#1589 Loss of Respect for American Institutions
2024-03-04 01:03:17
Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.
Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast. introduction to this week's program with Dr. Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Brady is the Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Berkeley.
He has earned as Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy. He's the author of a number of books, including Letting the People Decide, Dynamics of a Canadian Election, Voice and Equality, Civic Volunteerism and American Politics, and so on, and a recent issue of Daedalus, you know Daedalus, as in Icarus and Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fall 2022, Institutions, Experts, and the Loss of Trust. This is one of the themes that I'm really passionately interested in. When I was growing up, there was high regard for the church, high regard for the police, high regard for the FBI, high regard for the Judicial Department, high regard for the presidency, high regard for newspapers, high regard for science, not much high regard for Congress. That's never been very high.
That's an American habit of skepticism, but high regard for almost everything else. And now there's very low respect and faith in those institutions. And how did that happen? Well, there's Watergate and there's Vietnam, and then there's the church senate hearings about America's attempts and sometimes successful to assassinate foreign leaders, colossal sexual predation scandal in the Catholic church, but not just in the Catholic church and there, and the paramilitarization of our police systems. We get it, right?
We all get it, that, that there is ample reason to be cynical, ample rational reason to be cynical about our basic institutions. But how does a country carry on when that happens? Can you function? And how do you claw your way back? Is it possible, once you have bottomed out, or nearly so in the way that we have?
Dr. Brady doesn't necessarily have answers to these questions, but it's fascinating to talk with him. He's a wonderful man. Well, maybe not even a month by the time you hear this, but on March 20th and 21st, we'll be in Vail, Colorado for the Vail Symposium. But this one is on loss of faith in American institutions.
And so I order a bunch of books from Amazon. I go through them, I read articles, and then we select somebody. So we selected Dr. Henry Brady. It turns out to be an excellent choice.
And so I wanted to share that with you, but invite you also to come to Vail. And if you can't come and most of you, I'm sure, can't, but you can stream it. So go to Vail Symposium and you'll find out all the details. There may be a slight fee, but it won't be much. And then you could listen to it.
live as we do it in March. But this is so important. You know, loss of national narrative. Who are we now? Loss of belief in ourselves.
Loss of confidence, I think. And widespread disillusionment and cynicism. This is not a good time in American life. And one question I asked Dr. Brady early on was, do we just know more today?
I mean, was it always been sort of like this? And we just know more because we have 24-7, 365 media.
and social media? Or have we actually become slovenly? Have standards slipped? Are we becoming a more morally problematic nation than we were? And he actually wants to resist the idea that things are worse.
It's more, that we just see more, perhaps. And he does have some suggestions towards the end of this conversation. But anyway, I'm having the time of my life. And this so fits into what I'm trying to do as we approach the 250th birthday of America. Who would have thought that when we were 200, our institutions, even in 1976, which is just after the debacle in Vietnam and just after the debacle of Watergate, that our institutions were riding pretty high comparatively, and that now they're in the tank.
Nobody would have predicted that in 1975, that this plummeting would occur. So what does it signify? The clock is ticking. I'm getting ready for my gargantuan tours of America, beginning 2024 in May, but extending into 2025, 2026, 2027, and perhaps beyond. My goal is to go out and see this country and to listen to people and to.
investigate these questions, I hope in an entertaining and playful way, but in a very serious one. And people like Dr. Brady are helping me to prepare for all of this. I'm teaching an online course here shortly on America at 250.. You're welcome to sign up for that.
There's still a few places on the summer Lewis and Clark trip. I hope you will consider coming on that. That's the trip of trips. Then, in January, at Locksaw Lodge, in January 2025, there will be two courses. One, well, they're really humanities retreats, and it's a book club you've always wanted to be a part of.
One of them will be on Henry David Thoreau's Walden, my favorite American book, and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, which is a sort of 20th century reply to Thoreau's Walden. And the second one will be on two Shakespeare plays, King Lear and the high comedy, As You Like It. And both of these plays, King Lear and As You Like It, touch on, you know, flashpoint issues of our own time. King Lear, about dementia, old age, family succession, and the other play, As You Like It, is about love, of course. All Shakespearean comedies are about love, but it also is about, in strange ways, about gender, about gender construction, about transgender.
