Where do Americans place trust? The answer may surprise you.

Episode transcript

Gail Chaddock:  If you follow news chatter, you may be convinced that party lines are all that count in American politics, and people don’t trust their government, their institutions, or each other. Even on issues where there is middle ground, somehow party lines prevail, stifling prospects for cooperation and progress. How can trust be rebuilt in such a climate of thought?  

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Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking with Marshall Ingwerson, former editor of The Christian Science Monitor, about his recent story “What we think about trust and politics is (mostly) wrong.” As editor, Marshall led the launch of the Monitor as a daily digital subscription product in 2017. Then, and now, he’s focused on recognizing progress and helping people understand each other across divides. He’s based in Laguna Beach, California.

Marshall, thank you for joining us today.

Marshall Ingwerson: Glad to be here, Gail.

Chaddock: For someone who is allegedly retired, you have taken on some assignments of remarkable scope. Your end of the year cover story in 2023 stepped back from daily news shocks to highlight points of progress. Your latest story challenges deeply held views about polarization and trust in the United States. How do you go about looking for counterfacts when the public narrative appears to be set in stone?

Ingwerson: Well, first of all, you have to face the bad news as well as the good news and really look it fully in the face. On many topics, like in politics, there is overwhelmingly bad news. Americans don’t like the way their political system works. They do not trust their government. And this is a serious problem that people feel really threatens democracy and their basic rights. It’s very important to look things fully in the face, but then also back up and say: What is actually happening? Because that’s often very different than what people fear is going to happen.  

Gallup asked 14 questions to the American public at the beginning of 2023. They covered the board from foreign affairs to the economy. The questions were about what people expected to happen in the coming year. And the answers were overwhelmingly pessimistic. They expected higher inflation, higher joblessness, a falling stock market. They were overwhelmingly wrong. I think on 10 of 14, people had clearly guessed the wrong direction. And of course the right direction turned out to be much more positive.

Chaddock: So many times there’d be a news story that predicts something horrific. It doesn’t happen. And the corrections are very tiny, but the headlines are very large.

Ingwerson: Yes.

Chaddock: If you were to give someone advice about how to think about polls, how much of what you’re seeing there should listeners really take to heart, and how much is fear?

Ingwerson: I’ll give you a couple examples. Very high on the list of current American concerns is that the two parties have an inability to work together. So, on the one hand, that tells you that Americans are very concerned about their politics. They don’t like what’s going on. On the other hand, it wasn’t a concern that, you know, the other party should be obliterated. Uh, the concern actually reflects that people care about the relationship. Which is just different than what you get from cable television and talk radio? It’s sort of the world of unending culture war.

Chaddock: Yeah, gladiators.

Ingwerson: Exactly. And people really do not like that world. You can also look at the polls showing, uh, the level of acceptance of violence. 

Chaddock: Yes. 

Ingwerson: The percentage of Americans who say violence might be justified, if things really head south one way or the other. Those numbers have been a real concern after the incident of January 6th. But at the same time, I happen to be looking at some surveys from the late ’90s during the second Clinton administration. They’d asked the same question, and the numbers of Americans who said violence might be justified in some circumstances was even higher. It was a few percentage points higher. And it wasn’t even particularly noted at the time because it wasn’t sort of a prominent public concern.

But, it is some perspective that uh, maybe things aren’t quite as bad, or getting worse the way we perceive them to be. Studies have also looked at those questions on violence and find that surveys tend to overestimate that view by as much as six times.

Chaddock: That was so interesting. I love that you put that in the story. The other thing was posters are finding that people that feel inclined to be violent themselves are really misperceiving their rivals on the other side. And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone thinks the other side is inclined to violence and that is making them more inclined.

Ingwerson: Yeah, people generally think the other side is about twice as inclined to violence as it really is. Uh, and then when they learn the facts, their own acceptance of violence tends to back down. 

Chaddock: Anything else to say about how to think about polling data? Can you really trust what the polls are telling us about what we think, and about how others think about us? 

Ingwerson: I think there’s a lot of distortion. There was a well known study a few years ago, that Americans have so personalized this hyperpartisanship, that a huge proportion of Americans would be very upset if their child were to marry somebody from the other party. In 2010, half of Republicans and a third of Democrats would be very upset about a cross-party marriage. But then a follow up study was done asking essentially the same question, but saying: What if this new in law didn’t talk about politics much? And the objection dropped way down, to the point, in fact, that most people would rather have a cross-party in-law who didn’t talk about politics, than a same party in law who did. They’re just sick of politics and they don’t want to hear about it.

Chaddock: The wording of the poll becomes very important.

Ingwerson: Yes, and it’s partly what, uh, political scientists call “the priming” of the question. Because when you ask that question the first way, what people imagine is, they’re picturing the people who are in the news, Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And it’s like, no, they don’t want anything to do with that. But when you talk about, you know, the person down the street, real-life people who are members of other parties, that’s very different.

Chaddock: You know, the impression I had reading this article is that you did a ton of reading to prepare for this story. What surprised you the most when you started sifting through the data on trust?

Ingwerson: The thing that probably surprised me most was the striking degree to which all this hyperpartisan division is not really about anything. People have not actually moved significantly apart on the issues. Some surveys will show that Republicans and Democrats are farther apart on the issues than they used to be. But that’s not because people have changed their opinions, that’s because they’ve changed parties. So, conservatives are really now all in the Republican Party. There used to be a lot of conservative Democrats. And liberals are now all in the Democratic Party. And there were a lot of liberal Republicans. We called them Rockefeller Republicans at one point. Um, people have sorted themselves out, and that makes the parties look more extreme, in fact, be more extreme, but people have not actually moved further apart in their positions. Even where people seem to have moved on any given issue farther apart, they’re often moving in the same direction. 

