Mandatory PPE
According to a certain t-shirt slogan, “Politics ruins everything.” Yet it somehow still manages to insert itself into conversation almost as frequently as the weather. And like the weather, it’s the conditions of our politics that dictate whether not it does indeed “ruin everything “or, instead, support other activities of a healthy society.
Kevin Vallier is a Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, a Bleeding Heart Libertarian, and a student of diverse thinkers from F.A. Hayek to John Rawls. He joins me this Sunday to discuss the “Mandatory PPE” needed for engaging in any political conversation in the coming weeks of Total War between the two dominant factions of the American political landscape. No masks or gloves are required. Rather, we will be discussing a different kind of PPE — the interdisciplinary study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics — which seeks out a higher caliber of discussion, and better ways to disagree.
Vallier, whose previous book asked “Must Politics Be War?,” has a new treatise: Trust in a Polarized Age. His research, combining philosophical rigor with observational data on the body politic, aims to reverse the decay resulting from an across-the-board decline in social trust. Divergent norms and bad-faith dialogues have split Americans along tribal party lines. In a sense, Vallier argues, we are wired for war against the political other. More optimistically, however, he explains how awareness of this fact can lead to the creation of institutions that allow for healthy disagreement on ultimate values.
Some say that we are already in a kind of civil war. If our national politics is this broken, we might think that a pluralistic society is impossible. However, Vallier affirms that political peace and a broad consensus on basic liberal rights is still possible if we elevate the values of reason, liberty and freedom of association above war, tribalism, and the desire to dominate those we disagree with.
Related Shows:
- Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism, June 5, 2014
- Will Wilkinson: G.O.P. Should Embrace the Welfare State, July 14, 2017
- Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice, Oct. 25, 2019
- Liberalism vs. Nationalism, Dec. 22, 2018
- Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Feb 6. 2020
- Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy. Michael Tanner’s *The Inclusive Economy*
Links:
- Kevin Vallier (@kvallier) / Twitter
- Blog: Reconciled — KevinVallier.com
- Latest book: Trust in a Polarized Age
- Book: Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America — The Atlantic by David Brooks
Transcript
Bob Zadek: Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show.
In God, we trust. Trust. Well, trusting in God, I suppose, is kind of easy. But who else do you trust? Is trust the default rule, such that we are born trusting in everybody? Or are we born distrusting everyone?
Which is healthier? Trust everyone unless you learn otherwise? Trust no one, unless you learn otherwise? Lastly, why does it matter? Does it matter whether or not we trust our government, or whether or not we trust our friends? Does it matter to us as a society? Does it matter to us as a country?
Here is my bet. You probably have not thought of any of these really important questions. I sure didn’t, until I discovered this morning’s guest, Kevin Vallier. Kevin is a Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University.
He is the author of a very important book called Trust in a Polarized Age. Kevin’s book follows on the heels of an earlier book that is equally important entitled Must Politics be War? Do you find yourself wondering the answer to both of those questions or examining or worrying about those issues?
I have never before seen any commentary discussing how important trust is for our survival as a country and for our individual survival. I never thought much about trust. It was just there, like the weather. To help us understand why this is so important. I welcome Kevin Vallier to the show. Kevin, thank you so much for your book. Thank you so much for your scholarship. And thank you for joining us this morning.
Kevin Vallier: It’s a delight to be here, Bob.
Social Trust versus Institutional Trust
Bob Zadek: In your most recent book, you explain to us, by some pretty shocking observations — heavily data-driven, not just your musings — that, as a country in recent times, there is a growing level of distrust in the country. You explain in your book two core concepts. Social trust versus governmental trust or institutional trust. Briefly explain both concepts and then share with us your observation about the trend in our country in trust.
Kevin Vallier: Social trust is trust of people in their society. You are trusting strangers in your nation. It is how much you trust people when you take a walk in your neighborhood. For example, someone isn’t going to come by and rob you. Or, when you buy something, you will not be defrauded. When you interact with some kind of local bureaucracy, you are going to be treated in a more or less professional manner. Political trust or institutional trust is trust in particular institutional bodies that are thought to have on certain functions. For example, trust in Congress, or trust in the presidency, or trust in the CDC, or perhaps distrust in the CDC.