That's not why I chose them, but they turn out to have immediate and really extraordinary application to the things that are going on in the country in our own time. And so, as usual, a genius speaks to us across time, and there is no greater literary genius than Shakespeare. So go to the website ltamerica.org, sign up for our newsletter, tell everyone you know, if you can contribute to our success, we'd be absolutely thrilled. So let's go to the show, Dr. Henry Brady, with Loss of Respect for American Institutions.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm joined from Berkeley, California, Dr. Henry E. Brady, the Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, the author of Letting the People Decide Dynamics of a Canadian Election, and the co-editor of the Fall 2022 issue of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Welcome, Dr.
Brady. Great, to be here. So the issue is the collapse of faith by Americans in their basic institutions. And if you look at the statistics, and they're all over this extraordinary issue of Daedalus, in 1960, people had respect for the church, people had respect for the media, people had respect for the presidency, people had respect for the courts, people had respect for medicine, people had respect for science, etc. And if you look at any one of those today, the amount of faith and respect that the American people have for those key American institutions has, I think the fair term is plummeted.
The question I really want to get to, and we don't have to start there, is, then what? You know, because here's my view, tell me if I'm wrong, that these institutions, like medicine and the media, and Congress and the presidency are the basic glue of a Republican system of society and government. And if the people lose their faith and respect for those institutions, that would seem to suggest a radical disintegration of American life. Is that too severe?
No, it's not. I mean, the way we get things done in modern society is we have institutions which are able to think about the future, plan for the future, and hopefully do better by us in the future. And if Americans think that their institutions are failing them, and the truth is, some of their institutions have definitely failed them at times, and that's part of the problem, why there's less faith in them. By the way, the one institution of the 16 that we dealt with, the 20 actually total, if you count the governmental institutions, as well as the 16, what we call non-political institutions, those are institutions for which there's not elected officials. The only one for which trust and confidence, which I use interchangeably, has increased, is the military.
But for every other one, it's plummeted. And that's really.
worrisome. So interesting that in, say, 1968, respect for the military would have been low in many quarters of this country. Today, it's the one of the 16 that you're talking about that continues to enjoy a very large degree of confidence by the American people. So there are these historical reversals. And you also make the point in this extraordinary issue of Daedalus, which people can consult, it was the fall 2022 issue, this comes out along partisan lines, too.
So amongst Republicans, or conservatives, the police still rides pretty high, but the FBI, not so much now. And amongst Democrats, some institutions are more highly regarded than others. And so that there's a strong partisan element that I would not have, I think we would not have recognized necessarily so much in 1980..
Yeah, no, and in fact, it's a shock to me. And actually, it was a shock to other political scientists, when my colleague and I, Thomas Kent, first wrote this article and pointed it out. For example, the Democratic electorate is very positive about what I would call the knowledge producing institutions. That's education, higher education, science, journalism, and so forth. But Republicans aren't so positive about those institutions, even though they used to be actually fairly positive about them, but no longer.
On the other hand, Republicans are very positive about what I would call the order producing and norm enforcing institutions, like religion, the police and military, but Democrats aren't so positive about them. So one of the worries that I have, it's not so much, actually, that we don't trust institutions. America was built on a distrust of institutions. That's why we had a revolution. It's not a surprise when we don't trust institutions.
That's our nature. What is worrisome is when we are polarized in our trust and confidence in institutions, because then it makes it hard to solve problems. If half the people are saying the police are doing a great job, and the other half of the people are saying, no, no, they're really doing a pretty bad job. How do you fix them if there's problems? Because one group doesn't think there's a problem, another group thinks there's a problem, but they can't agree that.
there's even a problem, much less how to fix it. I never thought in my lifetime that there would be any widespread belief that we should not trust the FBI, for example. Yes. And here we are. So you have conservatives and many Republicans saying it's been weaponized, it's been politicized, it needs to either be broken down entirely and rebuilt, or we need radical reforms in it.
