(light musical chord) - [Announcer] The School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership presents "The Civic Discourse Project: Sustaining American Political Order in History and Practice."

This week... - Because if we don't have information that we can trust, or if we only have information that people trust if it suits their particular political priors, then we don't really have valuable information at all, and more importantly, we don't have the basis for a civil discourse.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership.

And now Gerard Baker, an Editor at Large for "The Wall Street Journal," examines the American Breakdown: politics, governance, and the trust deficit.

- So I'm just gonna talk a little bit here, and then Will and I are gonna have a discussion and open it up to questions from you two about, really about the themes of my book.

The book is about trust, or as I said, the collapse, really, in trust.

It's called American Breakdown, the breakdown of trust that Americans have in their major institutions.

And I really do think this is, if not the central, then one of the central elements of what has created so much political and civic and social discord in this country in the last 20 or 30 years or so, why we have so much bitter partisanship, why so many Americans feel consistently that their country is on the wrong track.

It's both a product of, but also a reflection of this decline in trust that we've seen in this country over the last 20 years, and it's a broad decline in trust across all, literally all, of the major institutions in this country, political, legal, civic, civil society institutions in this country.

According to surveys that are taken, trust has declined in all of those institutions dramatically.

Now, I work, as you know, in the media, and have done for 30 years.

I've been in the American newspaper business for almost 30 years.

And I've seen firsthand the collapse in trust in the American media, which I think is one of the, it is the most dramatic illustration of this decline in trust.

Back in the 1970s, after Watergate, something like 75% of Americans said they had a high level of confidence, a high level of trust in their major news organizations.

They trusted them largely to tell the truth, to be fair, to be objective.

75% 50 years ago.

That declined steadily in the latter part of the last century.

In the last 20 years, it's gone down from about 50% at the beginning of the century down to now about 30% of Americans say they have a high level of trust in their media.

Across the board, conservative media, liberal media, however you want to characterize it, trust has collapsed.

People just simply don't trust those news organizations anymore to tell the truth.

And I think we saw, by the way, in this 2024 election, I wrote in my column this week for "The Wall Street Journal" that if 2016, the 2016 election, when the media, you know, did become rather frenzied about Donald Trump, if the 2016 election was the handwriting on the wall for media in terms of public trust, then to extend the biblical analogy, 2024 was the collapse of Babylon for the media.

I think the media have ceased to on a very, very wide scale, and that's a problem for our society because if we don't have information that we can trust, or if we only have information that people trust if it suits their particular political priors, then we don't really have valuable information at all, and more importantly, we don't have the basis for a civil discourse, the basis for discussion about what happens, what's going on in the world, and how to address the challenges in the world and how to address the challenges that face this country.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great Democratic senator from New York in the '60s and '70s, and I think even into the '80s, when he would argue with people, famously used to say, you know, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

And actually, we have now, you know, God rest his soul, got to the point where that's no longer true.

You're not only now entitled to your own opinion in this country, and indeed in much of the world; you are also entitled to your own facts, thanks to increasing polarization, thanks to the ease of access that we get to news that we want to get through digital media.

We can essentially block ourselves off from any information we don't want to hear, and that's increasingly what has happened to the media, and I looked at what the polling data said about people's trust in the media.

It was evident that trust across American institutions had declined precipitously, and it wasn't just the media.

It is fair to say, I'm sorry to say the media probably seen the steepest fall, but across government and private sector, Americans used to trust the federal government, the judiciary, law enforcement, big business, the media, universities, higher education, technology companies in the last 20 years or so, public health officials, high levels of trust in all of those institutions across America, across American society.

Everything we do in our daily lives, in our relations with each other, in our relations with as consumers with business or as business with consumers, and most importantly of all, as members of civil society, as part of a democracy in our trust in government and the institutions that lead us.

Everything we do depends on trusting in order for us to be able to function both as a democracy and frankly, as an effective economy.

And if those levels of trust have declined as they have, and we've seen this in other societies, this is what I think is so concerning about what's going on in the United States, when you have declining levels of trust, we've seen it in societies, then those societies break apart.

People trust only a section of society, only their side, only their tribe, only their family, their community, their narrow community.

I think there are a number of factors.

If you like a kind of institutional failure at many levels in the United States over the last 20 years, and if you look at this period that I'm talking about, this decline of trust has been particularly marked since the year 2000.

In the last 20 years, that's when the level of trust in all of these institutions has declined.

And again, I think part of that is to do with institutional failure.

I think people have lost trust in government, in part because of failures of government, big, spectacular, frankly, failures of government that have weakened the United States and weakened its ability to get things done, and understandably produced a level of mistrust among the people.

Look at the major defining political events, if you like, of the last 20 years, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly the war in Iraq.

By the way, I'll say at the time I supported that war.

