Declining Trust
Sebastian Mallaby has a column up in the Washington Post that bemoans the declining trust Americans have in politics and business. He doesn't actually say how to regain that trust, just shakes his head.
You see this most viciously in politics. In the mid-term campaigns, nobody has time for trust. The name of the game is to hold opponents accountable by attacking their records — for failings real or imagined. If the Democrats capture one or both chambers, it will be largely because they promise to hold the president accountable.
This reflects a shift somewhere around 2003 or 2004. In the 1990s, after academics and pundits began talking about trust, the nation did actually become more trusting. The share of Americans saying they trust government "most of the time" or "just about always" rose from 21 percent in 1994 to 56 percent in 2002. Equally, elections became less abrasively focused on accountability. In 2000, according to John Geer of Vanderbilt University, a relatively low 40 percent of the messages in presidential TV spots were negative, down from 47 percent four years earlier.
But some time after the Iraq invasion, these trends reversed. In 2004 the share of Americans saying they trusted government fell to 47 percent, and this month a CBS News-New York Times poll put it at a rock-bottom 28 percent. Meanwhile Geer's measures show that in the 2004 election negative messages jumped to 50 percent of the total, and he guesses that this year's congressional races are the most negative in history.
There's been a similar change in corporate America. In the late 1990s, the new thing for corporate managers was to trust ordinary employees. Company hierarchies were flattened so that people in the middle could demonstrate initiative rather than suffocating under bureaucratic controls. In 1999, the Harvard Business Review reported that 30,000 articles on trusting and empowering middle managers had appeared in the business press over the previous four years.
That paradigm ended in 2002 with Enron, WorldCom and dozens of lesser corporate scandals. Suddenly nobody wanted to trust managers; they wanted to audit them. Instead of the era of management empowerment, we entered the era of mandatory online ethics training. Meanwhile private-equity firms are raising record sums to take over companies on the premise that incumbent managers need to be kicked rather than trusted.
Interestingly, although Mallaby doesn't point it out, the 2003-2004 time frame he sees coincides with Nancy Pelosi's admitted strategy to go after the president. Not that this is the only thing that has been going on to erode trust.
I tend to see things like this as pendulum issues. Many things swing from one extreme to another. Politics and business are only two of the things that do this all the time. So in one way, Mallaby is correct, there has been a swing of these pendulums. I think the genius of America is that it has always managed to get these pendulum swings under control and find a middle ground.
By Black Jack, Monday, 30 October , 2006 @ 2:08 pm
Have you ever been to a planetarium and seen a big pendulum swing back and forth, one with little wooden pegs on the floor which start out placed at a right angle to the swing line?
The pendulum obeys the laws of physics and tends to remain swinging in the same plane, however as the earth rotates on its axis, the wooden pegs are knocked over in sequence.
It’s an interesting metaphor for progress: don’t get caught up in the back and forth as the pendulum swings. That’s just window dressing, full of impressive motion but ultimately only represents endless repetition.
Progress, however, is taking place on the ground below. It’s slow and not easily noticed, but it’s there nevertheless.