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What’s wrong with these darn institutions, and why does nobody trust them? That’s the question lurking behind every postmortem about why Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election and what they could do to start winning future ones. The thinking goes like this: Donald Trump, as a political figure, represents blowing up the status quo; Trump won and the incumbent vice president lost; ergo, a majority of voters are unhappy with the people and groups responsible for the status quo.
But the evidence that residents of the United States don’t trust their institutions goes beyond election results. It’s also visible in the falling number of Americans who get news from what were once known as “mainstream” sources, and in the declining share of people who say in polls that they, uh, trust institutions.
Whose fault is this? Some influential voices toward the center of the political spectrum—Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt—blame the influence of bumbling, know-it-all leftist elites in media and politics. Silver calls it the Indigo Blob, an informal alliance of “progressive institutionalists”—educated media figures, academics, activists, and political staffers who (among other things) pushed the Democratic Party too far left on social justice and “identity politics” issues, triggering a working-class backlash over issues ranging from police reform to COVID-era shutdowns. To that list, Yglesias would add issues of “biological sex” (i.e., trans rights), while Leonhardt blames the left for Biden’s alleged lenience on border security. Broadly, they say, the self-appointed progressive “expert class” and its values are out of step with the public.
One can agree that some voters have been turned off by leftist scolding and boundary-pushing without finding this explanation of events fully satisfying. For one, Silver’s blob metaphor is supposed to connote homogeneity and groupthink, but some of the most sustained backlash against “wokeness” has been led by organizations and public figures within the elite left-of-center sphere. If working-class voters simply believed that rejecting confrontational social justice activism was what made for a functioning institution, they would have elected the New York Times op-ed section to the presidency.
The most electorally consequential decision that Silver writes about, meanwhile, was the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the insistence that he run for reelection. But that was mostly the work of older, centrist Democrats who’ve held power for decades and, if anything, see younger people in their party and the press as their enemies. Teachers’ unions, which insisted on keeping schools closed during COVID, largely exist outside of Ivy League influence spheres—and in fact often found themselves at odds with influential progressive parents. The federal judge who issued a key ruling ordering Biden to reopen the border to asylum applicants was a 77-year-old first appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. These perceived institutional failures can’t entirely be pinned on highly educated progressives.
Americans also despise—or at least distrust—a number of groups that aren’t affiliated in the common imagination with Democrats or liberals at all. “Defunding the police” might not be popular, but only a modest 51 percent of respondents in Gallup’s trust survey this year said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police as an institution. “The medical system” clocked in at 36 percent, churches and organized religion at 32 percent, and both banks and “large technology companies” at 27 percent. “Big business” (16 percent) was one of the least popular institutions named in the poll, while a recent study by two political science professors at Berkeley who aggregated a variety of survey information found that Wall Street was the U.S. institution that has lost the most trust over the past 50 years. Evidence, in other words, is thin on the ground for the idea—boosted by Silver, Yglesias, and others inside the party—that Democrats could benefit from embracing the leaders (or at least the ways of thinking) that hold sway in Silicon Valley and high finance. Americans, for the most part, are not looking at what Facebook, Elon Musk, McKinsey, and the Bitcoin people have created and thinking, yes.
The data says Americans as a whole share some of the left’s resentments. And for all the damage they may have done, contemporary progressives are also responsible for some pretty popular stuff, too, like protecting Dreamers from deportation, getting people like Harvey Weinstein out of workplaces, ending the war against nonviolent drug offenders, legalizing gay marriage, and prosecuting the kinds of police officers who killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. YIMBYism—removing zoning-based barriers to building homes as a means of addressing housing prices and homelessness—is another initially leftist idea that has shown signs of heading in the direction of broad acceptance. (Maybe.)
So if it’s not (exclusively) the Indigo Blob’s fault that no one trusts anything, then what is it? Perhaps the answer has something to do with the first institution I mentioned: Our beloved free press. Thanks to the innovative work that tech monopolies have done in the advertising market, it’s increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting. That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.
Where that mostly leaves the participants in media (defined broadly) is trying to hustle up a career by selling a strong perspective on the world—by having a dramatic and emotionally satisfying explanation for everything that’s happening everywhere. Its marker of success is being able to headline your own podcast or subscription-driven Substack newsletter, and it runs on opinion “takes,” which cost relatively little to produce, but have to compete for space and eyeballs on Google results, X and Bluesky, and Apple News. And in many cases, the more a take reinforces readers’ existing beliefs, the better it does. It’s a truism and a Paul Simon lyric for a reason: All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest.