I thought it was the right thing to do, but it obviously was both flawed in its conception and in its preparation and very, very flawed in its execution.

And Americans, I think you look back now, ask them what they think about that war, they think it was a terrible mistake, and that was arguably the defining foreign policy decision of the first 10 years of the 21st century.

Then we had the global financial crisis in 2008, 2009.

That was an indictment not only of certain financial institutions who had taken on excessive risk.

It was an indictment, and seen as an indictment in many ways by the government because the government, first of all, didn't do anything in advance to prevent this worst financial crisis that we've had in 80 years leading to the worst economic recession that we'd had in 80 years as well.

But also there was a sense that people who actually were responsible for this crisis were actually rewarded.

They were bailed out.

Government actively moved to help those institutions that had precipitated the crisis, helped them to restore their balance sheets, and nobody went to prison.

Nobody seemed to suffer any accountability for it.

It was a major break.

It led to the Tea Party movement, which I think ultimately led to Donald Trump and the kind of rebellion of so many voters against the government.

But it led also above all to mistrust in the government.

And then we have this problem of partisanship.

That has led to a decline of trust.

One of the interesting things that lies behind this decline that we've seen in levels of trust that people express is that people tend to trust people who are on their side.

We've not seen that on such a scale before in the United States, this hyper-partisanship where people tend to only believe, it's not even that they approve of a particular government or disapprove of another government.

They're actually to the point where they only believe what they hear from a government that they are politically sympathetic with.

I do think that there's a deeper problem with what's happened to the United States and its institutions in the last 20 years, and that is that many of these institutions have essentially been captured by an ideological set, if you like, a group of people with a particular ideological viewpoint that actually I think is quite inimical to the traditions of American values of American history.

It is true in the media most dramatically.

This is one of the reasons people stop trusting the media.

The media is increasingly controlled by people of a particular ideological viewpoint, increasingly practiced by people of a particular progressive political viewpoint.

It's true in universities, many universities.

I'm sure not this one, but many universities across the country, they're becoming captured by an increasingly intolerant narrow orthodoxy.

It's true in large parts of the permanent government, not so much the political government, the elected government, which changes, but the permanent government has, again, been captured by people of this ilk, and it's true increasingly of a lot of big business, too, that businesses have become increasingly attached to these ideological positions that I think have alienated large numbers of Americans.

These ideologies were globalism, the idea that global integration was not only a good, an economic good, but a kind of moral good, that the idea of the nation-state was somehow morally questionable and that we should open ourselves up, both in terms of business and in terms of migrations and everything else to as much of the world as possible.

It became this globalist ideal became to dominate in the 1990s and 2000s under both political parties, this consensus that opening up the United States, opening up the world to mass, to whether it's free flow of people, capital, goods, was the right thing to do, and in the process undermined the very idea of the nation-states.

That's why we ended up with the kind of border crisis that we've had.

It's why we ended up with so many people feeling disillusioned by what had happened with businesses being exported overseas.

The second was this strong commitment, the strong belief in what might be called sustainability, green ideology, green policies which was closely allied, actually, to the phenomenon of globalism, the idea that the planet was in peril, thanks to overuse of fossil fuels, and the country and the world needed to completely be transformed, essentially through regulation, through the canceling of traditional forms of energy.

The third leg was what might be called, for want of a better term, kind of woke progressive ideology.

Previously, our principle debates had been along economic lines about the right level, the right size of government, the role of government, the level of economic redistribution, taxation, and spending.

This ideology is what I would call essentially kind of self-loathing on the part of the West, and again, these things are not just confined to the United States, but this idea that America was sort of fundamentally a wicked country, that far from being the triumphant country of the post-Cold War era, the end of history where we had demonstrated that America and America's system was the greatest on earth, people became very focused on the internal flaws, if you like, within the US, obviously going back, race, a historic flaw in the United States, gender, sexuality, and these issues rose to the top and became again a kind of creed for so many of our leaders in both political and non-political institutions, and we got down this route of, again, what we might call woke, whether you're all familiar with woke progressivism, and not just the promotion of that ideology about fundamentally how wicked the United States has been and how it owes a tremendous debt to so many people, but also that it became exclusive, too.

In so many institutions it became the dominant and exclusive ideology.

So I think that's those three elements of this new philosophy, of this new elite philosophy, if you like, of the people who dominated our institutions, I think that is the core reason why these institutions became so distant, why they alienated so many Americans, and why Americans have come to mistrust them so much.

How do we change that?

How do we restore trust?

One thing we need to do is to bring these institutions, all institutions back closer to the people.

Accountability is critical.

We've lost accountability.

There's a sense that many Americans have that their institutions, whether it's the media, whether it's universities, whether it's to some extent the government, even when they elect the government, that there is no accountability.

We need to do that.

One of the interesting things I discovered as I researched this topic was that while levels of trust in places like the federal government and big business have declined dramatically, levels of trust in institutions that are closer to Americans, local government, small businesses, have actually risen over the last 20 years.

