(upbeat music) - In Michigan and across the country, public trust in government is on the decline.

Here in West Michigan, there's pandemic skepticism over public health decisions and activist groups emerging distrusting of police.

From vaccines to elections, fake news and the deep state, residents here and across the nation are suspicious of American institutions.

What has caused the erosion of faith in government?

What is the path forward regaining civic trust?

We take a deeper dive into the state of our nation's domestic affairs on West Michigan Week.

(upbeat music) Grand Valley State University's Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies is tackling lost faith, not only in government, but in business, healthcare and the press.

Today on West Michigan Week, guest speakers, Linda Chavez and Ethan Zuckerman join us.

Linda is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and chairman of The Center for Equal Opportunity.

And Ethan Zuckerman is professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of the book, "Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them."

Thank you both for joining us.

This is fascinating stuff.

I don't know that we can get into all of it in a half an hour, but let's give it our best try.

It seems like mistrust is everywhere in our society right now.

It seems like politically, both sides pointing fingers.

You lie.

No, you lie.

And I think the public is just kind of caught in the middle and believes whatever ideology they follow, yet there is a gray area somewhere in all of this.

Lead us off.

I mean, how did we get here?

- Sure.

First of all, Patrick, it's wonderful to be with you.

And it's so great to be doing this with Linda who's just an extraordinary thinker and just a great public servant.

So I'm glad we got the chance to do this together.

One of the things that I've found out in researching this book is that it's been a very long path to get to this mistrustful moment.

It's not something that happened during the Trump administration.

I started writing my book because I was interested in why the left was so mistrustful of institutions during the Obama administration.

And as I started looking backwards, I think a lot of these changes happened in the 1960s and 1970s.

We went from a nation in the 1960s where roughly four out of five people would tell you that they trusted the government all of most of the time to a moment now where under both Trump and under Obama, roughly 13% of Americans say that they trust the government.

Now it's not just trust in Washington, it's trust in all sorts of institutions.

As you mentioned everything from the banking sector to the church, to the healthcare system, if it is big enough that it is a bureaucracy, that you're interacting with an institution, not an individual, Americans have gotten more skeptical about it.

And some of the consequences are becoming quite severe.

It's not just vaccine hesitancy and the ongoing COVID epidemic.

It's literally the takeover of the US Capitol on January 6th.

So mistrust is steering us into some uncharted waters, and it's a very scary moment.

- I think it's really a very dangerous moment for democracy.

And I agree with Ethan, this is not a recent phenomenon.

It did not just happen on Trump's watch.

Certainly there was tremendous mistrust during the Obama years, but it does go back to the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

I'm old enough to have lived through that.

I was a college student at the time and later went into the academic community and was teaching on campuses at the end of the Vietnam War.

And I will tell you that as divided as we were then, I think we are much more divided today.

And I think that this is tremendous peril for our institutions.

I mean, there are reasons to mistrust when the institutions themselves fail you.

The Catholic Church, which had tremendous trust, at least by its adherence has become not a trusted institution in the wake of the scandal of sexual child abuse.

There are reasons to mistrust when institutions themselves fail.

But it has become so pervasive, so broad that we don't trust our neighbors.

We don't trust anyone who doesn't agree with us right down the line on a variety of issues.

And most importantly, we don't have a common basis of facts about which we can agree.

The truth is no longer even talked about with that impersonal pronoun.

We now talk about your truth and my truth.

Well, where I come from, there's truth and there's non truth.

And the idea that you can have a different truth than I can, I think is fundamentally incompatible with having a functioning democracy.

- As a member of the media, that's an interesting point.

And there are lots of accusations.

I deal with it in the public as well.

And I have to frame it in a certain way to regain that faith and that trust that journalism is good.

And I will jokingly say during daylight hours.

And so there in lies able news outlets and disinformation, misinformation through social media.

How do we get our arms around that?

Who is gaining from, which institutions or individuals are gaining from that disinformation and that mistrust?

- Well, I would certainly jump in and say that there's a lot of money to be made in mistrust.

There are a lot of scam artists out there.

There are a lot of grifters out there.

And spreading lies sells very well.

And again, this is not a new phenomena.

