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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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The problem is lack of trust. Is that vaccine real or is it just a way to sell a product at taxpayer expense? Are those people regulating industrial waste actually engaging in a good-faith effort to keep the commons clean, or are they just regulating competitors of their lobbyists’ sponsors off the board?

You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.

You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.

I don't think this is consistent with the patterns we observe in contemporary politics. General institutional distrust is wildly asymmetric and the populist moment certainly hasn't cut down on the number of liars and grifters involved in government. People overwhelmingly think the other team is untrustworthy, but are, if anything, even more blindly loyal to their own political elites than they have been in the past.

It's perfectly consistent. If Republicans blindly trusted their own elites, Trump would never get the nomination, let alone the presediency. The fact that this did not result in a decrease of grifters might be a flaw of the tactic they picked to address the issue, but it's not a result of blind trust.

When the elites will not lead the people in the direction they want to go, they will find other leaders, who will be mostly grifters, because that's who is left.

"Social trust" isn't just between a population and its rulers, but also between the members of the polity themselves. Perception of crime, "thickness" of social bonds, community engagement, etc. That also has been going down thanks partially to increasing diversity but also thanks to the internet which has everyone staring at a screen instead of each other and staying in instead of going out.

I don’t deny that the things you mention may be factors, but I think by far the most prominent driver of trust decline is people giving compelling evidence that they are, in fact, untrustworthy.

Thanks to most people, especially those with authority, being utterly untrustworthy and the shared agreement to pretend they aren't failing.

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