That's because people feel that those institutions are more accountable, they are more responsive to the needs of people, and I think part of the answer is to make sure that all of our institutions become more responsive, that we get more genuine democratic control over our institutions from what we've seen before.

Second thing I think that can be done is the institutions themselves have to recognize how far they've got from the values that Americans appreciate.

I think this is particularly true in the media.

It's also true, I think, in academia.

And the third thing I think that will lead to change is political change.

I think one of the problems in this country for the last 20 years, and one of the reasons, again, trust has declined so much, is we haven't really had a decisive political moment in this country.

We have a very divided country.

Election after election is decided 50-50, even this last election, which looks like a decisive result with the Republicans winning the presidency, the Senate, and almost certainly the House and making big gains in large parts of the country, it's still gonna come down to like a 50%, 49% split in the popular vote, and what this means is you don't get clarity.

You don't get decisiveness.

When you have an election with a clear outcome, 1964, when LBJ won, and that was an affirmation of his agenda, the civil rights movement, obviously the Great Society, and the other changes that he introduced, that changed the political culture and people went along with it.

The Republicans had to change to adjust to that.

1984, when Ronald Reagan won, the other way around, Democrats realized that because of the scale of Reagan's victory, because of the scale of the Republican domination at that point, they had to change.

They had to accept that the country had moved on.

We don't have that clarity in American politics, and until we do, I think we will struggle to break out of this highly partisan, highly polarized environment where people, you know, simply say, well, they don't accept the results of elections sometimes.

You know, most elections these days, people challenge them and say they're illegitimate.

But even if they do accept them, they think, well, there's gonna be another election in two years' time.

It's a close race.

We can win.

But I think there has to be, for trust to be restored in American politics, in American government, I think we do need to see a moment of decision where the country goes in one direction or the other.

So just in conclusion, it is a worrying picture.

The decline in trust in this country is a worrying thing for all the reasons I've said.

It's unprecedented, certainly since people have been keeping records of these things.

But I'm optimistic still.

I'm optimistic partly because America's been through these challenges before, although this particular in the last 50 years is unprecedented.

America's been through periods of intense polarization and intense mutual mistrust.

Obviously, at the early days of the Republic, we had a very polarized country, and we had a very polarized country, obviously, in the 1850s.

That ended in civil war.

I hope we don't end up in that direction.

But think about the 1960s.

The 1960s, the country was very polarized.

Levels of trust in public institutions were extremely low, and America came through that again I think partly through resolving its differences politically and ultimately peacefully.

And I'm optimistic that having been through all those challenges, it will do so again.

Again, as I said at the beginning, I became an American citizen recently, and I became an American citizen mainly 'cause I love this country.

I came here, I admired this country as a young man growing up in England.

I admired this country what it stood for, what it represented in the world, that it was a beacon of not only freedom, obviously, most importantly, a beacon of liberty for so many people.

Growing up in Europe during the Cold War, those of you who ever saw it would understand how important what America stood for, what that meant for people who were struggling to achieve their own freedom.

And I came to admire this country and then to love this country and to recognize that this country and its values have made more of a positive impact on the world than every other political system, I include the British system in that, than every other political system, every other cultural system.

The United States has been a bigger force for good in the history of the world than any other country since civilizations first began to form, and I have that faith in this country, that having been through challenges before, but through faithfulness to those values that have been so powerful and so virtuous for the world, I have continuing faith that the US will, with some of these things that I think need to be done, will come through these challenges.

And I'll just conclude by saying, as kind of testimony to that, I'd like to quote something that's often attributed to Winston Churchill, who was also a Great America file, had American connections, and he said supposedly that when he was talking about America, he would say, you know, the thing about America is America can always be relied upon to do the right thing, but only after it's exhausted every other alternative.

So thank you very much.

I think we're gonna have a question and answer now with Will.

(audience applauding) (light music) - What about New York, where you now live?

That's an example.

The city of New York is an example where government has gone wrong.

Many of us remember New York in an earlier period that it had profound problems.

The pre Rudolph Giuliani era, issues of crime, issues of economic decline, jobs went elsewhere, and then New York came back.

What went wrong?

- You could say a one-party state, much more rigidly one-party state than anything North Korea has been able to achieve, even though, you know, in this last election, actually, Donald Trump did manage to get about almost 30% of the New York City vote.

Typically, you know, Democrats get 80% to 90% of the vote.

There's a one-party state, which leads to a complete lack of accountability for a start.

There's no real change.

All the competition for political control is within one party.

It's the same in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.. All of these cities essentially are one-party cities, and that is not a healthy state of affairs.

As I say, I think it's also that these cities have become captured by these parties.

