Mandatory PPE
2020-10-22 · Guest: Kevin Vallier (Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University) · 51:14
Decline of social and political trust in America
Bob Zadek interviews Professor Kevin Vallier about the alarming decline of both social and political trust in the United States. They explore the distinctions between trusting strangers and trusting institutions, the historical events that eroded these bonds, and how the centralization of government power fuels polarization by turning cultural differences into existential threats.
Topics: Social Trust, Political Polarization, Federalism, Institutional Trust, Economic Growth, Cultural Conflict, Big Tech
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Kevin Vallier
Introduction to Trust [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. The show this Sunday and always of ideas, never once the show of attitude.
Have you ever sat down and read a dollar bill? Well, if you had, you would have learned an important statement of our national ethos: “In God We Trust.” In God We Trust. Trust. Well, trusting in God, I suppose, is kind of easy. But if we get past God, who else do you trust? Is trust one human’s trust of another, one human’s trust of institutions that affect that individual’s life? Is trust the default rule? Are we born trusting everybody and we learn whom not to trust? Or are we born distrusting everyone, or trusting everyone, and we discover by experience who has lost that trust and who we should no longer trust? Which is healthier? Trust everyone unless you learn otherwise? Trust no one unless you learn otherwise?
Lastly, why does it matter? Does it matter to us whether or not we trust our government, whether or not we trust our friends? Does it matter to us as a society? Does it matter to us as a country? Here’s my bet: you probably have not thought of any of these really important questions. I sure didn’t, until I discovered this morning’s guest, Kevin Vallier. Kevin is a philosopher, he’s a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University. He is, for this morning’s show, the author of a very important book. A book called—what could be more timely than this?—Trust in a Polarized Age. Kevin’s book follows on the heels of an earlier book, equally important, Must Politics Be War?
Well, do you find yourself wondering the answer to both of those questions, or examining or worrying about those issues? I have never before seen any commentary discussing how important trust is for our survival as a country, for our individual survival. I never thought much about trust. It was just there, like the weather. To help us understand why this is so important, I welcome Kevin Vallier to the show. Kevin, thank you so much for your book, thank you so much for your scholarship, and thank you for joining us this morning.
Kevin Vallier: It’s a delight to be here, Bob. I really hope that I can share with your audience what you promised. So, happy to have the conversation.
Defining Social and Political Trust [03:50]
Bob Zadek: Now, Kevin, in your most recent book, you explain to us, you teed up the issue, if you will, by some pretty shocking observations, all data-driven, not just your musings, but heavily supported by data so they are irrefutable. And that is that we have experienced as a country in recent times—that is going back my lifetime, going back 50 years—a growing, growing, and the trend is without interruption, growing level of distrust in the country.
And you explain in your book, you point out, and it’s important for our audience to understand, two core concepts as we discuss trust. You distinguish social trust versus governmental trust or institutional trust. So please, because we’ll be using these terms throughout the show, briefly explain both concepts and then share with us, as a starting point, your observation about the trend in our country in trust, and share with us why you think that is happening.
Kevin Vallier: Sure. So that’s a couple of different points. I think I’ll just begin by giving the two concepts, try to make them real simple. Social trust is kind of trust in most people in your society. Essentially, trust in strangers in your nation. All right? So it’s how much you trust people, say, when you take a walk in your neighborhood, that someone isn’t going to come by, say, and rob you. Or that it’s trust that, for instance, when you buy something, you’re not going to be defrauded. Or trust that, you know, when you interact with some kind of local bureaucracy, that you’re going to be treated in a more or less professional manner.
Political trust or institutional trust is trust in particular institutional bodies that are thought to have certain functions, like trust in Congress, or trust in the presidency, or trust in the CDC, or perhaps distrust in the CDC. So, you know, those are two important kinds of trust to distinguish because they have different causes and they have different consequences, even though they’re intimately related.
The Decline of Trust in America [06:21]
Kevin Vallier: Now, the trends that we’ve been seeing is something a little bit like this. So social trust in the US has fallen dramatically. So in the early ’70s, around half of Americans said most people can be trusted. And today that figure’s less than a third. Political trust has fallen steeply too. Throughout the ’60s, about 70% of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington always or most of the time. By the early ’90s, that number had fallen to 30%. There’s a rebound because of 9/11, but now it’s collapsed to 17% as of 2019.
