The systematic destruction of American institutional trust, by the numbers

Americans are doing fine — just ask them. 

That’s essentially what decades of carefully collected survey data keep returning — a stubborn, almost defiant sense that life, personally speaking, is manageable. Family income feels roughly average. Health is okay. Happiness persists. The individual American, surveyed across generations, reports muddling through with reasonable success. 

The country, however, is on fire, metaphorically and sometimes literally. 

A recent PNAS Nexus analysis drawing on two of America’s longest-running surveys — the American National Election Studies (running since 1948) and the General Social Survey (launched in 1972) — captures this split personality with clinical precision. Personal welfare stays relatively stable across the decades. But national wellbeing is retreating like a glacier — slowly enough that you barely notice, dramatically enough that the scientists are worried.

The numbers are specific enough to sting. Satisfaction with democracy is falling. External political efficacy — the belief that government actually listens, that it cares, that your voice registers somewhere beyond the voting booth — is dropping. Institutional confidence is vanishing across the board. And affective polarization, that fashionable term for how much you despise the other side, is up roughly 30 points since 2000 — not drifting upward but surging.

The darkly elegant finding buried inside all of this is that Americans have somehow maintained their personal equanimity while watching the entire architecture of collective life crumble around them. People feel fine, and the system feels broken.........

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