Those are two important kinds of trusts to distinguish because they have different causes and they have different consequences, even though they are intimately related. Social trust in the US has fallen dramatically. In the early 70s, around half of Americans said that most people can be trusted. Today, that figure is less than 1/3.
Political trust has fallen steeply, too. Throughout the 60s, about 70% of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington always or most of the time. By the early 90s, that number had fallen to 30%.
“Throughout the 60s, about 70% of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington always or most of the time. By the early 90s, that number had fallen to 30%.”
There is a rebound because of 9/11. But now it has collapsed to 17% as of 2019. More troublesome is that Americans reporting no confidence at all in the national government doubled, from around 14%, between 1995 and 2000, to about 28% in 2017.
You’re seeing people have partisan distrust. Just in the 2017 election, around 70% of Republicans say they don’t trust anybody who voted for Hillary. And actually, the reverse is also true, about 70% of Democrats said they distrust anyone who voted for Donald Trump. It isn’t that they distrust Trump. They distrust anyone who voted for Trump.
We also see increases in darker impulses like hatred. Now, about half of each member of each party hates the other. Another trend is that trust is falling by generation. So the world war two generation was the most trusting, the boomers are less trusting, then Gen X and millennials, and it is the 19–29 year olds that are the most distrusting group. Around 30% of Americans over 65 said most people can’t be trusted, which is still too high. 30% is a lot. But 60% of 18 to 29 year olds say that most people can’t be trusted. So we are raising a distrusting generation.
We know from some of the data that social trust attitudes tend to harden with age. So it is not that they are going to become more trusting as they get older. We face a lower trust future. Now why does that matter? Why does it matter that trust is falling? There are all kinds of good things that come from social and political trust. I can just run through a few of them.
One of the things that more social trust enables us to do, is to exchange. To engage in economic exchange. So if you trust people, you don’t have to worry about them doing something shifty or unjust or something along those lines. And it is for that reason that the more trusting countries tend, all else equal, to grow faster. People become more prosperous. People are also willing to regulate each other less. If you trust people, you don’t feel like you have to control. You don’t have to manipulate them. So the countries that are high-trust, like Sweden, which is not a socialist nation, by the way, enabled them to carry out massive de-regulations in the 80s and the 90s. That would not have worked here, but in Sweden, you can actually have that conversation.
Those are the kinds of things we lose when we lose social trust. We get more corruption in the legal system. As long as we have a large government, we should want it to work better in at least some of the things it does. Maybe we don’t want the DEA to work better, maybe we don’t necessarily want the Fed to work better. But by distrusting certain parts of government, you give others more power. So for instance, I’m a little worried about the Federal Reserve System. But I think trusting the Federal Reserve System means it is less likely that Congress is going to engage in fiscal spending in huge deficits. So sometimes trusting governments is good because we trust the part that is less destructive than another part. People are more worried about trusting the government, but it does produce good effects when it’s targeted in the right way.
How Broad is American Distrust?
Bob Zadek: I’d like to drill down one notch. You pointed out some scary statistics. You pointed out that a high percentage of Democrats hate other people just because they are Republicans, and vice versa. They distrust them solely because of that. Is it universal distrust? For example, I am playing sports against somebody in competitive tennis, and my opponent is a Democrat and I’m Republican. Is that distrust so broad that I will be suspicious that he will be cheating at the game of tennis? Or is the distrust limited to when he is performing a function where the result is dictated by his political party? Is it broad distrust, or focused distrust?
Kevin Vallier: That’s a great question. Empirically, we are not exactly sure how broadly distrust affects behavior. I’m actually raising some grant money to run these studies now. I can give you one example that it affects people. Today, about 50% of Republicans don’t want their children to marry someone who is a Democrat. And the reverse is also true. About half of Democrat parents don’t want their children to marry a Republican. So distrust at least affects that gigantic factor in one’s life. 50 years ago, those were the numbers for people being against interracial marriage. We traded racial prejudice against political prejudice. What would happen in the case you described. If people are focusing on their tennis team and working together, they have what some people call “cross-cutting identities,” because they have identities that don’t have anything to do with politics.