And, you know, more troublesome is that Americans reporting no confidence at all in the national government doubled from around 14% between 1995 and 2000 to about 28% in 2017. You’re seeing people have partisan distrust. So just in the 2017 election, around 70% of Republicans say they don’t trust anybody who voted for Hillary. And actually, the reverse is also true. About 70% of Democrats said they distrust anyone, anyone who voted for Donald Trump. It isn’t that they distrust Trump; they distrust anyone who voted for them.
We also see increases in darker impulses like hatred, where now as many as half of each members of each party hate the other. And another part of the trend is that trust is falling by generation. So the World War II generation was the most trusting, then the Boomers are less trusting, Gen X, the Millennials, and it’s the 18 to 29-year-olds that are the most or distrusting group. So, you know, around 30% of Americans over 65 said most people can’t be trusted, which is still too high—30% is a lot—but 60% of 18 to 29-year-olds say that most people can’t be trusted. So we’re raising a mistrusting generation, and we know from some of the data that social trust attitudes tend to harden with age. So it’s not that they’re going to become more trusting as they get older. So we face a low-trust future.
The Benefits of High-Trust Societies [08:30]
Kevin Vallier: Now, why does that matter? Why does it matter that trust is falling? Well, there’s all kinds of good things that come from social and political trust. And I can just run through a few of them. So one of the things that more social trust enables us to do is to exchange, to engage in economic exchange. So if you trust people, you don’t have to worry about them doing something shifty or unjust or something along those lines. And it’s for that reason the more trusting countries tend, all else equal, to grow faster. So people become more prosperous.
People are also willing to regulate each other less. If you trust people, you don’t feel like you have to control them, right? You don’t have to manipulate them. So the countries that are high trust like Sweden, which isn’t a socialist nation, by the way—high trust in Sweden enabled them to carry out massive deregulations in the ’80s and the ’90s that if they occurred here in a lower-trust country, people would howl. “Oh, you have to watch those evil businesses, you have to control those evil businesses.” But in Sweden, you can actually have the conversation, “Oh, you know, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s true that fewer regulations would work. I trust you, you’re a good person. I’ll have to think about that.”
So those are the kinds of things we lose when we lose social trust. We get more corruption in the legal system. And lower political trust, you might say, “Oh look, you know, I shouldn’t trust the government. Like, why should I trust it? Why should I trust the government? Why would that be good?” Well, what I encourage people to think about is that the government’s actually a whole lot of different things. And as long as we have a large government, we should want it to work better at least in some of the things that it does, right, the legitimate things. Maybe we don’t want the DEA to work better, maybe we don’t necessarily want the Fed to work better. But by distrusting certain parts of government, you give others more power. So for instance, I have my own worries about the Federal Reserve system, but I think trusting the Federal Reserve system means it’s less likely that Congress is going to engage in fiscal spending and huge deficits. So sometimes trusting government’s good because we trust a part that’s less destructive than another part.
Partisan Distrust and Cross-Cutting Identities [10:38]
Bob Zadek: Now Kevin, I have one—the concept of trust. I’d like to drill down sort of one notch. And when you pointed out some scary statistics, and you pointed out that a high percentage of people who attribute themselves to one party, identify as being Democrats, they hate other people just because they are Republicans, and vice versa, and they distrust them solely because of that.
Now I want to—is it universal distrust? For example, I’m in a sports—playing sports against somebody else, competitive tennis. And my opponent is a Democrat and I’m a Republican. Is that distrust so broad that I will be suspicious that he will be cheating at the game of tennis? Or is the distrust limited to when he is performing a function where the result is dictated by his political party? Is it broad distrust or focused distrust? And if focused distrust, isn’t that kind of natural, and what’s unhealthy about that?
Kevin Vallier: So that’s a great question. Empirically, we’re not exactly sure how broadly distrust affects behavior, and I’m actually raising some grant money to run these studies now. But I can give you one example that it affects people. Today about 50% of Republicans don’t want their children to marry someone who’s a Democrat. And the reverse is also true. About half of parents don’t want—Democrat parents don’t want their children to marry Republicans. So distrust at least affects that gigantic factor in one’s life. And, you know, 50 years ago, those were the numbers for people being against interracial marriage. So, you know, we traded racial prejudice for political prejudice.
