A crisis of trust
The consequences of tearing down the foundation of society.
Who was surprised when Pew Research Center revealed a recent poll showing that America’s trust in government “to do what is right” is just 22 percent, down from 77 percent in the early 1960s? Not me. This lack of trust erodes our democracy. When we perceive dishonesty and deceit — or just plain incompetence — in the people and institutions that manage our public affairs, our nation becomes ultimately unmanageable.
I’ve used this space in previous issues of Thinking Minnesota to describe how this distrust derives from the lack of common sense in many of our public officials when they devise and implement public policy, especially regarding social and economic concerns. I suspect the average Minnesota voter will be shocked when in the coming months the state government implements some of the policies passed by the recent legislative session.
The “paid leave” legislation, for example, will create havoc for small business operators and farm workers and is just one example of many. When such harebrained policies fail, our political leaders will quietly move on to the next thoughtlessly conceived idea without fear of the consequences of past failures and misdeeds.
I noted in an earlier column how the “Feeding Our Future” fraud case perfectly illustrates terrible policy and horrible administration. While dumbfounded Minnesotans can hardly believe the extent of these crimes, not one government official was publicly reprimanded or punished — not the governor, the legislators who proposed this program, or the officials in the Department of Education who administered the program. There is not, was not, nor will be accountability for those responsible. Do we doubt the level of our distrust in those who presently govern us?
Many people also fail to find common sense in how health care officials and our political class mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic from start to finish. The initial measures were dubious at best, with little scientific merit. They watched as school-age students were locked out of their classrooms when actual data confirmed that the pandemic least affected children. (They should have focused on elderly residents in assisted living facilities.) And who were the biggest proponents of school lockdowns and lockouts? School principals, school superintendents, and school boards all led by none other than Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers — an association comprised largely of non-teachers.
Perhaps most emblematic of all the misguided COVID mistakes is the now infamous “six-foot rule,” which required that individuals remain 72 inches apart, and which was foisted on the American public by an insistent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Society was torn apart, businesses shuttered, and individuals harassed over a policy Dr. Anthony Fauci recently was forced to admit under oath to the House Oversight Committee “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.”
Likewise with the requirements for masking of children even down to two years old, which were contrary even to the recommendations of the World Health Organization, and to which Fauci in the same testimony admitted there was never a cost-benefit analysis performed to examine the unintended consequences of masking children versus the supposed protection masking would provide them. To the contrary, Fauci testified that he could recall no studies or even data supporting the efficacy of masking children.
Yet Americans were lectured, hectored, and bullied to “trust the science.” Only now we have learned what many suspected — the “science” never existed. In the case of the six-foot rule, it turns out that two CDC staffers came up with the capricious recommendation that massively disrupted American life, and which was recently debunked by an exhaustive study conducted by Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
In retrospect, the CDC was wrong on virtually every major issue relating to the pandemic, yet not a single official at the CDC has been held responsible. I’m unaware of a single official at the CDC even acknowledging errors — including the obdurate and unrepentant Dr. Fauci. Instead, these officials have spent subsequent years covering up their mistakes and posturing as heroes. It begs the question why we allow ourselves to be governed by opportunistic elites who occupy official positions only for their own self-interest in pursuit of financial gain, career advancement, and power.
Trust is necessary for our lives to be manageable. We take hundreds of actions in our daily lives based on trust. We make certain assumptions based on trust in others. We assume the best in people based on this trust. Our experience shows us when to trust and when to remain skeptical. The past several years have given us reason to distrust our political, business, academic, and media elites. We all make mistakes, but trust suffers when our leaders can obfuscate and mislead the public without accountability. It is no accident that the Pew data reveals that trust in our leaders and institutions has sunk to crisis levels.
Distrust in state and national leaders is grounded in the contempt they exhibit toward average citizens. This attitude is shared by many other institutional leaders in the political class, government bureaucracy, academia, mainstream media, arts communities, and Hollywood. What is particularly disturbing is that no matter how destructive their policy prescriptions may be for the citizenry, the governing class is never held accountable. These government officials appear so self-centered that they seem to be indifferent to or unaware of the damage they inflict on others. Their obvious policy failures cannot be debated openly and freely without furious opposition and hostility from these very same elites.
American Experiment is committed to shining a light on the failures of the elite governing class and exposing their nonsensical policies, such as CRT, DEI, ESG, non-binary gender politics, Marxist economics, and general incompetence — along with the corresponding greed and corruption that emanate from these harmful theories and practices. It is past time to return common sense to the public square and hold leaders accountable when they implement such foolish, arbitrary, and destructive policies. We will continue our work doing exactly that.