Chuck > Recent Status Updates

When you are trying to change a dynamic that feeds on itself, you have to find a point at which to intervene. For America…our most actionable opportunity is to start by intervening with a fairer tax code.
Americans will not suddenly begin to trust government if they don’t see better results; and government won’t suddenly deliver a dramatically higher standard of living if it remains starved of resources.

The slashing of taxes, and the opening of loopholes, have had a clear and direct cost: degraded services and yawning deficits that give the entire mission of government a bad name…And so, perversely, it becomes easier for politicians to argue against the levels of taxation we would need in order to fund a more effective government and reduce income inequality (or even to sustainability fund the safety net we have)

The levels of income inequality we now experience in America amount to a glaring policy failure. The explosion in inequality over the last half century has not been an inescapable consequence of capitalism but the result of a series of policy choices, many of them tax-related.

[if voluntary service] positions are decently paid so that service is not a luxury, and if we cultivate a societal expectation that young people in particular should seek an opportunity to serve, we could quickly see civilian service become a national norm… Whatever it takes to deliver this widespread opportunity to serve would amount to a generational investment in trust.

As the opportunities for full citizenship have expanded through time to include more and more people, the sense of belonging has also become less automatic…than it would be among a group that more or less looks and thinks the same…Addressing this question-of how to creat or enhance a sense of belonging within gas diverse a group…as the American people-is central to our chances of building greater trust.

A more trustworthy democracy will yield greater participation, a greater fidelity to the needs of Americans, and a positive cycle of political trust.

The Constitution’s most elegant quality-its capacity to be amended- made it possible for our republic to grow more democratic and inclusive… This feature of the Constitution was itself an expression of trust: trust in future generations. The founders were flawed men who were also cognizant of their limitations…[they trusted] their successors with the power to improve upon what they had created.

Fundamentally, ours is not an ethnic identity but a civic one. This means that for us, even more than for most other people around the world, a sense of trust is not just strategically important, but existentially meaningful…

The coronavirus pandemic quickly became a grim and tragic national exhibit in the legality of distrust and confusion.

…the two great global threats besides us: pandemic response and climate change. They require sacrifice and transformation, inconvenience and expense, imagination and cooperation-all things of which America has proven itself capable in the past. Such challenges can only be resolved if Americans can trust in their institutions and, just as important, if the world can trust in America.

Across fifty years, through a combination of failed policies, amoral technologies, and concerted, deliberate attacks, foreign and domestic, we have lost access to the basic levels of trust that democracy demands.

The appeal of paranoia, in this sense, is actually that it simulates the creation of a trusted community. When someone whispers, “trust no one,” they are inevitably also saying, “trust me,” suggesting that you can believe in them because they are so skeptical, and therefore credible:.. Bringing someone into your conspiracy theory, strangely, is a performance around the theme of trust.

The algorithms did not need help from anyone in an editorial role-speed and spread were the coin of the realm, so why slow them down with something as pedantic as a human being trying to make decisions about what readers needed to know or who was credible? And without a moderator or editor, these spaces called forth an echo chamber- of rumor, invention, and superstition.

By the logic of social media, to go viral is an achievement, a triumph, even; the term entered our vocabulary so swiftly and comfortably that we rarely pause to consider what the metaphor of a fast-spreading disease might be telling us.

The various patterns of democratization and division brought about through technology are still developing. But one pattern has proven to be dangerously consistent: companies create new technologies and new platforms, and then, in short order, someone figured out how to weapon one them.

To see middle-class sages stagnate and real minimum wages fall, through years of enormous economic growth, is to witness a policy failure. And in this sense, the Reagan-era belief that government could not be trusted to do a god job became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the end, these overwrought attempts at evenhandedness actually served to distort the truth- and Americans’ access to it. By lending equal credence to either side of a controversy, they signaled that the controversy was legitimate and created the perception for viewers that knowable and established facts are, themselves, open for debate.

The mission of the denier [global warming skeptic, climate change apologist, etc.] was accomplished even if he convinced no one; the point was not to prove anything with certainty but to elevate the general level of doubt.

Because it aired opposing views at the same time, this approach had a kind of integrity that Fox News and right wing radio lacked… but it implies that [both views] are equally valid, even when one side has been thoroughly discredited on the facts. The result is to institutionalize false equivalence- in ways that now permeate our media environment and political system.

Getting people to trust you through consistent, hard-won credibility is difficult and time-consuming. But a shortcut to gaining trust is simply to ask people to join you in distrusting someone else… the lucrative logic of opinion media [like Fox] is that whoever you do capture in this way will become less and less willing to hear outside voices, and more and more dependent on yours.

Denunciations, not of a particular administration but or the very possibility of government serving people well, increasingly went from being provocative to commonplace to eventually obligatory… [Bill Clinton declared,] “The era of big government is over,” at is 1996 State of the Union Address.

Reagan’s famous declaration that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” came not in some campaign appearance, but in his inaugural address- in other words, the ceremony in which he was taking charge of the very government he was denouncing.

When it comes to the collapse in trust, it may be tempting to imagine that this is just more hand-wringing, the kind of thing each generation says to the next about today being worse than yesterday, romanticizing the past as a kinder and gentler- and, of course, “more trusting”, time.
But the collapse is real, not some mirage from the imaginations of the nostalgic. It can be, and has been, measured.

Our ability to trust in institutions and in one another- the ability to trust that we are subject to the same facts, even living in the same reality- is now endangered.

For all white Americans there is an opportunity, and obligation, to examine and change how we have benefited from structures that we may not have created, but help to reproduce anytime we are not acting to tear them down.

Distinguishing between deliberately perpetuating rebirth and benefiting from racism requires a nuance we don’t often enjoy in public life.

More and more of the residents I spoke with explained that they were unbanked not because they hadn’t been exposed to the mainstream financial system, but because they had… [fees and minimum account balances] are the result of mathematical formulas that determine how much trust an institution places in a customer; and the formulas wind up systematically placing less trust in Americans of color.

To the extent that trust is about expectations, expectations are shaped by experience.

Trust, in this sense, is about predictability… the relationship between predictability and trust is captured in a nice English word that has no literal equivalent in many other languages: “trusty.”

I believe that America’s best chance rests with those who are prepared to hear a phrase like “a more trusting time” and view it, not as a wistful invocation of a bygone past, but instead as a description of the future we must now work to create.

We don’t have another fifty years to sort this out. If present trends continue, we will be swamped by the consequences of climate inaction, democratic backsliding, racial inequity, and economic inequality. This time really must be different.

Yet here we are, uncertain of the future of the American project, and with good reason. For all the progress our country has made across the last half century in things like technology, LGBTQ+ inclusion, gender equity, and life expectancy, we have remained stagnant or fallen back when it comes to economic equality, racial justice, rates of incarceration, health equity, and social cohesion.