Bill Bishop is one of my favorite sociologists. (He’s not a real sociologist, mind you. He’s a journalist. But he co-wrote one of my favorite sociology books, The Big Sort. If you haven’t read it, run, don’t walk.)
Over the weekend, Bishop published a long essay on polarization in America and the decline of our institutions. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Bishop’s key argument is that when we try to explain declining trust in our institutions, we often do so in political terms, using Watergate, Vietnam, and the riots of the late 1960s as shorthand. But the collapse of trust was so widespread that this view seems incomplete, at best. Because over the same period, Americans stopped trusting banks and organized labor and churches and public schools. Something much bigger was going on.
And what’s more, this decline of institutional trust was not unique to America. Bishop cites political scientist Russell Dalton’s research showing that the decline in trust that began in the 1960s/1970s “spread across almost all advanced industrial democracies.”
Reading Bishop in light of what Charles Murray experienced at Middlebury suggests that what has been broken won’t be easy to fix. Or worse. Maybe it doesn’t go back together again.