Chaddock: Oh, that’s interesting.

Ingwerson: For example, support of gay marriage. Over the last 10 years, Republicans and Democrats have moved slightly further apart, but they’ve both moved in the same direction toward greater acceptance of gay marriage. And now, a majority of Republicans as well as Democrats support gay marriage. Republicans are much stronger than Democrats on supporting gun rights. But that support has actually declined a lot among Democrats and a little bit among Republicans. So again, they’re moving in the same direction.     

This hyperpartisanship is really not being driven by the issues. It has become much more of a personal identification with my tribe, uh, my team.  

Chaddock: I don’t want to assign you your next huge project, but it’d be interesting to find out where that’s coming from.  

Ingwerson: Yes. Since the ’70s, the political parties have gotten weaker, and activist groups have become stronger within the parties. The parties used to have a, they cared about a band, you know, a cross-the-board set of issues, and would sort of trade off priorities and work things out between the different interest groups. And so you didn’t have, you know, single-issue political parties. Now, the interest groups are much stronger, and the funding with these groups is much more focused on specific issues. That has driven politicians to extremes. And it makes extremism pay. You’re no longer sort of always looking for the swing voter.

Extremists are served by more extremism. In other words, one extreme needs the other extreme. The sort of conservative right, in the U.S. or the populist right, let’s say, in the U.S. needs the woke progressive left to play off of. And on the left, it’s the same way. I mean, If you’ve ever contributed money to a cause, then you probably get a lot of letters that are designed to trigger you, to get you afraid, very afraid, of what you’re facing on the other side.   

Chaddock: In your years as a reporter, do you ever recall being called by a television station or some other news outlet, trying to sense if you’d be appropriate to talk to them. And the minute you say something that’s in the middle, you know, “No, no, no, we’re looking for, you know, we’re looking for something else.” You very rarely see some calm, centrist person reasoning through the argument held up as a representative of either party.

Ingwerson: Yeah. There are media organizations out there who are really making new fresh efforts to be nonpartisan and to really find common ground. The Christian Science Monitor has always done that, and there are others, newer ones, like Tangle, which will take an issue a day, and look at, here’s what the right is saying, and then give a very fair assessment of that, and what the left is saying, and a very fair, complete assessment. And then give their own take, which sometimes is a mix of both, and sometimes tends more to the right, and sometimes more to the left. In the current media environment, it almost feels strange, you know, when you read that, because it’s: “Wait, is this ... so this is reality.”  

Chaddock: Is there any evidence that distrust in government institutions, our fellow citizens, the other party, can be changed? 

Ingwerson: Yeah, and I would say, first of all, the fall in trust is not universal, even in this country. Local governments are still highly trusted. People still have very high trust in the military. Uh, in fact, trust in the military has risen in the last decade or so.

Chaddock: Hmm. 

Ingwerson: And small business has very high trust. But on a larger, more national level, Ireland is an example. It used to be a fairly high trust country. Ireland in the early aughts, was booming and it was in its Celtic Tiger phase. And then the big crash of 2008 came along, and it sent them into a big tailspin, and trust plummeted. But in fact they have been successfully building back from that. They’ve been developing what you call deliberative democracy. For example, they’ve created these citizens assemblies where a hundred people are assembled pretty much at random like a jury. They sit down and take a few months around one issue. The first one was abortion. Ireland had a constitutional ban on abortion. And, uh, the first citizens assembly held basically like public hearings listening to everybody across the board. They came up with a plan to hold a referendum, and about two thirds of the Irish people voted to do away with his constitutional ban. There have been about five citizens assemblies on other controversial issues since then, and about two-thirds of their recommendations have been adopted by Irish governments. And about 80% of Irish people say that they trust the citizens assemblies to make good decisions.

The United States and Ireland are two countries that are very distinctive in that they’re basically rich countries. But at the same time, they are very religiously based. That can be a difficult thing to put together, modernism of self-fulfillment and personal development and the traditionalism of the core values. So, Ireland’s success might conceivably, uh, have some positive lessons for the U.S. But it’s a long road. Because, distrust tends to follow generations through their lives. And in this country, the millennial generation is somewhat less trustful in general than the older generations.   

Chaddock: In your 36 plus years with the Monitor – and thank you for that, by the way – what have you learned that might be helpful to readers in rebuilding their own trust or defending themselves against, call it, manufactured distrust.

Ingwerson: Yeah. One thing I think that has been important to me is just after you’ve covered the news, and just having been around for a few decades, you remember stuff. For example, some friends of ours have an adult child who doesn’t think it would be ethical to have children because she’s very worried about climate change and the future of the planet. But I remember that from 40 years ago, we were very worried about overpopulation. In 1968, a Stanford professor wrote a book called “The Population Bomb,” in which he predicted that because of the fast growing population, hundreds of millions of people would begin to starve in the ’70s. The book was a bestseller. And, uh, Paul Ehrlich, the author was on, uh, Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” you know, dozens of times. There were a lot of people, young people in that era who were saying it would be unethical to have children.

Now we didn’t have mass starvation in the ’70s. There were some famines, but far fewer than in preceding decades. And in fact, now, while the population has in fact exploded, people have more to eat. Agriculture is so much more productive that they’re feeding all of us without using much more land. And I don’t want to imply that concerns about climate change now are trivial. I think it’s gonna really call on the best of us, you know, to figure it out. But at the same time, just looking at history, I think, you know, but we do figure this stuff out.

Chaddock: Marshall, thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. And thank you for your years of leadership at the Monitor. I got to work there while you were editor and that focus on progress like a laser was inspiring. It was great to work with that and I thank you for that. 

Ingwerson: Thank you, Gail. 

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Chaddock: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes, with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins and Jingnan Peng. Our sound engineer is Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.