TRUST REQUIRES TRUSTWORTHINESS, AND OUR RULING CLASS IS ANYTHING BUT. Collapsing social trust is the biggest problem we don’t discuss.

The main toxin ruining our politics and coarsening our society is the loss of trust. Not Trump, or evil liberals, or the dishonest media, or right-wing populism, or insufficient fervor for this or that candidate or cause—but rather the widespread and growing belief among Americans that many if not most of their fellow citizens lack basic honesty, integrity, and reliability. Our loss of trust in one another is arguably our biggest social problem, mainly because it helps to drive so many others, from family disintegration to political polarization to post-fact public debate. . . .

Evidence of our loss of trust in one another is clear and abundant. For example, a 2013 study reports: “Trust in others and confidence in institutions, two key indicators of social capital, reached historic lows among Americans in 2012 in two nationally representative surveys that have been administered since the 1970s.”1 In Bowling Alone, the great sociologist Robert D. Putnam similarly describes a decades-long U.S. trend of “declining generalized trust and reciprocity.”2

Today, three main types of mistrust course through our society. One is partisan mistrust: Americans increasingly believe that those with whom they disagree politically are not only misguided but are also bad people, members of an essentially alien out-group.

A second is class mistrust: The approximately 30 percent of Americans with four-year college degrees are mostly thriving; the other 70 percent are falling further and further behind on nearly every measure. Upscale Americans are increasingly isolated from and ignorant about the rest of the country, and large numbers of middle and working class Americans resent and mistrust the nation’s elite class.

And a third is governing mistrust: Huge numbers of Americans no longer believe that their elected leaders, including those from their own party, are honest or can be trusted even to try to do the right thing.

All of these feed on one another, but it’s the failure of those who run institutions to be trustworthy that is the worst. They clearly care more about their standing within their peer group than anything else, and that’s a recipe for institutional failure.