Trust: America's Best Chance

When no one’s word is authoritative, any crank is as credible as the next person. It is the irony at the heart of conspiracy thinking: You can’t trust anyone these days, so you may as well place some credence in some stranger who just tweeted something exciting, if unproven. ... When someone whispers, “Trust no one,” they are inevitably also saying, “Trust me.

To love a country, as to love a person, is to love a flawed and exquisite creation, to see what is best in it, to be angry when it is not what it could be, precisely because you have seen glimmers of its greatness.

To believe that your hopes of election depend on fewer people voting is to have a tragically weak level of trust in the value of your own positions, and your ability to defend them.

Our ability to trust in institutions and in one another—the ability to trust that we are subject to the same facts, even living in the same reality—is now endangered. A combination of causes has brought us to this point, a crisis of trust that has the potential to be paralyzing.

Doubt is our product,” said the memo, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the best means for establishing a controversy.

The truth is our election system is flawed. But it will only be improved if we trust it enough to use it to elect people committed to fixing it.

playing to an audience’s distrust of others, you can more quickly secure their trust in you.

Ours is not an ethnic identity, but a civic one. This means that for us, even more than for most people around the world, a sense of trust is not just strategically important but existentially meaningful. If the cornerstone of American identity is democracy, the cornerstone of democracy is trust.

But I was admittedly frustrated after Iowa. The conspiracies multiplied. Someone noticed that our campaign had purchased software from the same software company that made the flawed app in Iowa—enough to send the Twittersphere into a tailspin. A staff member on my campaign was married to someone who ran a company that invested in the company that made the app—clear evidence! No one really took the trouble to explain what all these tidbits were supposed to amount to, but then, conspiracy thinking is not obliged to answer questions; it merely asks them, insinuating.

We cannot have a free Government without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.

the Constitution an attempt to structure the founders’ beliefs on how that trust could be distributed.

Addressing this question - of how to create or enhance a sense of belonging within as diverse a group as the American electorate or, even more broadly, the American people - is central to our chances of building greater trust in our country.

Economists comparing the economic growth of various countries have found a strong positive correlation between GDP growth and measured social trust. The effect even seems to apply when comparing different states in the U.S., with one study finding that a ten percent increase in trust translated to about a half percent increase in per capita income growth and even a positive effect on employment rates.

We will have to decide which approaches we wish to emulate from abroad, which structures we wish to dismantle from before, which strategies we wish to retrieve from our past, and which institutions we may need to fashion completely anew.

choose a politics defined not by who we push away, but by how many we can call to our side.

TRUST ISN’T ABOUT perfection. It’s not about certainty. Trust only arises, is only needed, because we are so often less-than-credible beings. Trust in institutions is important precisely because we can’t all be checking on them all the time. Trust in one another matters because we do not have the energy or the tools to be constantly verifying what others will do. The extraordinary power of trust is that it lets us proceed as though we are certain of what to expect from others,

As Arendt said, “facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.

A police officer is supposed to represent safety; when an officer kills a resident, it strikes at the core of the relationship between a community and the police officers who are trusted with arrest powers, and weapons, in order to do their job.

Americans will not suddenly begin to trust government if they don’t see better results; and government won’t suddenly deliver a dramatically higher standard of living if it remains starved of resources, no matter how many efficiencies we find at the margins.

when you are trying to change a dynamic that feeds on itself, you have to find a point at which to intervene.

while circumstances are distinct in each of the Nordic countries, what they now all have in common is a robust social democracy that takes care of its citizens and rewards higher rates of taxation with first-rate services that drive more widespread well-being.

America’s highest ideals hold out the promise that the country can be a place of belonging for everyone.

For John Adams, it was a central issue: “The only Maxim of a free Government ought to be to trust no Man living with Power to endanger the public Liberty.

The formation of trust has to do with predictable, supportive behavior over time.

Individual decisions are of course not the only things that shape health outcomes: environmental factors, discrimination, and access to health insurance and health providers all play a role. But to the considerable extent that our health is shaped by the choices we make as individuals, those choices are in turn shaped by our levels of trust.

Public health strategies, as Fauci had experienced decades before, depend on a population trusting in experts and authorities, because the outcome of these strategies can depend on the decisions that individuals make, and who they choose to listen to.

Our interests may differ, our identities may be diverse, and our values may not always be the same. But we can only negotiate among these interests, identities, and values if we stand on the same field of fact.

Across fifty years, through a combination of failed policies, amoral technologies, and concerted, deliberate attacks, foreign and domestic, we have lost access to the basic levels of trust that democracy demands. The democratic process is our only means powerful enough to move us to safer ground, but it, too, relies on trust.

What Russia, led by KGB veteran Vladimir Putin, understands is that trust is a national security asset, critical to the strategic position of the United States, and therefore a high-value target.