Trust and confidence eroded in 2023… 

January 6th, 2024

Thanks for joining us on this first Saturday of 2024. We wanted to ease into things with this first piece of the year, but a Gallup polling analysis published on December 31 struck us as timely and urgent.

In short: lack of confidence in American institutions remained at record lows in 2023.

Religion, big business, our political system, education, the media: all face declining trust among average Americans.

What does it mean, why is it happening, and where do we go from here? Our analysis is below.

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What is a country?

We could spend hours debating the definitional contours. For much of history, though, most would agree a country has been characterized by a homogenous collection of people grouped together within defined boundaries. The people of a country share many traits: ethnicity, religion, language, culture, and more.

America skews wildly from this standard. Her people are of many ethnicities and religions. They can trace their ancestries to vastly different cultures.

So the American experiment in country-building replaces shared traits, like ethnicity and religion, with shared values, like human rights and political pluralism. Thus our motto: Out of many, one.

This country model makes faith in certain societal anchors all the more important. Without ethnic or religious homogeneity, something else must anchor a shared identity.

Those anchors include institutions, broadly defined:

• Education, and the promise that schooling will usually lead to a more productive life.
• Media, and the expectation that what we read in the paper is fair and accurate.
• Religion, and the desire to behave morally.
• Government, and the trust that leaders make prudent decisions.

In general, they represent shared acceptance about who we are and how we operate.

“Sociologists tell us that societies must have shared expectations of the ways to handle major societal challenges – accepted standards and ways of approaching the core elements of society’s functions,” the Gallup analysis says. “Otherwise, chaos rules.”

That final conclusion may soon be put to the test. Confidence in major U.S. institutions is at or near historic lows.

Gallup has measured average combined confidence in religion, the Supreme Court, banks, schools, media, Congress, unions, and business every year since 1979. In 2023, the index reached its lowest level ever, at just 26%.

Confidence in higher education has seen a stunning decline in recent years, dropping from 57% in 2015 to just 36% in 2023.

Confidence in newspapers was just 18% last year, near its lowest point ever.

Adherence to religion continues to decline while political polarization accelerates. It appears that America is replacing religious identity with political identity, which may portend yet more division.

“Republicans and Democrats differ, often significantly, on most of the 24 policy and lifestyle issues we measured,” Gallup reports. The simultaneous decline in religious identity suggests that “some humans looking for a source of authority to help anchor their worldviews and approach to life may be turning to politics to fill the vacuum created by religion’s decreased relevance.”

How did we get here? It depends on who you ask, but it seems foolish to think the trend is unrelated to rapid ideological changes in some institutions.

We and others have written about what’s happened in higher education. Just last year, some North Carolina universities were basing their hiring and tenure decisions on essays about support for social justice doctrines.

And after years of espousing the importance of “inclusion” and “equity,” Ivy League presidents were tongue-tied when asked whether calls to exterminate Jews violated their university rules.

In the media, there has been a shift away from objective, just-the-facts reporting and towards advocacy journalism. The News & Observer, for example, employs reporters who are paid with grants from actual advocacy organizations to cover topics important to those advocates.

Our discourse has turned outrageously sour, attacking those on the other side of an issue as illegitimate and subversive to democratic health.

Gallup notes, “Conservatives focus on criticisms of the ‘corrupt Washington establishment,’ the ‘deep state’ and the Washington ‘swamp.’ Liberals focus on criticisms of those who have power, wealth and privilege as oppressors of minority and disadvantaged segments of society. Both of these approaches can decrease confidence and trust in the way society is arranged.”

Add all this up, and it’s no surprise American institutions face a crisis of confidence (and therefore legitimacy). The question, then, is how to fix it?

Last April, The Results Company CEO Chuck Fuller penned a piece pointing the way toward a possible solution. The piece started out highlighting the decline of trust Americans feel, which continued throughout 2023. It ended by saying this:

“So, I’ll end today where I began: Adverse circumstances don’t crush us, inadequate foundations do. We must build and maintain foundations in our personal lives, businesses, and government for America to endure. This begins with us as individuals – at the dinner table, in our staff meetings, and in our communities. The next time you think about what you can do to impact America, it begins with ‘me.’ Take a few minutes today to pause and think about it. Everyone’s engagement matters.”