If someone brings up politics in the group and starts talking about it all the time, and someone else disagrees, I do think that is going to make it harder for them and more unpleasant, or more awkward or more anxious for them to be in that group, given how polarized we are. So I do expect that would affect things when that distrust in politics is made salient. If you learn that someone voted for Trump. I know people said “my dad voted for Trump, can I spend time with my dad now?” Or, I learned that my boyfriend voted for Trump. Should I break up with him? I do think that phenomenon is there. The boyfriend and girlfriend have the common bond of the relationship but then one learns that the other voted for the other party and thinks, did I ever know that person in the first place?
Bob Zadek: You point out that there is a steady decline in social distrust. I can understand an increase in political distrust, because somebody with political power has the power to harm me, in the sense that they are interfering with my freedom, taking away my property through taxation, etc. So they represent a true threat to me, and therefore I don’t trust them. However, what accounts for social distrust when my neighbor, my friend, or my work colleague, doesn’t have any real power and can’t really harm me? Those relationships are kind of benign. So what started it all? What caused the decline in social trust?
Kevin Vallier: In my view, the decline in social trust is one of the great social scientific mysteries. We don’t know historically how people learn to do it. How did people grow from tribes where they knew everybody to trusting people they didn’t know. We don’t know the answer to that question in social science. We have only been measuring in a careful way across the world for about 40 years. What I would really want to see, for instance, are social trust levels around the Second World War.
My deep suspicion is that war, particularly against an enemy that was universally and rightly regarded as terrible, made people think they could trust their government and each other, because everybody was working together to beat the Nazis. Another war comes along, in Vietnam, and there isn’t agreement that it is just. There is no agreement on whether the enemy is bad. The younger generation says, “don’t trust anyone over 30.” That was one of the slogans back then. So that created social distrust. So I think one thing that is probably the case is that when people have to band together under some common threat, with the exception of this virus, perhaps, they become more trusting because they all see each other contributing. Whereas if you have something divisive, and people are being sort of cruel and mean to each other, or saying, “you’re a baby killer,” or something, that can make people be less trusting.
A lot of it has to do with the kinds of positive experiences we have with others, especially when we are younger, or the negative experiences we have. That is one part of the story. When we view corruption in government, I think that can also matter a lot. I think Watergate was a very big deal. It certainly was for political trust. But before then you could have this kind of rosy image of the presidency. They hid the fact that FDR was having affairs. They hid the strange stuff that was going on in JFK’s Oval Office. Watergate and the Vietnam War were real periods of increasing our distrust. I also think that when people disagree more about values, it is harder for them to trust each other.
The United States is a very religious country, even still. And what is interesting is that it goes in cycles. There are times where people get much more religious and then there is a decline. This has happened a bunch of times. The way I see what happened in the 60s and 70s, is we had a non-Christian religious conversion on the left, they became converted to a kind of equality, a sexual revolution, where abortion is okay and the equality is pretty much the only political value that matters, not liberty. And so you have this culture arise that is effectively a kind of new religion. We are seeing a new evolution of this today, in the social justice kind of area.
So imagine half the country had converted to Islam 50 years ago, we would probably be having lower trust.Those people are really differen and they have really different values. I think there was a big change in values, but not among everybody, just among part of the country. And I think that’s getting people to be less trusting because they know that other people have different values and it is harder to trust people because of these values. That’s another possibility. I think that political polarization has been playing a role. Less participation in associations such as churches and charitable organizations as the government takes over more and more of those functions. So there are a lot of different things that could be contributing, but it is really hard to tell. So it is a little bit of a mystery. But those are some thoughts.
