Trust Issues
The future fault line separating the Democratic and Republican Parties is not ethnicity, wealth, or education - it is trust.
Something relatively unremarkable happened on the night of October 1, 2024. A Yale-educated lawyer won a debate against a small-town Social Studies teacher. Watching the vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Coach Tim Walz, I was reminded of a quote by another football coach. “They are who we thought they were,” Dennis Green shouted in a 2006 post-game meltdown after his Arizona Cardinals blew a 20-6 fourth-quarter lead, allowing the highly-favored Bears to win. On the debate stage, Vance and Walz were who we thought they were based on a glance at their respective resumes. They were not the idealized or demonized versions of themselves created by their fans and critics. Vance managed to dispel the couch-victimizing weirdo image but still came across as a slick social climber more likely to launch a preemptive strike against the reputation of his drug-addicted mother than provide a straight answer to a question about sanctioning an Israeli preemptive strike against Iran. Walz reassured swing voters that he was not some clever Cultural Marxist plotting to reassign the gender of America’s children but still revealed himself to be untested and unpolished enough to flub a question about the timing of his 1989 trip to China and utter a cringe-worthy misstatement like “I’ve become friends with school shooters.” During a debate lauded for its Midwestern politeness, both vice presidential candidates boosted their personal favorability ratings even if neither gained an edge in the likelihood of Americans voting for their running mates on November 5th.
In a debate remembered for how often the two candidates politely agreed with each other one disagreement foreshadowed a growing divide that may define the fundamental difference between Republican and Democratic voters for years to come. In a folksy critique of Donald Trump’s tendency to dismiss the advice of economists, scientists, and other experts, Tim Walz cracked, “My pro tip of the day is this, if you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump.” Rather than concede the importance of expert opinion, Vance sneered at Walz’s willingness to “trust the experts,” citing economists’ misjudgments on free trade and the offshoring of manufacturing to China. “This has to stop,” Vance declared. “And we're not going to stop it by listening to experts. We're going to stop it by listening to common sense wisdom, which is what Donald Trump governed on.”
What seemed like a relatively unmarkable exchange in a remarkably tame debate, actually revealed a defining attribute of the 21st-century Republican psyche: distrust of all elite institutional opinion in favor of a strong man leader like Trump guided by the amorphous dictates of “common sense.” The Low Trust Voter has become the foundation of a Republican Party rapidly mutating in the Age of Trump. Trump rose to power by tapping into the distrust already found within traditional Republican voting blocs: the tax protestor distrustful of the government’s ability to efficiently spend his hard-earned income, the evangelicals distrustful of the Department of Education’s ability to guide her child’s intellectual and moral development, the white retiree distrustful of black and brown immigrants filling his streets with the chatter of languages other than English. But this political realignment across the axis of trust also applies to the newcomers to the Trump alliance who do not fit the stereotypical profile of Republican voters: the all-natural homeopathic healer distrustful of the FDA-approved vaccines and food additives, the crypto bro distrustful of the ability of Federal Reserve and big banks to keep custody of his wealth, the black and Hispanic males distrustful of Democratic lip service to diversity and equity that rarely results in material progress for their communities, the celebrities distrustful of cancel culture, and public intellectuals distrustful of academia’s prioritization of psychological safety over free speech, etc.
Meanwhile, Democrats have increasingly become the party of trust and respect for institutional authority. After one final spasm of anti-authority rebellion in the summer of 2020 over the murder of George Floyd, liberals have trended toward a high-trust mentality and respect for institutional authority, an instinct further cemented by efforts to legitimize the Biden Presidency after the failed Trumpian insurrection of January 6th, 2021. They trust the CDC to tell them when to get a vaccine and when to wear a mask. They trust climate scientists who tell them a shift to driving an EV or a vegan diet might help avoid a catastrophic 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. They trust the psychologist who tells them their child has gender dysmorphia and will face a heightened risk of suicide without gender reassignment surgery. They trust the Pentagon and the CIA when the experts say tens of billions of dollars in aid must be sent to Ukraine to prevent Putin from invading all of Eastern Europe. They trust the DEI officer of their company to re-engineer their speech to avoid inflicting psychic harm to BIPOC colleagues. In 2024, the defining characteristic of the Democratic voter has become trust in the experts.