But when that happens, Dr. Brady, an average American living in Omaha or living in Tampa, Florida, begins to wonder, well, what can I trust? If the party that I have basic allegiance to says that I can no longer trust the FBI, then doesn't that have kind of a cascading effect of distrust that seeps into all sorts of other areas? Well, and in fact, it really points out one of the problems.
is that there's a tendency of politicians these days to off-limit blame for problems that arguably they've created to institutions, even though those institutions are actually trying to behave in good faith. I thought recently, for example, the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, while at the same time, the same party that was impeaching him was refusing to agree to a bill to actually solve the problem at the border. Now, you could argue that the Republicans didn't really think it was a good enough bill and so forth. But still, the sort of absolute refusal to do that, but instead impeaching Mayorkas, is blaming the institution. And we can argue about whether Mayorkas has totally done what he should have done or not.
But basically, he's been trying to implement the laws that he has. And in doing that, he's made Republicans angry. But part of the problem is the laws aren't so good, and they need to be fixed. And even Republicans a year ago agreed about that. They don't seem to agree now, but at one point they did, and yet they don't want to change those laws.
So offloading blame for your mistakes as politicians onto institutions is maybe a convenient way to absolve yourself of any blame, but it's also a way to diminish the capacity of those institutions to solve problems and to, in the long run, build up a lot.
of problems. So there are 535 members of Congress. Do you think that the average, say Republican in this case, is aware that by jumping on a bandwagon of distrust for the process is actually a very dangerous thing to play with? It's playing with a kind of constitutional or normative fire?
Well, it depends on which part of the Republican Party you're talking about. The sort of freedom caucus in the far right of the party actually doesn't seem to care much about whether government works or doesn't work. And indeed, they mostly just want to blame it for being a nuisance. My wife always says that one of the problems with government is, if you're not careful, it'll pave a street right to your door. What's bizarre about all of this?
Yes, government can be a nuisance and a problem, but it also solves a lot of problems that we have. And I'd rather have a paved street to my door than not. And I'd rather have an FBI too. And by the way, historically, the FBI has been thought of by most people as a very conservative organization, not a liberal hotbed. And indeed, there's no evidence that it is, even today, a liberal hotbed.
So to blame the FBI for some of the problems in America, if you're a Republican, seems quite.
bizarre to me. Let's say that I'm a Freedom Caucus Republican and I'm attacking the FBI and I'm attacking the judiciary and so on. This allows me to raise a ton of money and it re-elects me because I have a gerrymandered district and I'm riding high because of the posturing I'm doing. But does that person also understand that if you do enough of this in enough areas, you could actually cause the country to move into something like, I'd say, disintegration, but I almost want.
to say collapse. Yeah, I suspect that a fraction of the Republicans and maybe a goodly fraction, perhaps as many as two thirds in the House, for example, and certainly many more in the Senate, understand the importance of government and that you can't really demean it endlessly without creating havoc for the future. But I think there is a group of Republicans, and these are the Republicans that ousted Speaker McCarthy, for example, who really don't see it, don't really.
care, and don't really understand it at all. But if you look at the impeachment that you speak of, you would have thought that in a country that's doing pretty well, that that impeachment vote in the House would get 30 votes and the rest would say, no, he may be imperfect and the policies are wrong, but that's not how the process works. And if we do this, then that invites the other side to do it in another way, that this is not the path of supervising the executive branch, that of all the tools we might use to fix the border or to get better attention by our cabinet secretaries per the border, this is actually a very, this is a dangerous tool to be using, right?
Right. Well, it's purely performative, because when it gets to the Senate, it's not going to go anywhere. But furthermore, even if it did end up getting rid of Mayorkas, the next cabinet secretary in that post would have exactly the same problems. It wouldn't change. And even some Republicans have said that.