Bob Zadek: I distinguish political distrust from social distrust. I find them almost, but for the common word, trust, very different concepts. I distrust the government because they have the power to harm me. I think the distrust in government can be tracked as behaving in the same way as the accumulation of governmental power. If the government’s power receded, I would trust it more, because it does not represent a threat. If somebody is attacking me with a gun, I’m not going to trust them so much. Social distrust puzzles me. My neighbor is not going to harm me. What is the natural order of mankind, trust or distrust? Are we hardwired to distrust so we survive? Or are we hardwired to trust so we survive? Can you speak to the observation that distrust in government is explainable that simply?
Kevin Vallier: I think that that is actually part of it. It is consistent with the observation that people trust their local and state governments more than the federal government, because of course, the federal government intervenes in a much more harmful way. They have the military, after all, where your local government typically isn’t going to beat up on you in the same way that the feds do. So I think that’s consistent.
I also think it is the case that we distrust each other more when the federal government insists on making a decision rather than letting those decisions be made more locally. So I think abortion is a big case of this. I think that Roe made salient this massive point of disagreement, where, if that had not happened, we would have handled abortion at state levels or a national level through Congress, where people would have to kind of get together and decide what the policy would be. So deciding points of social controversy for everyone across the country is a source of distrust in government.
Another reason that large governments cause distrust is because large governments can slow down economic growth and prosperity. And they can make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, through things like corporate welfare and stuff like that. And I think when people see that corruption, they trust the government less. And when they see that they’re not as prosperous as they once were, they trust the government less. I think the biggest factor in determining political trust is performance. I think you and I would probably agree that if the government was smaller, it could do the things it does better.
Bob Zadek: You mentioned in your comments a few moments ago that Gen-X, the youngest generation, has the highest level of social distrust. I don’t understand at all why social social distrust should ever have a declining or increasing trend. After all, there is no outside force affecting it. It is social. It is how I react to my neighbor, my colleague, my family members and the like. And there is nothing external about that. It is bilateral. It is me and somebody else. Why should those bilateral relationships be trending downward? What is the outside force that causes individuals who don’t know each other and who have different life experiences to experience a declining distrust? What’s that all about?
It is such a powerful mystery. If you look at social trust in other nations it has exactly the pattern you described. By and large, over the past hundred or so countries where they are able to do the survey, social trust is very stable. Sweden is the most trusting country in the world. It has been for 40 years. A lot of people don’t know that Sweden moved from democratic socialism to a more capitalist welfare state. They had massive policy changes and it had no effect on their social trust at all. Why would it? So there is almost nothing that affects social trust. Some people say economic inequality lowers social trust, because people feel like the game is rigged in favor of the rich. But there are other countries that have seen increases in economic inequality over the last few decades, and their social trust levels have not declined.
The younger generations have not had any national unifying event where they saw that everyone can get along and can contribute to each other and help out. They are also more likely to spend time alone and less time in interactions with others face to face. With the kids growing up now, you know, in COVID, they are seeing people less.
People are less religious so are less likely to interact with people at church and in the charitable activities that churches do. So there are less interactions between people of different social classes or races. I also think that an increased attention to certain kinds of social conflicts between different parts of society makes people less trusting because they see relations and oppression, be they real or unreal. So those are all things that I think are potential causes. But if I told you we knew for sure, I couldn’t say.
Political polarization is part of what’s reducing social trust. This is a factor that actually tracks. The fall in social trust corresponds fairly closely to the increase in political polarization. Now, why would that be? Well, I think what is going on is that we are developing more clearly these two different cultures, the red tribe and the blue tribe. They live in different parts of the country. They wear different clothes. The Reds go to church, the blues, usually don’t. The Reds drive certain kinds of cars, the blues drive different kinds of cars. The reds eat meat, the blues shop at Whole Foods. When you ask, can most people be trusted?
People may be thinking, “Well, you know, I can trust Democrats, I can trust independents, but if someone’s really conservative, I’m not going to trust them at all.” People at the elite level are becoming more ideological. As I like to say, religious fundamentalism is being replaced by political fundamentalism, and the top politicians are political fundamentalists. They distrust each other, they hate each other. They don’t trust each other. They don’t spend time together, except to fight. People notice those patterns and it filters into society more broadly.