The whole term snake oil salesmen goes back to the 19th century and the frontier and paddlers who would go around literally selling fake medicines to people who were willing to buy them.

We see the same thing going up on now in the media and this basic disintegration of any sense of a common frame of reference, I think has been very, very harmful.

And I'm sure Ethan has a wealth of data on this phenomenon.

- So it's interesting, the polarization of America into tribes that have a hard time talking to one another, Linda and I have been talking about this all day, and there's a bunch of different causes for it.

But again, it's not that recent.

It's actually a little bit further back.

Linda argues it may have a lot to do with encouraging different identities, whether we're doing ethics studies or sort of identifying from different cultural backgrounds rather than looking for assimilation, which really comes up in the 1990s.

I would put a lot of blame on the rise of cable news, where we suddenly have people's ability to isolate in comfortable media that reinforces their prejudices.

And now, of course, it's gone supersized in a social media age because not only can we soak in content that makes us comfortable, we can build our own content as well.

And we have companies like Facebook and Twitter that benefit from keeping us engaged and keeping us hungry.

And one of the best ways to do that is to ensure that we either encounter only content that we agree with, or when we encounter content that we disagree with, we do so in a way where we're never gonna build bridges between it, we're simply gonna reject it and find ourselves yelling at it.

But at the end of the day, I think Linda and I are exactly on the same page.

It's very hard to imagine a future for American democracy unless we have a common reality that we're living with it.

We're allowed to disagree on what those facts mean.

We're allowed to disagree on what the implications are of those facts.

But if we can't agree on the same reality, we're in real trouble as a society.

- Where does accountability come into this?

- So one thing that's been so interesting about this movement to digitize government, this movement to put everything online, is that we really thought that transparency was gonna come from having all this information and all of this openness.

It turns out that just sorting through all the data and trying to figure out how to hold people accountable is actually very, very difficult work.

It's work that journalists do.

It's also work that activists do.

It's all the work that academics do.

And all of those professions turn out to be absolutely essential, to try to figure out how we hold institutions responsible and ensure that they're actually doing their job.

One of the things that I argue in the "Mistrust" book is that in many cases, we find ourselves dissatisfied with institutions for very good reasons.

We have institutions in many cases that are failing to live up to their promise and are failing to give us what we need.

And in fact, we need accountability to ensure that those institutions are doing their job.

And if not, that we can find ways to change them or put new institutions in their place.

- I think one of the reasons I've always been a free market conservative is that I think accountability is very much there in the marketplace.

If you build a bad product, if you try to cheat your customers, you're not gonna stay in business for very long.

And so there is a kind of automatic accountability.

We have elections to hold politicians accountable, but the fact is that our elections, I mean, the elections themselves are now mistrusted.

And we now have a political system, particularly at the federal level, where jurisdictions, where you have people who have different points of view don't end up living together.

I mean, we've so gerrymandered, there are so few competitive congressional districts out there that basically all of the fighting goes on within a particular party.

And what this has led to I think is allowing for the extremes of both parties.

The extremes are often the ones that are most energized.

They're the ones that are the most activist.

And so you have the left-wing party.

The Democratic Party is beading being moved evermore to the left and the conservative party, the Republican Party being moved ever more to the right.

Meanwhile, most of the country defines themselves pretty much a centrist.

And so those of us who find ourselves center left, center right, end up feeling homeless in either the Democratic or the Republican Party of today.

- So how do the people in the middle feel right now?

Just on this topic of mistrust, what is your sense of the middle and how the middle views this distrust, mistrust, in just about everything right now?

- I look at COVID as a perfect example.

I mean, most Americans believe that the vaccine was a godsend and that we were very lucky to develop it as quickly as we did.

And a majority of Americans, certainly in some parts of the country, overwhelming majority of people, have gone out and gotten vaccinated.

The same attitudes on masks.

Nobody really likes putting a covering over your face.

You don't get to show your facial expression.

It's a little harder to breathe, but we did it because we think, well, this may slow down the transmission of disease.

But that's where the majority of Americans are.

But you've got a segment of the population that has turned a disease into a political statement.

And again, it gets back to this question of mistrust.

They don't trust our federal government.

They don't trust the FDA to have properly vetted the vaccine.