So that’s one way I think it would come out. But my suspicion is what would happen in the case you described: if people really are focused, say, on their tennis team and working together, they have what some people call cross-cutting identities. That is, they have identities that don’t have anything to do with politics. If someone brings up politics in the group and starts talking about it all the time, and someone else disagrees, I do think that’s going to make it harder for them and more unpleasant or more awkward or more anxious for them to be in that group given how polarized we are.
So I do expect it would affect things when that distrust in politics is made salient. Like you learn that someone voted for Trump and you—I know people who’ve said, you know, “My dad voted for Trump. Like, can I spend time with my dad now?” Like, “I learned that my best friend is for Trump,” or “I learned my boyfriend”—there’s a whole bunch of online articles—“I learned that my boyfriend voted for Trump. Should I break up with him?” Right? So I do think that phenomenon, I do think that phenomenon is there. I mean, the boyfriend and girlfriend have the common bond of the relationship, but then one learns that the other voted for the other party and thinks, “Yeah, that just suggests I didn’t know them. Who were you all along? Did I ever know who you were in the first place?” So I think those kind of things happen, and I expect them to happen more with time.
Historical Turning Points for Trust [16:03]
Bob Zadek: Now you distinguish, of course, you and many others who have written about the subject, you distinguish, as I said in my opening, between distrust in government and social distrust. And you pointed out, both in your book and this morning, that there is a steady, steady decline in social distrust. Now I can understand a distrust in or an increase in political distrust because somebody with political power has the power to harm me in the sense that interfering with my freedom, taking away my property through taxation. So they represent a true threat to me, and therefore I don’t trust them because they’re that—they’re a clear threat. It’s like I don’t trust somebody who’s attacking me with a gun. I don’t trust that he’s not going to pull the trigger.
However, what accounts for social distrust when my neighbor, my friend, my work colleague doesn’t have any real power, can’t really harm me? But what accounts for my—the growing societal distrust? Because those relationships are kind of benign. So what started it all? How did we start? Because there’s a trend you pointed out, a clear trend from the ’70s through today. So how did that come about? It’s not just because of climate change—I’m being facetious. What caused the decline in social—or the decline in social trust, and why should there be any growing social distrust between neighbors, friends, work colleagues, and the like?
Kevin Vallier: You know, in my view, the decline in social trust is one of the great social scientific mysteries because we don’t know historically how people learned to do it. How did people grow from tribes where they knew everybody to trust people they didn’t know? We don’t know the answer to that question in social science. We have some thoughts, but we don’t know.
As far as the changes in social trust, the problem is we’ve only been measuring it in a careful way across the world for about 40 years. And what I’d really want to see, for instance, were social trust levels around the Second World War. Because my deep suspicion is that war, particularly against an enemy that was universally and rightly regarded as terrible, made people think they could trust their government and each other because everybody was working together to beat the Nazis.
So then, you know, another war comes along, Vietnam, and there isn’t agreement that it is just. There isn’t agreement on the—who—whether the enemy is bad. There’s huge protests. The younger generation says, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” You know, that was one of the slogans back then. So that created social distrust. So I think one thing that is probably the case is that when people have to band together under some common threat—well, with the exception of this virus, perhaps—but they become more trusting because they all see each other are contributing. Whereas if you have something divisive and people are being sort of cruel and mean to each other or saying, “Oh, you know, you’re not a patriot,” or “Hey, you’re a baby killer,” or, you know, harassing soldiers that come home, you know, that kind of thing can make people think, “Oh, you know, people are really rotten.”
So a lot of it has to do with the kinds of positive experiences we have with others, especially when we’re younger, or the negative experiences we have. That’s one part of the story. When you view corruption in government, I think that can also matter a lot. I think Watergate was a very big deal. It certainly was for political trust. But before then, you could have this kind of rosy image of the presidency as the president not—because they hid the fact that, you know, FDR was having, you know, having affairs, right? They hid the fact of all the, frankly, strange stuff that was going on in JFK’s Oval Office. You know, the Nixon stuff was hidden for a while. And I think Watergate was this—you know, that and the Vietnam War were real periods of increasing distrust.