I will note that three Republicans did vote against the impeachment of Mayorkas. The question is, why not more? And I think there you get to the fact that we have a system, unfortunately, and mechanisms we've created that actually are producers of, and they precipitate, and they lead to the kind of polarization we've seen in America. And the one I'd really point to is the primary system. It used to be that we chose candidates at the national level for president, but also at state and local level through conventions.
And that meant party professionals. And party professionals cared most of all about winning. And often that meant they went to the center of the electorate so that they wouldn't actually nominate the most extreme member of their party. And they certainly wouldn't nominate people who they felt were unreliable in the sense that they weren't maybe on top of exactly how to govern and how to think about governing. Party machines, for example, were responsible for the nomination of Harry S.
Truman. We haven't done badly with the party machines, but now we have primaries. And what happens is primaries have small numbers of people go out to vote. They tend to be the most intense people in their party. They tend to be the most extreme.
And so any person who's trying to get the nomination before they actually get to the general election has to pander to the most extreme elements of their party, whether it's on the left or the right, by the way. So it's not just the right for which this is true. It's also true on the left. And so what it does is it pushes the parties apart. And we see this in the data with using congressional voting data.
We find that in the 70s, we had a lot of overlap between Democrats and Republicans in terms of how they voted. We don't have that anymore. And in fact, the most extreme or the least extreme Republican is more extreme than the most centrist Democrat, and so on and so forth. There's nothing in the middle. Whereas we used to have liberal Republicans, Jacob Javits, Nelson Rockefeller, and we used to have conservative Southern Democrats.
We don't have that anymore. As a result, the parties are bifurcated. They're split apart. And they have these forces, through these primaries that constantly push them further and further and further towards the left or towards the right.
There used to be pro-chice Republicans and pro-life Democrats. Now these are litmus tests. And we've created, instead of having two parties for which there's a fair amount of overlap on policy, we've now really separated them into deeply polarized parties, which allows them to demonize the other and say that the others aren't real Americans and the others want to destroy the country and the others, if they got power, that would be the end of America as we know it. And we seem to be stuck there. We need to take a short break.
When we come back, I want to ask you about a couple of those institutions and get your analysis of where you think we are. today. You're listening to a special edition of Listening to America. We'll be back in just a moment.
So, welcome back to Listening to America. I'm talking with Dr. Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley. How long have you been at Berkeley?
Well, it's complicated, because I was started here in 1978.
. Then I had to go away because I wasn't going to get tenure. And then I went off and I did things that made the university think maybe I was deserving of tenure. And so they asked me back, which was very nice.
There's a fair amount of real candor. And I'm glad that Berkeley saw the light. Not easy to get tenure at any major institution.
I consider myself very lucky. And I wasn't doing what I should have been doing. And in fact, it was good for me to go away. I ended up going to Harvard and then the University of Chicago, which were tremendous experiences.
Indeed. Let me go to an institution that it's not surprising that they've lost support by the American people. Take the Supreme Court. And the question I want to ask you is about, I guess, transparency. When I was growing up in the 1970s, we regarded the Supreme Court as nine eminent jurists in robes.
And we knew a little bit about William Douglas's private life. And we knew a little bit here and a little bit there. And there was Abe Fortas. And it's not as if we didn't know anything. But for the most part, we saw them as nine deeply learned, just senior jurists in robes.
And now, thanks to our media, 24-7-365, we're flooded with data now and investigative reporting and rumor and innuendo. And now we know a lot about those nine members of the Supreme Court, or at least some of them. And we don't very much like what we see. And now we're aware of the deep politicization of all of their decisions. I think that a couple of inflection points.
One was Bush v. Gore in the year 2000,, which turned out on a five-to-four basis along partisan lines. And now we come to, say, the Dobbs decision of a couple of years ago now, which was six-to-three along partisan lines, and so on. And I think that what has happened is the American people, in a sense, Dr. Brady, know too much now to maintain what might have been a naive respect for that institution.
Dr. Brady. Yeah, I think that's one reason that there's been a decline in trust is because, in fact, many more college-educated people. And, for better or worse, one of the things we teach students at any university is to be skeptical. And maybe sometimes we've gone too far.
