I wrote this book because I didn't want people to feel helpless because of mistrust. I wanted them to look at systems that they don't think are working well and position themselves to try to change them. That's what I'm personally trying to do.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap it up, you write about how the 1963 March on Washington provided a template for protests, but you say it no longer works. There are new levers of change that those who wants civic action should push. What are they?

Ethan Zuckerman: I ended up talking about a four-levers framework. I think a lot of people are very used to trying to pass laws. Obviously, changing laws is a very effective way to make change, but we can also make really effective change in the markets. If we have new products that come to market, think about the rise of electric cars and rooftop solar panels. Sometimes we can make change through technology. One of the ways that people have made progress on privacy is bringing strong encryption out there, tools like signal. Then for me, maybe the strongest lever that we don't talk about enough is norm space, social change, changing hearts and minds before we change laws.

That's where I see a movement like me too going where we don't actually necessarily need new laws around sexual assault and harassment, but we need a real change in people's attitudes in the workplace. and people's ability to talk about assault and the trauma that comes from it

Brian Lehrer: Was the deep platforming of president Trump, an example of tech companies using one of these new leavers?

Ethan Zuckerman: Wow, yes. President Trump went so far down the line of using media to change hearts and minds. I think now, realizing that tech companies have this power, whether they want it or not to shape the global speech environment, I think that's absolutely a moment where companies are using some of their levers of change to say, we're not going to allow certain behaviors to become the norm. It's a really strange moment where we start realizing that power is decentralized. It's not just the government, it can be big corporations, but it could also be big groups of citizens in social movements as well.

Brian Lehrer: Then, just to follow up briefly, there becomes a lack of trust among some people in the institutions of social media, the big media, the big tech companies, of course they're generating lack of trust for so many reasons. Think a lot of people who like seeing president Trump's disinformation silenced also think, but wait, this doesn't mean I want Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, to be the arbiter of who gets speech.

Ethan Zuckerman: That's exactly right. When we look at trumping the platforms, the first thing we say is, geez, do we really want to give Zuckerberg and Dorsey that much power? The next response that people come up with was perhaps the government should regulate it. We have strong feelings about that in the United States. We generally don't want the government tightly regulating a public speech.

What we actually need to do is build really different institutions. We need social media that we own and manage as communities. This is one of those moments where we look at this and we say the institutions as we built them are failing us. It's not just a matter of incremental reform. We might need something truly different here. That's why we actually have to be open to this notion of building something entirely new, not just making small improvements to what already exists.

Brian Lehrer: Therefore folks, the last line of Ethan Zuckerman's book is, "My biggest fear is not that not that mistrust makes us disengage, but that we fail to imagine change at the scale we truly need. "The book is called Mistrust: Why losing faith in institutions provides the tools to transform them. Ethan, great conversation. Thanks a lot,

Ethan Zuckerman: Always so good to talk with you, Brian. Thanks so much for having me.

 

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