I also think that when people disagree more about values, it’s harder for them to trust each other. And I see this—to put it this way—the United States is a very religious country even still. And what’s interesting is that it goes in cycles. So there are times when people get much more religious and then there’s a decline. This has happened a bunch of times. And the way I see what happened in the ’60s and ’70s is we had a non-Christian religious conversion on the left, that they became converted to a kind of equality and sexual revolution and abortion is okay and, you know, equality is pretty much the only political value that matters, not liberty. And so you had this culture arise, this, you know, effectively kind of new religion that we’re seeing a new evolution of it today in the kind of social justice kind of area.
And so imagine half the country had converted to Islam 50 years ago. We would probably be having lower trust because, “Oh, those people are really different and they have really different values.” So I think there was a big change in values, but not among everybody, just among part of the country. And I think that’s getting people to be less trusting because they know that other people have different values and it’s harder to trust people because you think, “Well, why—I mean, why do they have those other values? Maybe they’re—maybe they’re bad. Maybe they can’t be trusted because they have those bad values. Oh, they’re for abortion, they must be a bad person,” or “They’re against abortion, they must be a bad person.” So that’s another possibility. I think that political polarization has been playing a role, and less participation in associations, people being less involved in church and charitable organizations as the government takes over more and more of those functions. So, you know, there’s a lot of different things that could be contributing, but it’s really hard to tell. So it is still a bit of a mystery. But those are some thoughts.
Power and Distrust [20:39]
Bob Zadek: Now the—an observation that I have, and I distinguish, as I thought about your points in your book, I distinguish strongly distinguish, I should say, political distrust from social distrust. I find them almost, but for the common word trust, very different concepts. And I suggested this a second ago earlier in our talk, and I want to ask for your thoughts on this.
I the extent which I distrust government, and I profoundly distrust government as my listeners know, I distrust government because they have the power to harm me. And I think the distrust in government can be tracked as behaving in the same way as the accumulation of governmental power. As if government’s power receded, I would trust it more because it doesn’t represent a threat. If somebody is attacking me with a gun, I’m not going to trust them so much or trust their goodwill, they’re not going to use the gun against me.
And social distrust, as I suggested earlier, is kind of—it really puzzles me, your observations in your book, because my neighbor is not going to harm me. And I struggle with what’s the natural order of mankind? Trust or distrust? Are we hardwired to distrust so we survive, or are we hardwired to trust so we survive? So I wonder if my observation is correct, that the polarization, the distrust of government, the breakdown of political society into those who want more governmental power against those who want less governmental power—because that is a clear distinction between the two—and those who want more governmental power want the power kind of for selfish reasons so they can use government to enhance themselves with wealth transfers. We may talk about that a bit this morning because you discuss it in your book. But can you speak to that observation? Is distrust in government or growing distrust explainable that simply?
Kevin Vallier: I think that that’s actually part of it. It’s consistent with the observation that people trust their local and state governments more than the federal government because, of course, the federal government intervenes in a much more harmful way, right? They have the military, after all. Your local government typically isn’t going to beat up on you in the same way that the feds do. So I think that’s consistent.
I also think it’s the case that we distrust each other more when the federal government insists on making a decision rather than letting those decisions being made more locally. So I think abortion is a big case of this. I think that Roe made salient this massive point of disagreement where if that had not happened, we would have handled abortion at state levels or national level through Congress where, you know, people would have to kind of get together and decide what the policy would be. So in having so much power at the federal level and deciding points of social controversy for everyone across the country, I think is a source of distrust in government.
Another reason that large government causes a distrust is because large governments can slow down economic growth and prosperity and they can make the rich richer at the expense of the poor through things like corporate welfare and stuff like that. And I think when people see that corruption, they trust government less. And when they see that they’re not as prosperous as they once were, they trust the government less. And so yeah, I think a lot of the causes of distrust are totally understandable.