One of my next projects is to try to develop with some economists a general theory of the sources of social distrust. But it’s going to take quite a while because we have to run a lot of empirical work to get there. I think polarization is playing a role and social conflict both at the elite level and below the elite level play a role.
Bob Zadek: I’m going to give you a head start on your next book with a thought. I do not need acknowledgement credit. I don’t ask for anything.
The extent of polarization in our country as a characteristic is exaggerated. That seems counterintuitive, but let me explain my thought and tie it in with what we talked about a second ago. You distinguished all these social differences, religious versus less religious, Whole Foods versus meat eaters. If I were living in the Midwest, and I would observe culture in the Northeast or in California, that difference in culture would not be a threat to me, I would just feel pity, “Those poor sons of guns, they are so missing out on so much of life, thank God, I live in Nebraska or in Arkansas. Oh, my goodness.”
It is not envy. It is a pity. There’s no threat involved. If you want to live that way, that’s fine, the way I am unaffected in how the Amish live in Ohio. However, with a strong federal government, it starts to matter. People can live different lifestyles but they cannot impose it on me. However, with a strong federal government, those people will pose a threat because the federal government can impose on others a certain lifestyle. So it all can be boiled down to a federalism issue. No one would care about these differences if those differences couldn’t be imposed upon you against your will. You can change states, you can move from Ohio to New York. You’ll have a choice. And I think that’s the source of the hatred. It’s not the lifestyle, per se, or the values per se. It’s only when those values can be forced upon you that causes the little hairs to stick up on the back of your neck.
Kevin Vallier: That’s a really cool hypothesis. We could look at societies that are equally diverse. One would have more government power, and on this view they would have lower social trust. If the blue tribe couldn’t control the red tribe, the red tribe couldn’t control the blue tribe. But another factor I would add is not just political power, but cultural power. So when the Silicon Valley elites block conservatives or blocked the New York Post, I think that also creates distrust in those corporations and in the people who share those values.
So if you have canceled culture, for instance, that’s going to make people less trusting of others, because they think there are lots of busy bodies out there who really destroy my life. So I agree with you, I think that if we had less political power over each other, that would certainly help. But I would also stress the importance of cultural power from Hollywood, from the Academy, and now from Big Tech. So I’m just adding to your very plausible story.
Bob Zadek: I think you’re exactly right. The distrust of big tech comes from the fact that they control the order of hits when I do a search. They are exporting their worldview onto me. If all they did was have enormous economic power because they were successful, I wouldn’t care. I don’t care about that power, per se. I only care to the extent that it interferes with my freedom. And that is what causes the social distrust. It is a war when someone else can adversely affect my quality of life. The main quality of the progressive Democrats is that they seek the exercise of more power over Americans than do the Republicans.
So it is more power over the individual versus less power, and I would observe that it is not that I distrust the government, per se. It is only when the government starts to impinge upon my liberty that the distrust comes about. It is really a fight for something important, in the same way as we distrusted Nazi Germany in World War II. We distrusted Stalin during the Cold War. That was not irrational distrust because we were bad people. There was a clear threat. It’s the threat that causes distrust, not differences per se.
Kevin Vallier: A lot of our differences aren’t salient on religious matters anymore. Protestants and Catholics don’t have trouble distrusting each other because we stopped having the fight on whether the government should be Protestant or Catholic. So one theme I would have, and within the tradition of political philosophy I work in and the work I did with my dissertation advisor Jerry Gauss, was on any ideological control as parallel to religious control. So can we have a society where we treat other ideologies like we treat other states? They probably have good reasons for thinking what they think. But we have learned ways to tolerate each other and live together. What I want is ideological toleration and a reduction in political prejudice. A precondition for this is that the federal government has to be limited in a lot of ways. We need more federalism.
