Chuck’s Reviews > Trust: America's Best Chance > Status Update

Until we face the relationships between past and present wrongs, and how we are implicated in both, no one will be free. We will hesitate to travel at each other, and struggle to trust ourselves.

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.