Also, the biggest factor determining political trust is performance. And I think you and I would probably agree, and many of your listeners, that if government were smaller, it could do the things it does better, right? As a smaller number of things for it to do, and it’s also taking up a lot less of our attention, it’s taking a lot less of our money. And so it’s much easier to trust them to make good decisions if they can sort of focus on tasks that it’s easier for them to complete. So I would agree with what you say, and those are—I think it can be backed up by a lot of the data.
The Mystery of Social Trust [25:18]
Bob Zadek: Now you pointed out in your book that there is a clear—one can track the declining trust generationally. And you mentioned in your comments a few moments ago that Gen X, the younger—youngest generation has the highest level of social distrust. I don’t understand at all, I don’t understand at all why social—social distrust should ever have a declining or increasing trend. After all, there’s no outside force affecting it. It’s social. It’s how I react to my neighbor, my colleague, my family members, and the like. And there’s nothing external about that. It’s bilateral. It’s me and somebody else. And why should the collective bilateral—those bilateral relationships be trending downward? What’s the outside force that causes individuals who don’t know each other, who have different life experiences, to experience collectively a declining distrust? What’s that all about?
Kevin Vallier: It’s such a powerful mystery because if you look at social trust in other nations, it has exactly the pattern you described. By and large, over the hundred or so countries where they’re able to do the survey, social trust is very, very stable. Sweden’s the most trusting country in the world, it has been for 40 years. But Sweden, a lot of people don’t know, moved from democratic socialism to a more capitalist welfare state. They had massive policy changes, they had no effect on their social trust at all. And you know, why would it? So there’s almost nothing that affects social trust.
Some people say economic equality lowers social trust because, you know, people feel like the game is rigged in favor of the rich. But there are other countries that have seen increases in economic inequality over the last few decades and their social trust levels have not declined. So a lot of the culprits, I think, are not—a lot of the potential culprits, we don’t know.
One thing that’s possible, though, is or two things that make sense to me. First, the younger generations haven’t had any kind of national unifying event where they saw that everyone’s kind of get along and can contribute to each other and help out. And they’re also more likely to spend time alone and less time in interactions with others face-to-face. And the kids growing up now, you know, in COVID, I mean, a lot of trust is built on—is built in interaction. I think it’s also the case that because people are less religious, they’re less likely to interact with people at church and in the charitable activities that churches do, and so you have positive experience, say, between rich and poor or between people with different races.
So I also think increased attention to certain kinds of social conflicts between different parts of society makes people less trusting because they see relations of oppression, be they real or unreal. So those are all things that I think are potential causes, but if I told you we knew for sure, I couldn’t say.
But here’s part of the story that I try to tell in the book: that political polarization is part of what’s reducing social trust. This is a factor that actually tracks. The fall in social trust corresponds fairly closely to the increase in political polarization. Now why would that be? Well, I think what’s going on is that we’re developing more clearly these two different cultures. You know, the red tribe and the blue tribe. Today they live in different parts of the country, they wear different clothes. The reds go to church, the blues usually don’t. The reds drive certain kinds of cars, the blues drive different kinds of cars. The reds eat meat, the blues shop at Whole Foods. You know, we’re developing more and more markers for that other group, that other team. And so when you ask, “Can most people be trusted?” people may be thinking, “Well, you know, I can trust Democrats, I can trust independents, but if someone’s really conservative, I’m not going to trust them at all.”
So another way it could go is that people at the elite level are becoming more ideological. As I like to say, religious fundamentalism is being replaced by political fundamentalism. And the top politicians aren’t, you know, so much self-interested as they’re political fundamentalists. And they so distrust each other, they hate each other, they don’t trust each other, they don’t spend time together except to fight. And that people notice those patterns and it filters into society more broadly. But those—that is not entirely guesswork, but it’s stuff that we need more work on. And one of my next projects is to try to develop with some economists a general theory of the sources of social distrust and of social trust. But it’s going to take quite a while because we have to run a lot of empirical work to get there. So yeah, I think polarization is playing a role, social conflict both at the elite level and below the elite level. So I think those are the kinds of causes. But again, we need more empirical work to say for sure.
Bob Zadek: I’m going to give you a head start on your next book with a thought. And I do not need acknowledgment credit, I don’t ask for anything except just like me. That’s all—that’s all I want. So you don’t have to thank me in the forward of your book. But here’s—I think polarization is—or the extent of polarization in our country as a characteristic, I think it is exaggerated. But since that’s so counterintuitive, let me explain my thought and tie it in with what we talked about a second ago.
