MISTRUST
Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them
By Ethan Zuckerman
In his new book, “Mistrust,” Ethan Zuckerman takes us on a kaleidoscopic tour of everyone from Gandhi to Bitcoin enthusiasts, Brexit voters to Black Lives Matter activists — people and groups whom he calls “insurrectionists” because they are trying to overthrow or work around what has been a worldwide decline in social trust. Fighting this erosion from another direction are the “institutionalists,” those who seek to bolster trust and prevent any further crumbling.
Zuckerman, the former director of the M.I.T. Center for Civic Media, writes with the tone of a sobered-up insurrectionist who’s come to see in Donald Trump, QAnon and antimask activists the dark side of a society in which all trust is lost and anything goes. Rather than liberation, Zuckerman correctly explains, this systematic distrust has proved to be a blessing for authoritarians around the world who have only further undermined traditional arbiters of truth (say, journalists) in order to open the way to their own propaganda. He offers the particularly absurdist example that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, so all-encompassing is the leader’s control that many Russians see the mere fact that a dissident leader like Alexey Navalny hasn’t been murdered (yet) as evidence that he doesn’t represent a real opposition force.
It’s clear Zuckerman hasn’t abandoned his insurrectionist sympathies for those trying to work outside a system they see as irreparably broken. He writes sympathetically about plainly loopy ideas like seasteading (the libertarian fantasy of building floating communities outside the reach of established states) and using the same blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrency to establish new virtual nation-states.
But he seems to find most promising those activists with more conventionally progressive politics who embrace new tactics. He offers the fascinating story of the Association for the Empowerment of Workers and Peasants in India, along with the more familiar tales of Bryan Stevenson and the success of digital activists in reshaping coverage of law enforcement.
One of his big examples is the Black Lives Matter movement. Citing research from his former lab at M.I.T., he notes that after Michael Brown’s death and the protests in Ferguson, police killings of people of color “were 11 times more likely to receive media coverage than deaths that preceded Brown’s.” Media stories also became “far more likely to cover a story not as an isolated incident but as part of a pattern of police violence against people of color.”
Zuckerman’s heroes have what he calls strong “internal efficacy” (they believe they can do things) but low “external efficacy” (they think political leaders don’t care about them). So they operate outside the system, pressuring retailers to change their approach to selling firearms, decentralizing institutions or shifting media coverage.
“#MeToo is a different kind of movement,” he writes. “Sexual assault and harassment have been illegal for years, so its main demands are for changes not in law but in norms.”
This feels like an unsatisfactory effort to rebrand failure as success. The social media phenomenon revealed that conduct short of assault but still deeply troubling to its victims is fairly widespread in American life. And nothing fundamentally changed — no alteration to legal liability rules for employers, managers or bystanders, for example — to redress that situation. I hope that norms have changed, but there’s no clear evidence that they really have. Much-deserved Pulitzer Prizes were won, but crack investigative journalists exposing predators one by one is a not a viable fix.
This is where Zuckerman himself lands when considering the coronavirus pandemic and where he illustrates best the limits of the insurrectionists: Actual functioning institutions became indispensable, and couldn’t simply be worked around with internal efficacy and digital savvy.
Recounting a conversation with the activist Eli Pariser, Zuckerman proclaims himself a “resurrectionist” who believes that “we need institutions that deserve our passionate support and defense, and if the institutions we rely on now do not clear that bar, we need to demand new ones that take their place.” That seems correct and sensible, though it perhaps raises the question of what the point was in introducing the dichotomy in the first place.
Zuckerman concludes his book by saying that “we are likely to find that institutions fail when we no longer recognize ourselves as a single nation, when we no longer feel responsibility for or obligation to our fellow citizens.”
Out of context, one could imagine that flowing from the pen of Stephen Miller as part of a denunciation of globalist preoccupation with asylum seekers and the perfidious work of the 1619 Project in tearing down our common culture. In the course of a book that praises the protests that halted Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration initiative and casually tosses off an endorsement of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations, I’m quite sure that’s not what he means. But in many respects the divide between a call for unity that can be read as nationalistic and one that can be understood as cosmopolitan is the real split in the world today.
Another way of thinking about institutional trust is precisely in terms of that divide.
Major institutions have long been led primarily by the members of an educated elite. But it’s only over the past generation or so that college graduates with cosmopolitan attitudes have become a large enough share of the population that educated people’s sensibilities could be a force in mass politics. Consequently, today institutional leaders face meaningful pressure — often from some of the young, college-educated activists whom Zuckerman valorizes like David Hogg, fighting for gun control, and Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter — to use their power to reflect and act on those views. But when they yield, they face fierce backlash from a populist right rooted in the cultural sensibilities of older, whiter, generally less-educated people.
Meanwhile, there are those who feel caught between these worldviews: the working-class people of color who largely eschew left-wing radical chic and feel the pull of things like patriotism and traditional gender norms without wanting to hop on a right-wing bandwagon inflected with racism and indifference to the material needs of the lower class. These are precisely the people with the least direct access to media attention or the political process. They are the ones, more than the insurrectionists of left or right, that institutional leaders need to find a way to better serve if they want to preserve their power and restore their legitimacy.
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January 28, 2021 at 05:00PM
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How Do We Regain Trust in Institutions? - The New York Times
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