What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit. (Which, to be clear, is a take I usually agree with. There’s lots of bullshit out there!) At the same time, groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. (Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime.) It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.
Consider the issue of Joe Biden’s age. After the June debate, it was very obvious to almost everyone that Biden was too old to run for office. But a few figures—including writer/politician Will Stancil and political scientists Rachel Bitecofer and Allan Lichtman—argued otherwise. Their position was absurd, empirically disprovable, and very popular among certain kinds of partisan Democrats who were looking for someone to blame for Biden’s issues besides the Democratic Party. Arguing that voters wouldn’t have found it alarming that the president blanked out for 15 seconds on TV were it not for the “mainstream media”—a preposterous claim!—was good exposure for Stancil, Bitecofer, and Lichtman. It was good for their career prospects because their followers wanted what they were saying to be true.
The 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship to Russia provides another example. The connections between the two were a legitimate scandal and a symbol of structural problems plaguing the entire world, but the most popular media figures that emerged from the era were #Resistance goofballs writing what was essentially spy fiction about pee tapes and 1980s-era kompromat operations. (The Biden administration later invited a bunch of these people to the White House.) On the other side of the partisan spectrum, the ascendant figures are free/non-thinkers like RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan who “question everything,” even things that don’t need questioning, like the polio vaccine or federal deposit insurance.
It probably shouldn’t be surprising that all of this happened once media became democratized and decentralized. It’s fun to believe a conspiracy theory, or to be the person who was first to say that the emperor has no clothes. It’s also only natural to defend the groups to which you belong when they’re attacked. Thus will every possible subject eventually develop its own hater–stan dichotomy: Tesla, wearing masks during COVID, artificial intelligence, Mayor Pete, whatever. There is always an online army ready to roll out in defense of the indefensible. (To credit Nate Silver, this is something he has written about—but while he sees it as an Indigo Blob phenomenon, e.g., going overboard with COVID precautions because right-wingers rejected them, I see it more as an “everyone all the time” phenomenon.)
Stay too long in this environment and you either join a tribe, stop believing anything at all, or both. Part of the tendency among Democrats to downplay rising crime and border crossing numbers during Biden’s presidency may have been ideological; part of it was also probably the boy-cried-wolf effect of right-wing media having already been reporting constantly, for decades, that the country was in the midst of an unprecedented crime and immigration crisis. It’s well-known that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; the relationship eventually takes its toll on the nail, too. It’s hard to trust people who are telling you something is going wrong, even when they’re right, when that’s what they always say.
Let’s return to one of our original questions: Why don’t our institutions, with the exception of the hornet eradication apparatus, work? One reason might be that polarization-optimized discourse does not tend to build consensus around measured, fair, and accurate assessments of institutional failures. It fails to create the shared sense that something scandalous is happening; even when Republicans and Democrats are both angry about the same thing, it can be for different reasons. A criticism that emerges from one polarized, partisan-coded silo will create an equal and opposite reaction from another—that’s the hater–stan dynamic, which explains why Republicans are currently locked into rooting for self-driving cars that can’t stop running into things. Public opinion–based incentives also require that people pay attention to stuff in the first place, which they are increasingly not doing. You don’t get your prize for taming inflation and reducing the crime rate if most voters either don’t realize or refuse to believe that those things occurred.
Having just written an entire article about the dangers of universalized single-cause explanations, though, I would be remiss in putting the blame for dysfunction and discontent entirely on the media. As a mid-level member of the Indigo Blob, I also believe the usual suspects are at fault too: money in politics and the sclerotic U.S. legislative system, the failure of regulation to check the stock market’s collective expectation of indefinite earnings growth, the concentration of wealth and rise in the relative cost of basic components of the American Dream, bad-faith right-wing propaganda, the refusal of older generations to loosen their grip on their property values and political norms, blah blah blah.
Without a system that can build consensus, though—even the kind of phony, hypocritical, ideologically bracketed consensus we used to manufacture right here at home when this country was great—all of that stuff is academic. And while I do think I have some good ideas for how we can get back to doing that, I’m only going to tell you what they are if you subscribe to my Substack.