These party establishments have been captured by this ideological, very ideologically focused leaders who are focused not on the interests of the city, really, or their constituents, but on promoting these ideological aims, whether it's, again, you know, sort of particularly on issues of sort of the woke, if you like, the woke agenda on some of the sort of progressive cultural ideals.

New York is trapped at the moment, and again, so are some other cities, in a sort of fiscal spiral, which is that there is very, very high levels of fiscal support for the relatively disadvantaged.

Something like 2/3 of New York City residents are receiving some kind of either federal or state or city assistance.

In order to maintain this, taxes have to be put up very, very high.

New York state income tax, top rate of income tax is 12%, 12.5%.

On top of that, there's a New York City income tax, which the top rate is 4%.

So you're paying 16% if you earn above a certain income in New York, in addition to your federal top rate of tax, which is 37% right now, and some other taxes.

The marginal rate of tax, in other words, for many people who live in New York City is close to 60%.

What effect does this have?

People leave.

Large numbers of people left.

They left, you know, during the pandemic because of the quality of life issues then.

And then with these taxes constantly going up to pay for this very, very large proportion of the population that needs public assistance, they keep putting up taxes.

That means people leave.

That means the tax base shrinks.

That means there's less money, the deficit rises, they have to put up taxes even more.

We are in that kind of vicious spiral right now.

Now in the last year, actually as it happens, you know, the economy's been quite strong, so fiscal revenues have actually increased, and for the first time in many years, the state has said it won't be increasing taxes.

But that's the kind of spiral.

And by the way, you know, you all hear in Arizona, many, many people from New York I know come to live here or in Florida or Texas, you know, relatively low-tax environments, prosperous environments.

They're escaping that kind of a crisis.

So I think it's that combination of mismanagement, downward fiscal spiral, and the lack of accountability for the political leadership that leaves New York City and these other major cities in America in this, you know, parlor state.

- What role do you think social media has played in that, this genie that's out of the bottle?

You would think it would help because there's more information, but it seems maybe not to have helped, and what do you think are some solutions for not letting ourselves get stuck in that echo chamber?

- Yeah, it's a very good question, in many way core to some of these problems with the media in particular.

And I remember, and again, I write about this in the book, in 2000 when the internet came along, most of you weren't around then, but I was.

I remember it very well.

I can remember the claims that were made.

This is gonna be the most amazing innovation, you know, we've ever seen in sort of the history of human knowledge.

I remember Al Gore, who invented the internet, you'll recall, as we remember, saying at the time, you know, we're gonna have an Athenian style democracy in America because everybody's gonna have information, access to all the information you could possibly need or want in the world at their fingertips.

You know, we didn't even have smartphones then, but on our computers.

We were gonna have this information and we were gonna be the best informed citizenry in the history of the planet.

It would lead to better governance.

It would lead to better decision-making.

You know, we were entering a period of kind of political and civic nirvana.

Well, you know, how is that working out for you?

And your point, ma'am, about about social media is critical here because of course what happened was far from exposing people to all this information, objective information, data that you could possibly want in order to inform your decision-making, social media came along, started to sort of segregate us, if you like, into groups, whether initially, you know, well, the original social media, the original Facebook, you know, university started on university campuses and then obviously exploded into being a broad social network.

But instead of opening us up, it actually closed us down and put us into these sort of silos where increasingly we only exposed ourselves to information that suited us, only communicated with or socialized with people that we agreed with, and created this kind of siloization of American society, which I think has been an important factor in increasing partisanship.

So, social media, to answer your question, the long answer to your question has been unfortunately crucial in that.

Now, the only thing I would say, first of all, again, this isn't new, I mean, an historian will know this very well, that even before the internet came along and digital media came along, we had high levels of partisanship in American society.

The early days of the Republic, as I said in my opening remarks, were characterized by intense, vicious partisanship, including in the media.

Most newspapers in this country were essentially partisan newspapers for a long, long time.

It's still reflected in the names of newspapers, like, you know, the "Arkansas Democrat-Gazette," or, you know, the Republican leader in places like that.

So we've had that partisanship before, that partisanship not just of political identification, but partisanship of information and of access to information, and we have come through it and we came through it to some extent because we got to a point, and I like to claim and think "The Wall Street Journal" has a small creditable role to play in this, we got to the point where people had this partisan information they couldn't really trust.

They only trusted their own side and they didn't really have objectively verifiable information.

And there started to become a demand.

People wanted to have objectively verifiable information.

Partly they needed it for important decisions about their life, about, you know, investment decisions or consumption decisions or what they were gonna do for their jobs.

So they started to demand information that was actually trustworthy.

History certainly tells us that when we've had these periods where the media has been extremely partisan and extremely divisive, if you like, there's come a time over time where people have actually wanted something that gave them something that was more objective, and I think that will happen again.

- Let me express my appreciation to our audience, but above all, to Gerry Baker for coming and speaking for us.

- Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership.

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