This is a dramatic political realignment. For most of the 20th century, distrust of elite institutional opinion was a tendency far more common on the political left than on the right. “Question authority” and “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” were the mantras of the liberal baby boomer activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Crackdowns by college deans, military top brass being outmaneuvered by the Vietcong, and the widespread corruption of the Nixon White House revealed during the Watergate hearings, confirmed in the minds of the left their doubts about elite institutional authorities they were told to trust. Ralph Nader’s consumer protection investigations into companies like General Motors, Pfizer, and Exxon confirmed the Left’s deep distrust in corporate America. All the while, conservative Republicans at the time implored Americans to trust traditional sources of authority. Trust that President Nixon’s expansion of executive power was in the best interests of America’s Silent Majority, protecting us all from enemies foreign and domestic. Trust that the top-secret decisions of the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon were necessary to make the world safe for Democracy. Trust that breakthroughs made by scientific experts in nuclear physics, chemical engineering, and immunology were crucial to winning the Cold War. Trust that “the chief business of the American people is business” and that a few exploding Ford Pintos and a few cancer clusters near toxic waste dumps were a minor price to pay for the bounties bestowed upon the nation by Corporate America.
What happened? What could cause an inversion transforming the Democrats into the new High Trust Party and Republicans into the Low Trust Party? For all the talk of trusting authority, the Republican Party of the mid-20th century was still infected by a strain of what Richard Hofstadter coined the “paranoid style” of American conservatism with roots extending back before even the founding of our country. From the Indians lurking in the deep forest of the frontier to the enslaved blacks on that plantation plotting revolt to the secret Communist spies lurking in the State Department, fear of hidden threats has been used to bond Americans to traditional institutions of authority. When defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal broke, the remaining hardcore of the Republican Party saw an opportunity rather than a threat in the eruption of distrust spreading throughout American society. As Democratic “Watergate Babies” swept into power in 1974, railing against the corruption of Washington, conservative zealots like Roger Stone and Newt Gingrich knew that this flood of institutional distrust could be channeled toward their ideological goal of shrinking the Federal Government, deregulating the economy and passing massive tax cuts. They would find their conservative avatar of destruction in Ronald Reagan who could put a sunny spin on the paranoid style and direct it at the Federal Government of the United States. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Reagan quipped at a 1986 press conference, inciting distrust of even the most benign actions of state institutions.
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the paranoid Reagan injected into the populace would result in the United States federal government becoming the new Evil Empire in the minds of conservatives. Subsequent developments would allow this infection of distrust to spread rapidly. Right-wing talk radio and politically-slanted cable news created echo chambers for anti-government paranoia. Converging expert consensus that fossil fuels were causing the Earth to warm inspired the fossil fuel industry to spread distrust of scientists into the minds of Americans. Outright lies by the George W. Bush Administration leading to the Iraq War shattered trust in military elites, some of the few remaining government officials that conservatives respected. New social media platforms powered by click-baiting algorithms force-fed users with “alternative facts” confirming their most deranged paranoid impulses. Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign would even erode confidence in the very bedrock of our democracy, the electoral system. The solvent of distrust that Reagan Republicans had strategically used to erode the taxing and regulatory powers of the state to further their financial interests had leaked into the very heart of a Republican Party mutating the GOP into a paranoid throng incapable of trusting hardly anything other than the words of one man, Donald Trump.
Today the Democrats find false comfort in believing Trump is the cause rather than a symptom of this disease of distrust wracking the Republican Party. They foolishly think they can trade trust for votes by courting into their tent the business leaders, military brass, scientific experts, and war-mongering former Vice Presidents who now find themselves on the wrong side of Trumpist distrust. Bringing these elites and experts into the Democratic fold might help Kamala Harris secure a victory on November 5th. But it will not help counteract the narrative that Republicans represent the interests of the distrustful masses while Democrats are the party of the elites who oversee a system in which more and more Americans are falling behind. Democrats are right that this distrust is inherently destabilizing. But as Vance’s strong performance on October 1st demonstrated, a Trump loss on November 5th will not cause this alliance of the distrustful to collapse into the dustbin of history. Increased economic inequality, the disorienting deceptions of AI-generated deep fakes, mass migrations triggered by Climate Change, and the potential for an even more lethal and divisive pandemic all point toward a more chaotic future favoring Vance and others whose power is grounded in institutional distrust.
Yet Vance should not overlook the personal risks lurking in his impressive debate performance and his coronation as heir apparent to the MAGA empire. It is not hard to see the dangerous contradictions that come with being the elite-trained enemy of the elite, the authority on why you shouldn’t trust the authorities, and the trusted expert on how to argue against trusting the experts. Vance would not be the first casualty of the Faustian Bargain made by those who conjure the dark forces of distrust to fuel their own rise to power. Taming the Republican Party’s Dragon of Distrust without it eventually devouring him may prove a much tougher task for a Yale Man like J.D Vance than defeating a rural Minnesota high school teacher in a debate.