More on Institutional Alignment

Or "Why Class gets us close but isn't quite right"

In my last post, I wrote that the breakdown of trust in institutions has polarized the American electorate and is the best model with which to think of the new American electorate. That if you are embedded in a respectable institution, which provides you with money and meaning, then you believe in the system writ large, and are likely to vote for the Democrats. Conversely, if you are outside the institutional structure, are juggling to pay your bills, and struggle with a crisis of purpose, you are likely to vote for the Republicans. This dichotomy is strongly correlated with other indicators such as class and education, but is distinct. To put it in classical terms, the Democrats are the “Court Party,” while the Republicans have become the “Country Party”—a total inversion of how the parties would have been seen in the 1970s and 1980s.

The events of the 2024 election seem to indicate that this realignment is indeed progressing. That the institutions that have framed America—government, corporations, unions—are no longer trusted and/or seen capable of serving by large swaths of the American public.

Some additions/corrections

Some expansion of my thesis—I focused on 2008 as the galvanizing moment when the American electorate began to reorganize itself around its rejection of the utility and trustworthiness of institutions. I stand by that assertion. But I should have made it clear that the galvanizing moment was not the beginning. In particular, the events of 2003 and the runup to the Iraq war—which would eventually tarnish even Colin Powell, perhaps the most bipartisan admired figure of my lifetime in the deceptions regarding Iraq’s possession of nuclear weapons. I’ve often pointed to this event.

What I had not connected before, and am grateful to James Joyner for highlighting, is the earlier genealogy of the breakdown of institutional trust in the clerical sex scandals, centered on the Catholic church. These events could be said to culminate in the Boston Globe investigation in 2002, just a year prior to the 2003 Iraq events (which I have often cited, but did not emphasize enough in my last post). And I do think the loss of trust in The Church (mirrored in a number of Protestant churches as well) was a major breaking point. But we could trace the diminution of trust even further back, perhaps famously to the social critic Christopher Lasch and his The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy in 1995. I do still believe 2008 to be the crystalizing moment, but there was a long, slow build that preceded, with the deception around the 2003 Iraq war being another major point.

Why not just class?

Many readers think that my focus on institutional trust is essentially indistinguishable from social class, measured in income and education. There is some truth here, in that the two are undeniably correlated. And, since class is much easier to measure (I can’t imagine how you would try to operationalize a survey to measure institutional responsiveness and trust), why not just use it (as does Patrick Ruffino in his book and Substack most eloquently)?

I think this is a question of focus and how far down you want to push. As a practical matter, the two are deeply correlated. And were I someone who needed to make this data actionable—a political strategist or pollster—then I would most definitely use class. The best empirical political science will base this phenomenon around class, as class can be measured.

But I think class is just a proxy variable for what is really going on. It moves along (generally) with your level of institutional trust, but isn’t the same thing. So at a theoretical level, I don’t think that what is really happening is a class divide, though the lower classes are more likely to experience it. While class gives you the best empirical analysis, I think that looking at the breakdown of institutional trust is the best political theory.

Seeing through the lens of institutions

Once you start thinking about the loss of institutional trust, you start to see it reflected everywhere. For example, I think the powerful TED talk, and other media, used by Scott Galloway to talk about the injustices young people experience in contemporary society is also looking at a piece of this puzzle. But again, I think he is seeing correlated data rather than getting to the root cause. Galloway correctly sees that young people are being poorly served by the institutions. But what he misses (in part—in other places he captures it perfectly) is that the institutions are simply failing, fully stop. Those with resources can work around the failing institutions. But very few young people (absent generational wealth) have resources. So—QED—the institutions are failing youth. I don’t dispute that this is correct. But the causality is backwards. This is about failing institutions that disproportionately impact the young, not an explicit war on youth. But I believe we get much more purchase in looking at institutional failure (and associated cratering of trust) rather than just focusing on youth—again, wealthy youth with connected parents at the top ten or so universities are doing just fine working around institutional failure.

Another strain of this though that I should have mentioned in the original essay is that of Chris Arnade. His powerful book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America—richly enhanced by scores of photos—captures this loss of trust and was perhaps the first book that made me start thinking about institutional failure. Arnade’s first-person interviews are powerful and tap into the “back row” of Americans who “don’t’ want to leave their family and change where they live, who they are, what they believe, what they like, how they act, what they care for, what they value.” But our institutions have very little place for these values—save at the voting booth.