They don't trust the Center for Disease Control to advise us wisely on how to prevent catching the disease.

And as a result, we've got, as of today, almost 2000 Americans dying each day from a disease that should be under control, given the wide availability of that life-protecting vaccine.

- It's quite amazing that issues of vaccination or masking have become political to the extent that they have.

There's nothing inherently political about them.

One of the interesting things to think about is that the anti-vaccine movement in the United States has often been within progressive communities.

In fact, if you look at communities where we've lost herd immunity to the measles, they tend to be fairly left-leaning communities.

They tend to be communities where people are very interested in things like alternative wellness, organic foods, things along those lines.

These are not typically associations that we have with the Republican Party.

But one of the things that's happening right now is we are getting tribalized to the point where not only will people not vote a split ticket, not only will people not have complex nuanced, I believe this, but I also believe this.

We seem to have lifestyles that are falling into place along with political identification.

And that's just deadly.

We should be able to disagree on any sorts of policy issues, but issues around things like vaccination and masking, these are public health issues where these measures simply don't work, unless we have an overwhelming majority of people participating within them.

And this behavior isn't just a question of politics.

It's really a question of antisocial behavior at some point.

And that's the fear, is that we're moving beyond political polarization into these places in which we're just not doing a very good job of respecting or taking care of our neighbors.

- Over the years, I've become a pragmatist.

So that leads me to a topic which is, how do you become a good citizen?

How do you become an informed citizen?

Where does that begin?

And how does that maybe lead us forward through this wilderness?

- I'll take a stab at it first because I spent a lot of years in education.

I think our public schools today do not do a good job in educating future voters.

I think most students come out of high school without a basic understanding of our government, understanding how the institutions of government work.

And I think that's a problem.

I also think that just even love for your country, patriotism, which was something that was very much inculcated in people in the 1950s and early '60s, that's gone by the wayside.

The question authority, stand up to the man, that kind of attitude from the 1960s, I think has become very pervasive.

And I think that we've got to get back to civics education, truly understanding how the institutions of government work, what the responsibilities of the citizen are, everything from being willing to serve on a jury, for example, to learning how it is you go about voting, becoming a participant in the voting process, becoming a poll worker, getting active in your political party.

All of that I think is the building ground for more active, engaged citizenry.

- So Linda, I'm gonna agree, but with a twist and this may show some of the differences in where we're coming at this.

I think the space of civic engagement is actually broadening in a huge way.

And I see young people, the folks that I'm working with in the universities where I teach, using a much wider range of tools for social change than I grew up with.

And part of the reason I wrote this book on mistrust was that I wanted to reach young people who were frustrated with the democratic process, who didn't see a lot of change happening through the ballot box and to help them find other ways to make change.

And I've been amazed at how effective young people are with using social media to change norms and attitudes.

I'm also amazed a lot of the time with how much change can happen through the markets, through creating new products, through changing our consumer behavior.

I also work with a lot of technologists and it's remarkable that sometimes new technologies can really change how we interact with one another, how we interact with the environment, how we work on questions of power and energy.

So a lot of what I'm trying to do is get us to expand that toolbox of civics.

I don't know that it always has to be jury duty and poll watching.

Although those things are enormously important.

I actually think we need to expand that category of what we take seriously as civic activity and then reward people for actually finding ways that they can be efficacious, ways in which people feel like they can make change in the world and in their communities.

- So it's not always the loudest voice in the folks out on the fringes.

I know in the book you talk about institutionalists and insurrectionists and creating change.

Can you dig into that a little bit more and we'll move on.

- Those were much better terms before January 2nd.

- Well, yes.

- I borrowed those terms, they've actually been gaining some traction in political science.

The idea behind them is that an institutionalist is someone who sees the best way to make change, is working within an institution, making it stronger, making it more powerful.

An insurrectionists looks at an institution and says, I don't think this one works for us anymore.

It's time to change it.

And so I'll give you two examples on issues that I care about.

We're seeing an amazing shift in public prosecutor's office, the DA's office.

We're seeing a lot of people go and take those jobs as district attorney, from the perspective of saying, I wanna strengthen this institution, but I want it to be less about incarceration and more about community justice.

So we've seen Larry Krasner do this in Philadelphia.

