For perspective, things have been much worse
That tends to get overlooked by those lamenting polls showing low confidence in institutions. The benchmarks against which they are measured are inevitably when pollsters first asked those questions in the 1950s.
But that was a time when big institutions — big government, big corporations, big unions — had just finished leading Americans to victory in a world war and to unanticipated prosperity in the years that followed. They had arguably earned the confidence they enjoyed.
If you had been able to ask Americans those questions in the years before George Gallup conducted his first poll in 1935, it’s likely that they would often have expressed low confidence, as they did starting in the late 1960s.
The years of rapid industrialization and high immigration and farmer rebellion, the period after World War I, the Great Depression — all of which brought lots of discord and disillusion — would have made for negative marks. Not to mention the arguments over slavery that led to the Civil War.
What about the peculiarities of Donald Trump? I can remember other presidents who, despite impressive credentials, behaved very oddly, to say the least. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, for example, smart men with 30 and 20 years of high-level experience, respectively.
Then there’s the notion that the almost universally unexpected result of the 2016 presidential election represents a giant popular upheaval. Not so much, when you look at the numbers. Trump got 46 percent of the vote, 1 point less than Mitt Romney did in 2012, and Hillary Clinton got 48 percent, the same as John Kerry in 2004.
What did happen is that Trump, in effect, traded off votes from some highly educated whites in return for about the same number from non-college-educated whites, in a way that netted him 100 extra electoral votes. Russian trolls had no more to do with that than a bunch of kids sporting MAGA hats at a rally.
It would be nice to get some aspects of the Midcentury Moment back (more two-parent families), but no one wants some others (racial-segregation laws). In the meantime, read Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now,” on human progress in reducing violence, improving health and increasing prosperity. Many important things are getting better.
And remember that The Onion is parody.