In the first essay, I mentioned briefly the plagiarism scandal that brought down Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard. However, I skipped over a similar, earlier, research scandal that brought down the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, over accusations of data manipulation. The independent panel eventually convened by Stanford would conclude “that Tessier-Lavigne had failed to correct errors in years-old scientific papers and had overseen labs with an “unusual frequency” of data manipulations.” Tessier-Lavigne would resign from Stanford’s presidency in the wake of that report, in August of 2022. So to be clear, in the space of just 18 months, the presidents of arguably the two most distinguished research universities in the United States (meaning perhaps the most distinguished in the world), resigned over accusations of academic fraud.

18 months. Both Harvard and Stanford. Are we surprised that there is a crisis of trust?

The pseudonymous Trace Woodgrain (the source of the graph in the original essay) has also written a piece on the hiring scandal at the FAA. In the story he painstakingly researched, traditional and reliable sources of air traffic controller candidates were passed over in favor of a screening test which is—charitably—certifiably crazy. In what world is having bad grades in science a good indicator? It is difficult to envision how candidates selected by this screening test (assuming they answered honestly, and didn’t just game it with answers provided to them) would not be objectively less qualified than traditional sources of candidates. I’ve never been in Air Traffic Control tower, but I think I know enough about complex, stressful situations to know these questions are terrible and ridiculous. That an institution with an explicit mission “to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world” would deliberate exclude the most objectively qualified candidates to provide that safety and efficiency shows rot deep at the core of that institution—or at least a hijacking (pun not intended) of their hiring practices. Actions like these by an institution cannot help but break trust.

MAHA

Finally, a note on MAHA—or “Make America Healthy Again.” I had not heard this phrase until days before the election, so it did not appear in the first essay. But I am glad I highlighted Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra Processed People, one of the core texts of this movement, so I didn’t miss it completely. If I was to point to one instance where loss of institutional trust is not correlated with social class and education (therefore making the former the better unit of analysis), it would be here.

I have been shocked by the support I have seen for a radical reorientation of the food system in the United States. Now whether this support, under (assuming confirmation) of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, translates into successes as it encounters the U.S. food industry and its lobbyists is uncertain. Expect a fight. But there appears to be—based on the “vibe”—a sizeable group that supports the MAHA agenda. President Trump’s announcement of Makary’s nomination spoke directly to this suspicion of institutional failure: “He will work under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to, among other things, properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our Nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our Nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic.” Institutional failure doesn’t get much more potent than “harmful chemicals poisoning” our food and demonstrates (if found to be true) failure of both the institutions in the food supply and the government regulators who should be monitoring them. Of course, Makary’s latest book is itself about institutional failure, examining “the medical groupthink that has led to public harm.”

Closing thoughts

It is a strange turn of events that brought us to this place and I do not think it was preordained. There may be an alternative universe in which the 2016 election featured traditional Republicans rallying around one candidate to shut out Donald Trump in the primaries, while Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and here the poles might be reversed. But in our universe, it is President Trump’s Republican party that has become the vehicle for mass discontent. Again, in today’s world, to “Rage Against the Machine” is to be a Republican.

The movement of all—or most—of those affiliated with the institutions into the Democratic party will continue to ripple through our politics. Just to give one example, a more visible sign is that there is effectively no real political discussion between the newly realigned parties featured on network or cable news. With the exception of a few figures such as Scott Jenning on CNN (and now on the Los Angeles Times editorial board), many so-called political debate shows could now fairly be characterized as “a bunch of Kamala Harris voters talking among themselves.” Figures traditionally associated with the right and Republicans are self-aligning into the Democratic party—as one would expect of someone comfortably embedded in the institutions. But this leaves left-leaning commentators without their traditional foils, and programs nominally devoted to political debate reduced to squabbles between Democratic factions.

This continuing realignment—of institutionalists into the Democratic party, and anti-institutionalists into the Republicans (or, again Court and Country parties) shows no signs of abating. This does not mean it will continue indefinitely and can be extrapolated indefinitely (as was done, for example, by the common—but erroneous--assumption that Hispanic voters would be Democrats forever). It is possible that a political entrepreneur will emerge to rechannel the political currents. But for today, I remain convinced this is the best—though imperfect—model through which to view our unfolding political landscape.