He's actually been enormously successful in changing that department from quality of life offenses to actually taking on really serious crime and in the process, dealing with our over-incarceration problem.

So that's the way to be an institutionalist.

You dive into that institution and you try to bring it back to its core values.

But here I'm gonna move on to the controversial side.

I'm quite sympathetic to some of these movements to defund the police, not from the perspective of believing that we should live in a world entirely without law enforcement, but from believing that we have put way too much pressure and responsibility on our police forces.

And in some communities, they have reached a point where there's so little trust and so little faith from the community.

We really have to reimagine what public safety means.

That probably means fewer uniformed and armed officers, more people who are responding on social welfare and psychological calls and having that small group of people who can run towards violence rather than running away from it, which is something that everyone on the left or the right, should and can admire.

But the insurrectionist looks at this and says, there may be situations where this institution really needs to be taken apart and rebuild to recognize the community that we're living in right now.

- Well, the reason I'm a conservative is I'm an institutionalist.

I'm not an insurrectionist, even though there are some in my party or my former party, the Republican Party, that would think that being an insurrectionist is a good thing.

I don't think it is.

In terms of the police, look, we have rising crime right now.

We're not quite back where we were in the early 1990s or in the 1960s, but crime is on the rise.

And I don't think most people who live in those communities, poor people, who are more often the victims of crime, wanna see less police on the street.

I do think we have a problem in our police departments in over militarization of our departments.

And I think the buying of essentially military weapons, tanks, carriers of police that are capable of withstanding a rocket attack, that I think has not been very good.

I would actually like to see more police out on the beat, getting to know their communities and being considered partners rather than an occupying presence.

- All right, we've got about four minutes left.

How do we regain that trust in each other?

I think we're having an issue with the word freedom right now.

Everybody feels like my freedom's more important than your freedom.

We're all Americans here.

I hear the word patriot quite a bit.

Let's talk about our freedoms and how our interactions matter with each other, supporting our freedoms.

Linda, I'll let you start off on this one.

- Thanks Patrick.

Well, if I knew the answer to that, I'd be the next president of the United States.

So I'm not sure that I have a perfect answer.

But one thing that I think is important is exactly the kind of discussion that Ethan and I are having, getting people together who may profoundly disagree on specific policies.

We both think there's something wrong with the police, but we would go about it very, very differently.

But just getting people to sit down at the same table and have these discussions.

And unfortunately our current media environment mitigates against that.

We each watch our preferred ideological network to get our news.

Then we go on Facebook and join Facebook groups of people who think just like we do.

And so there isn't the kind of cross-fertilization.

So figuring out a way of getting people back out of their bunkers and talking to each other and getting to learn that your neighbor is not your enemy even if he voted or she voted a different way in the last election.

You're still neighbors and you still have more in common than you have that is different.

So that's what we've got to figure out a way to do better.

- I think it's so interesting that freedom, in so many cases, seems to drive people towards acting the same way another large group of people is acting.

One of the things that Linda has me thinking a lot about in this conversation we've been having is about tribalism.

And I think in a lot of cases, we are looking for ways to be free, to sort of follow a tribe that we feel like is out of power, that we feel like is being disrespected in one fashion or another.

I think what's so interesting about having an extended discussion with someone is you find the complexities and the nuance of it.

Linda has worked for both political parties and her long career identifies very much as a conservative, but there are issues like immigration where we have enormous amounts of common ground.

And it would be a terrible mistake to deal with her one dimensionally.

I would hope the same thing from my side, where I come in with a pretty strong set of progressive stances.

This ability to deal with each other as nuanced individuals rather than stereotypes.

That's the freedom that I would really like us to have at this point is that freedom for nuance and that freedom for complexity.

And that strikes me as a foreground to finding some common ground.

- There are solutions that can be found in the gray area.

We just have to recognize that the gray area exists and that really policy can move forward in that gray area.

Linda Chavez, thank you so much for joining us.

Ethan Zuckerman, thank you.

The book is "Mistrust."

I will definitely read it even though I need fiction right now to escape all of this, but I think it will be a fine read.

Thank you both so much for joining us.

- Thank you.

- Thanks so much for having us.

- And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

(upbeat music)