I don't actually think that, because I think it's good to be skeptical. But it would be nice if we had ways to also give people knowledge and understanding of how hard it is to build an institution, how important it is these institutions be respected, and how much we should all try to make sure that, as much as possible, we keep them intact and strong and powerful. I don't think that message is abroad in the land right now. And I think many people don't understand that if you destroy these institutions, it's going to be very hard to build them back. In terms of the Supreme Court, part of the problem probably is that we haven't had many members of the Supreme Court recently who were formerly elected officials.
They tend all to be lawyers. Lawyers are fine, but many of them have never really had any experience out in the hustings, talking to real people, understanding the real problems that folks have. Sandra Day O'Connor is a good example of the opposite. She was an elected representative. She is a person that had been out and about and seen the world.
And then, when she became Justice of the Supreme Court, she always acted in moderation. She understood that there were different perspectives and different ways to think about problems. We just don't have those types of folks on the Supreme Court right now. And this court seems willing to break with traditions in ways that I think anybody who had been out in the world would know is going to be really problematic. But they think it's so important to be, I guess, ideologically pure or whatever they presume, rather than to be more conciliatory and maybe compromise.
I see three things here, really. One is that we know a lot more about them than we used to. That has a disillusioning effect in some cases. The Senate confirmation system, I think, degrades our trust in these institutions, because it's set up so that the nominee almost inevitably either evades candor or lies openly to the American people in the Senate in order to get confirmed. The third thing is, of course, the ideological way in which the cases seem to fall out, on strict partisan lines.
I remember when Gore v. Bush was decided. It was the first time in my life, and I've lived through the Warren Court and the Rehnquist Court, it was the first time in my life that I thought, oh, it's a sort of another political branch of government, isn't it? And that's not good. We don't want that feeling, do we?
Yeah. No, I was very involved with some of those things because I testified on the butterfly ballot case, which is not the one that went to the Supreme Court of the United States. It did go to the Supreme Court of the state of Florida. And, by the way, the Supreme Court of the state of Florida said that the butterfly ballot was not in substantial noncompliance with the law. A wonderful phrase, if you can parse that.
What they were saying is, wow, this is a terrible ballot. It's probably not really legal, but we don't want to say that. So we're going to say it's not in substantial noncompliance. And it's that kind of decision, which I think sometimes makes people a little cynical. I do believe you're right that the Bush v.
Gore was the starting point of a feeling of, geez, are these folks a little too partisan? There was a way to solve that problem without the Supreme Court stepping in, and certainly actually without it stepping in quite as quickly as it did. So there were other ways to go forward with that. You're exactly right that these issues of we know too much about them.
The Senate confirmation process is really flawed. And then, ultimately, as I say, I think that there's not enough people who have been legislators.
Yeah. So even Earl Warren, who was a seriously ideologically engaged chief justice, had come from the elected branch of government in California before he came to the Supreme Court. And in the key cases, he worked very, very hard behind the scenes to get unanimous decisions, or very close to unanimous decisions. So you can imagine how much horse trading and compromise occurred to make those decisions possible. So one more thing about the court.
Jefferson said, I think rightly, we need guardians, but who will guard us against our guardians? So if you have someone like Clarence Thomas, forget his ideology. But it's clear to me that the kinds of emoluments that he has received from his rich cronies are entirely violative of any respect we should have for a Supreme Court justice, that that simply shouldn't happen. Ideally, you want a republic where he wouldn't behave that way. But if he does behave that way, you want the court itself to have a set of conflict of interest codes that it enforces.
And if that doesn't work, you want the other branches to step in and say, we're going to demand a higher quality of ethics from such people. But when this happens and he's going to get away with it, then the country says, well, I guess they're all corrupt. I guess everyone's in it for himself. I guess everyone's taking bribes and is taking special favors from their cronies and so on. And so the erosion of trust is because there doesn't seem to be any accountability.
in these institutions. Yeah. And I mean, Justice Alito, also another one, who famously said that he took a seat on an airplane that was open and free, and he took it for free because otherwise nobody would have been in it. Right. That caused me to immediately call up my airline company and ask them if every free seat would be available to me.