You distinguished all these social differences: religious versus less religious, Whole Foods versus meat eaters—you ran down the litany and they, of course, are caricatures but exactly accurate. The point is that I feel if I were living in the Midwest and I would observe culture in the Northeast or in California, that difference in culture would not be a threat to me. I would just feel pity. Those poor sons of guns, they are so missing out on so much of life. Thank God I live in Nebraska or in Arkansas. Oh my goodness. And so it’s not envy, it’s pity. But there’s no threat involved. If you want to live that way, that’s fine, the way I am unaffected in how the Amish live in Ohio. It’s strange, I don’t think I could live under that regime, but it’s not a threat to me.
But once that becomes with a strong federal government, then it starts to matter. Because those people with—I say those people as if they’re a different species—but people who have different values and a different lifestyle, they are free to live that lifestyle, but they’re not free to impose it upon me. And the polarization comes from the fact that with a strong federal government, they do represent a threat. Because if they, they, gain powers of the branches of government, they do represent a threat because now I don’t have a choice. I will be forced into their lifestyle, and the only choice is to swap passports.
So I think the social—the difference in lifestyle, while very clear-cut, and you’re exactly right in listing the characteristics, is not itself—it’s just different, but it’s not a cause for polarization and for hatred and for anger and for distrust until it represents a threat to my lifestyle. So I think it all can be boiled down to a federalism issue. And no one would care about these differences if those differences couldn’t be imposed upon you against your will. In the state level, you can change states, you can move from Ohio to New York if that’s your choice. So you’re not—you’re not up against it. You have a choice. And I think that’s the source of the hatred. It’s not the lifestyle per se or the values per se, it’s only when those values can be forced upon you that causes the little hairs to stick up on the back of your neck and causes the polarization you refer to.
Kevin Vallier: You know, that’s a really cool hypothesis. So basically what we would do is we could look at societies that are equally diverse but ones that have more government power. On this view, the idea is that they would have lower social trust. And you know, the country was very diverse when we were very trusting, but it was also a whole lot smaller. Even under Nixon, the government was doing a lot less than it does now, in particular before 1964 it was doing way less than it does now.
So I think that actually makes a lot of sense. If you didn’t worry if the blue tribe couldn’t control the red tribe, and the red tribe couldn’t control the blue tribe, I agree. But another factor I would add is not just political power, but cultural power. So when the Silicon Valley elites block conservatives or block the New York Post, right? I think that also creates distrust in those corporations and in the people who share those values, right? So if you have cancel culture, for instance, that’s going to make people less trusting of others because they think, “Look at all these busybodies out there who are willing to destroy my life.”
So I agree with you. I think that if we had less political power over each other, that would certainly help. But I would also stress the importance of cultural power from Hollywood, from the academy, and now from Big Tech. So I’m just adding to your very plausible story.
Cultural Power and Big Tech [35:25]
Bob Zadek: I think you’re exactly right. And you have pointed out that distrust in Silicon Valley by way of example—and I have profound distrust, although they are private enterprise and they are allowed to do what they want, doesn’t mean I have to trust them. But the distrust comes from the fact that they control the order of hits when I do a search. I don’t—that’s exporting their worldview onto me. If all they did was have enormous economic power because they were successful, but they didn’t use that power to affect the quality of my search, I wouldn’t care about that power per se. I only care to the extent that it interferes with my freedom. And that’s what causes the social distrust, the war, the word you used in your earlier book.
It is a war in a way. It’s a war to the extent that somebody else’s view can adversely affect, as I see it, the quality of my life. So it’s not their views are different, it’s the attempt to export those views or impose them upon me that causes the war, the polarization that we talk about. And the red versus blue polarization, while there are a lot of qualities that you mentioned, the main quality is the blue, the progressive Democrats, they seek the exercise of more power over Americans than do the Republicans. So it’s more power over the individual versus less power, and I would observe—of course I have a bias, a profound bias—but I would just observe for you to have you comment through the lens of your study of trust, that it’s not that I distrust government per se, it’s only when government starts to impinge upon my liberty that the distrust comes about.
