culture
politics

Renewing Trust in America’s Institutions

Mercatus Center
National Affairs
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Martin Gurri

Mercatus Center

January 23rd, 2021
I find myself in violent agreement with most of what Yuval has written. Rather than play-act a phony debate, I’d like to build on what he said.
Institutions, viewed from inside, are always messy. Having worked at CIA, I can attest to that. What has changed in the new information environment is that the insides are now outside: everyone gets to see how messy the process is. Much of the public’s loss of trust is derived from this reversal of perspective. We can’t conduct the experiment, but I doubt that most of the institutional achievements of high modernity, from Hoover Dam to the Social Security system, could have been carried out under such intense and hostile scrutiny. I sometimes wonder what Jefferson and the Democrats would have done to poor George Washington, if they’d had the web to rant about him.
But it is also true that our institutions aren’t trustworthy. It’s also true that the quality of our elites has declined appallingly. In part, this is because they keep dreaming of a return to the last century, when the insides were still inside. They act and speak as if we don’t know – but we do know. Generational change will improve this. The young don’t remember a time when institutions weren’t transparent. A political rhetoric grounded on honesty and humility, even if embraced in self-defense, will do much to restore trust in institutions.
As our institutions increasingly resembled theaters in the round, with the whole world as audience, our elites became performative and now value applause over achievement. I believe we need to reconfigure government. Yuval believes institutions should hold their members to high standards. Neither proposition is realistic under conditions of radical distrust. That is another way of saying: we need new people. We need elites who can stand straight in the digital storm and exploit the institutional stage to build and grow rather than strut and self-promote. Beyond a structural reconfiguration, let me repeat, we need a moral reformation.
Alexander Hamilton left the Constitutional Convention early. The formal design of federal institutions was less important to him than the moral character of the people in them.
How do we get new people at the top? By beginning the reformation with the people at the bottom: with us. We’ll never get an elite class driven to service and achievement from a self-indulgent public. It’s easy to criticize and join the endless rant. That absolves us from responsibility. It’s harder to hold ourselves accountable – hardest of all to embrace self-restraint in our behavior and in our public and commercial choices. But if we want to reconquer trust and move our democracy into the digital age, that’s where it starts. I said it before. It’s up to us.
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