Other countries do not have these deep disagreements about values. The Singaporean government is a bit smaller. I’m worried about the Biden administration, who is going to staff all the powerful positions? I think Biden himself is a moderate but the people behind him are not. What we’re going to see, I think, is similar to the Obama administration. There will be a messing with the tea party groups and giving a lot more oversight to them than to others. I worry that we are going to see a lot more of that, particularly now that the tech companies and many other corporations have adopted the values of the regressive left. I think we’re going to see a combination of political and cultural power used against people in the right. This is only going to make things worse, and it is one of the reasons people on the right are happy to vote for Trump. They were worried about being controlled, not just politically, but culturally.
As a libertarian, I disagree with Trump on many, many things. The cultural plus political power of the left is creating a lot of social conflict, and I think it’s going to be worse under a Biden administration, because the social justice folks are just going to take all of the big cabinet offices. The federal government will fund abortion, maybe even through direct payment. That is going to cause more division because people do not want to use their taxpayer money to kill children. But the left will claim that abortion is healthcare. We may even see the passage of the Equality Act, which allows for almost no religious exemptions for people who have more traditional views. So I’m worried. I am worried about a huge amount of bureaucratic control and monitoring, backed up by a huge amount of cultural-power courts. I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial, but maybe even some coordination between the Biden and eventually Harris Presidency and Silicon Valley and what they are doing.
Bob Zadek: There will be a decline in individual freedom and a ceding of power over one’s life from the individual to the government. This will increase rational polarization because it’s a fight to preserve individual freedom.
I am a lawyer and a business person, and I have a profound respect for the power of entrepreneurship and small business. That is part of the economy that gives me goosebumps when I think about it. You pointed out that as social trust declines, so does trust in business and the willingness to take a risk. As risk taking declines, entrepreneurship declines, and that becomes a profound break in the economy. So share with our listeners the link between the decline in social trust and its effect upon something we all care about, which is the big picture of the economy.
Kevin Vallier: I don’t know of measures that look explicitly at social trust and then entrepreneurship levels. That’s actually a great idea for papers. Here’s a reason to think that there’s a deep connection between the two. We do know that social trust does reduce economic growth, in part because people are not exchanging as much. It also affects people’s productivity levels, so their ability to exchange in more closely knit economic organizations is reduced.
Labor productivity is reduced by a lower level of trust. And entrepreneurship and innovation occurs in those moments of exchange. That’s how you get the money for a startup. That’s how you are able to hire workers that can be flexible and thoughtful and creative to help you engage in exchange. If a less trusting society engages in less exchange, and it has more corruption, then those opportunities for innovation will decrease. I do think that less trust means less economic gains, that you’re probably going to see less effective and less entrepreneurship.
Bob Zadek: What has to happen in order to change the trend in the decline in social trust and the trust in government?
Kevin Vallier: I think there are some policies that we can support that I talk about in the book, particularly deregulating housing, that I think will help economic growth. I think there are electoral processes that we could reform, like having ranked choice voting, so that people would have to put the other party as their second choice. I think that would get people to sort of moderate negative attitudes. I do think we should limit government more and have more federalism.
There is also something that you can do personally, as a matter of the heart. My view as a Christian is that my biggest enemy is myself. It’s the bad things that I do and the bad attitudes that I take towards other people. And what I think I tried to do in politics is to try my best to see the humanity in my opponents, and to see the inhumanity in myself. And I think that if we are not able to be humble about what we know, to recognize the mistakes that we make in our own lives, it is going to be very hard to re-establish trust with others because we’re focused on them being the enemy.
So we have to focus our hearts in a different way of thinking about other people. disagree with us politically. We’ve done this with religion. If someone else is a Protestant or a Catholic, we can still love and respect them. And I think we have to get to that same place of ending political bigotry and being able to see the other side as some as human, as equal and worthy of love and respect.
Bob Zadek: Much thanks to my guest, Kevin Vallier, for his important book, Trust in a Polarized Age.
Kevin Vallier: Thank you so much. It was a great conversation.
Bob Zadek: Thank you, Kevin.