So that’s the core of it all. It’s not simply random red versus blue like color war in summer camp. It is really a fight for something important, the same as we distrusted Nazi Germany in World War II. Well, duh, of course we distrusted them. We distrusted Stalin during the Cold War. But that was not irrational distrust because we’re bad people; there was a clear threat. It’s the threat that causes the distrust, not differences per se. Just an observation.
Kevin Vallier: No, I think it’s a very good one. I think that, you know, a lot of our differences aren’t salient on religious matters anymore. Why? Politics. Protestants and Catholics don’t have trouble distrusting each other because we stopped having the fight of whether the government should be Protestant or Catholic. So one theme I would have, and within the tradition of political philosophy I work in, the work I did with my dissertation advisor Jerry Gaus was on ideological control as parallel to religious control. So can we have a society where we treat others’ ideologies like we treat others’ faiths? Where we can say, “Look, they probably have good reasons for thinking what they think, but we have learned ways to tolerate each other and live together.”
So what I want is ideological toleration. What I want is a reduction in political prejudice. But I think I agree with you, a precondition for this is that the federal government has to be limited in a lot of ways that in some regards I think that both sides could agree upon. We need more federalism. I don’t, unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of data on federalism, so I didn’t get to really talk about it in the book. But I think more federal arrangements would certainly help because you would have governments being governing people with similar values. So California could do one thing and Utah could do another.
So yeah, I definitely think that you are onto something. And it would be interesting—so I think the issue isn’t exactly government per se. So like, take a very highly functional and effective government, Singapore. Now they do try to control people, they ban TV shows and, you know, if you break certain kind of laws, they’ll whip you, although I think it’s often more humane than putting people in jail, just as an aside. But you don’t have the same kind of nasty conflict over there in terms of deep, deep, deep disagreements about value. There are important differences, but yeah, I think the Singaporean government’s a good bit smaller, but it does intervene in certain ways, but not in ways that are what we might call sectarian.
Where the left says, “Look, the folks from the right are bad and we need to suppress them.” Like one thing I’m worried about with the Biden administration is who’s going to staff all the powerful positions. I mean, I think Biden himself is a moderate, but the people behind him are not. And so what we’re going to see, I think, is how we saw a bit of the Obama administration kind of messing with, say, Tea Party groups and giving a lot more oversight to them than to others. I worry that we’re going to see a lot more of that, particularly now that the tech companies and many other corporations have adopted the values of the progressive left. I think we’re going to see a combination of political and cultural power used against people on the right. And this is only going to make things worse. It’s one of the reasons people on the right were happy to vote for Trump because they felt like they wanted a street fighter because they were worried about being controlled not just politically but culturally. I mean, that’s one way that Trump was so influential, because he could take hold of the cultural conversation and say, “Look, this is dumb, like what they’re doing. Let’s say Merry Christmas,” just even things like that just to give people on the right the sense that they had these basic social freedoms.
Now, as a libertarian, I disagree with Trump on many, many things. But I think that’s what was going on, is that the cultural plus political power of the left is creating a lot of social conflict. But I think it’s going to be worse under a Biden administration because, you know, the social justice folks are just going to take all the big cabinet offices. They’re going to, you know, we’re going to see the federal government funding abortion, you know, and probably to a very large extent, not just giving Planned Parenthood money but direct payment. And that’s going to cause more division because people are saying, “Well, now you’re using my taxpayer money to fund hurting children.” So I think—but then the people on the left are just going to say, “Well, you know, abortion is healthcare, so you can go away now.” Right? So yeah, I think we’re going to see—the Supreme Court, I think, will take care of a lot of the religious exemption issues. But we’ll see the passage of the Equality Act, which allows for almost no religious exemptions for people who have more traditional views. So I’m worried. I’m worried just about a huge amount of bureaucratic control and monitoring backed up by a huge amount of cultural power, maybe even some coordination between the Biden and eventually Harris presidency and Silicon Valley and what they’re doing. So the federal government says, “Well, here are some guidelines for what’s in bounds and what’s not.” I’m not sure that will happen, but the fact that it could happen worries me a lot and puts me in a mistrusting mood.
