OPINION
As institutions collapse, Americans need to renew faith in each other
By Ben Domenech
December 26, 2019 | 7:32pm
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The most important story of our soon-to-end decade is a radical decline in trust in once-trusted institutions in the United States — a social trend half a century in the making.
The church, the Supreme Court, small businesses and the police fared OK, though only the American military maintains high levels of trust and confidence. But according to Gallup, trust in most other major institutions matched or hit historic lows in 2019.
Only 8% of Americans trust television news; big business and the criminal justice system are at 10%; newspapers, 12%; banks, 13%; public schools, 13%; and the health care system, 15%. Probably to no one’s surprise, Congress fared the worst, managing a mere 4%.
Some of these institutions made catastrophic mistakes in the recent past. Think, for example, of investment banks’ failure to foresee the looming threat posed by their securitized gambling in the run-up to the Great Recession. Or consider the mainstream media’s serial blunders in response to the Trump phenomenon, most of them a product of an ideological determination to undo the results of 2016.
There is also a deeper, pervasive crisis of institutional collapse going back to Vietnam and Watergate that has to do with the failures of government — in war, in intelligence, in deficits, in health care websites, in disaster response.
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READ MORE: https://nypost.com/2019/12/26/as-institutions-collapse-americans-need-to-renew-faith-in-each-other/
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Unlike other nations, where there is only the mob and the leader — a crowd of powerless people appealing to the powerful for salvation — the United States has sustained itself time and again thanks to the spirit that drives us to link arms with our neighbors and solve problems for ourselves.
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A nation where citizens spend hours yelling at strangers on the internet but don’t know the names of their neighbors to invite for Christmas Eve is a sad one, indeed.
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If the idea of America is to survive for generations to come, we can’t respond to betrayals by institutions, at whatever level of community, by throwing up our hands. We can’t give up on our churches just because the pews are filled with sinners; on sports leagues filled with cheaters; or the government filled with idiots.
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It’s those 435 people we ought to concentrate on bettering. Institutions can die. The Americans who must renew their purpose will come from within our communities. They might be your neighbors. They might be you.
Benjamin Domenech is publisher of The Federalist. Twitter: @BDomenech
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