Trust and Entrepreneurship [45:18]
Bob Zadek: Well, for sure there will be a decline in individual freedom and more of a seeding of power over one’s life from the individual to the government. Not the seeding of power, that sounds voluntary, but rather forced. And that’s what’s going to really increase polarization. But as I said, it’s rational polarization because it’s a fight to preserve individual freedom.
In your book, you made an interesting observation that caught my attention because I am, in my day job, I am a lawyer and a business person, and I have a profound respect for the power of entrepreneurship and small business. That’s the part of the economy that gives me goosebumps when I think about it. And you pointed out that as social trust declines, so does, hand in hand, lockstep, so does trust in business and the willingness to take a risk. And as risk-taking declines, entrepreneurship declines, and that becomes a profound brake on the economy. So share with our listeners, if you will, the link between the decline in social trust and its effect upon something we all care about, which is the big picture, the economy, specifically risk-taking and entrepreneurship. And if you have examples in other countries, that would sure be helpful.
Kevin Vallier: So I don’t know of measures that look explicitly at the—try to look just at social trust and then entrepreneurship levels. That’s actually a really cool idea for papers because I’ve read like thousands of pages of research on this and I’ve not seen stuff on social trust and entrepreneurship. But here’s a reason to think that there’s a deep connection between the two. We do know that social trust does reduce economic growth, in part because people aren’t exchanging as much. It also affects people’s productivity levels because their ability to exchange and form more closely-knit economic organizations is reduced. So labor productivity is probably reduced by lower trust.
And entrepreneurship, right, innovation occurs in those moments of exchange. That’s how you get the money for a startup, right? Exchange. That’s how you are able to hire workers that can be flexible and thoughtful and creative to help you, right? You engage in exchange. So if a less trusting society engages in less exchange and it has more corruption, then those opportunities for innovation will decrease. So I think you’re coming up with great empirical hypotheses that one day I hope to be able to test because they’re very plausible. But I do think that since less trust means less economic positive-sum games, that you’re probably going to see less and less entrepreneurship, which is what we are seeing. We are seeing less entrepreneurship.
Restoring Trust: Policy and Personal Change [48:00]
Bob Zadek: Give us—we’re running out of time regretfully—but give us in the closing minutes of our show what you see has to happen and is it likely to happen in order to change the trend in the decline of social trust and perhaps even the more monumental task, trust in government. We have about a minute or two left. What should our listeners have as their personal to-do list, what to look for and how to behave? I know it requires about a 40-minute answer, but I’ll give you two minutes.
Kevin Vallier: So first, I think there are some policies that we can support that I talk about in the book, particularly sort of deregulating the building of housing that I think will help economic growth. I think there are electoral processes that we could reform, like having ranked-choice voting where people would have to put the other party as their second choice, and so I think that would get people to sort of moderate negative attitudes. I do think we should limit government more and have more federalism.
But there’s also something that you can do personally as a matter of the heart. My view, as a Christian, is that my biggest enemy is myself, right? It’s the bad things that I do and the bad attitudes that I take towards other people. And what I think I try to do in politics is to try my best to see the humanity in my opponent and to see the inhumanity in myself. And I think that if we aren’t able to be humble about what we know, to recognize the mistakes that we make in our own lives, it’s going to be very hard to reestablish trust with others because we’re focused on them being the enemy. So we have to focus in our hearts in a different way of thinking about other people, about people who disagree with us politically. We’ve done this with religion. If someone else is a Protestant or a Catholic, we can still love and respect them. And I think we have to get to that same place of ending political bigotry and being able to see the other side as human, as equal, and worthy of love and respect.
Bob Zadek: Much thanks to my guest Kevin Vallier for his important book, Trust in a Polarized Age. If you, as you should, read that book, be sure to read Must Politics Be War? They are both provocative, interesting, and will invite you to think about something that you haven’t been thinking about as much as you should. And if the country read these two books, we would be collectively much healthier. So Kevin, thank you so much for your work, for sharing your wisdom with us.
Kevin Vallier: Well, thank you so much. It was a great conversation.
Bob Zadek: Thank you, Kevin. And to my friends out there, enjoy the rest of the weekend.