You know, that's just not something that ordinary human beings have an opportunity to do. So it's sort of really indicative of the problem.
And senators from the state of Georgia, U.
S. senators doing insider trading tips when they knew that Congress was about to pass legislation that would shut down the economy, not only not going to prison for it, but not even really getting their hands slapped by the internal ethics bodies within the Congress itself. When you think, why have people lost trust? Mostly because we need to lose trust, because the institutions are letting us down. To be trusted,
institutions have to be trustworthy. And the way you become trustworthy is you sort of do things according to established cultural norms. And policing right now suffers from the fact that many people think that they don't do it according to proper cultural norms. You have to be ethical and moral. And there's a lot of concern about that.
I mean, think of the Catholic Church and their pedophile priest scandals. There's just been too many institutions. I was just reading the other day about a scientist who was doing research and had numerous false articles. These are really disturbing kinds of things. And the final thing you've got to do is you've got to perform well.
And that gets us back to Congress, which doesn't seem to be solving problems in the way that it.
should be. Are we looking at this in the way that, let me say that differently, is our disillusionment, because we see what people in 1950 probably would not have seen, but this sort of self-dealing and corruption probably existed then? Or do you think there's been actual slippage of character and integrity in our public life and in our private institutions over the past 40 or 50 years?
I actually don't think there's probably been slippage. I think post-Watergate, the media became much more critical of all institutions. I think post-Watergate, there have been a lot more college-educated people, and we're not really thrilled with some of the things we see. And as a result, I think it looks worse. I'm not sure that it is worse.
I do think that this spiral of polarization has helped to exacerbate things and make things worse. Before we go too far down this road, though, let me do say the following. It turns out that, if you look at the American public, we agree on a lot of things. There's a lot of areas. For example, more than 80% of the American public thinks that there should be an increase in the minimum wage.
And there's lots of other issues, ways to reform Social Security, for example, health care, and so forth, where the American public actually agrees. You just don't hear much about those things. Instead, we're constantly focused on those things on which we disagree. And, by the way, one of the things we really agree on is that it's good to be an American, and it's good to be in America. And one of the problems we find in polling is when we ask people, well, what do you think the other side thinks of being an American, for example?
Typically, they think that the other side is not as concerned about, or focused on, or happy to be an American as they are. Now, that's disconcerting. So we have images, polarized, partisan images that are just wrong. Turns out, there's much we agree upon. There's a great deal we can do together.
And it'd be nice if we focused on that. Unfortunately,
the media don't allow us to do that. And how much do you blame the media for the multiplier effect it has on this distrust?
I think the media are, certainly, whether blame is the right word, they're doing their job in some cases. In other cases, not. I worry about social media, which focuses on clicks. And to get a click, it's good to get people angry, to get them emotional, fearful. 24-hour news cycle, social media with its emphasis on clicks, maybe journalists who all too often focus on the bad and not the good.
I think that's part of the problem, without a doubt.
What do you think the trajectory is? Because if things are plummeting, at some point, they either zero out or they stay at a residual, low-level, basic willingness to live in a society that's highly imperfect. Or there's the possibility that there will be slow rebuilding of trust. Where do you see the trajectory?
It's interesting to compare us with the time of the French Revolution or the time of the 1870s and 80s. In the French Revolution, all the norms in France were destroyed. And suddenly, pamphlets started to be put out which said the most hideous and horrific things about the other side. And as we know, the French Revolution is a terrible story of one side getting in power, killing a lot of the other side, and then the sides kept changing. It's quite a messy story.
And then, with yellow journalism in the 19th century, we have lots of circumstances where newspapers riled up the public in ways that caused troubles. I think we're in one of those periods right now. Certainly, the internet is part of the problem. It's ruined the model for newspapers. It's one of those periods in time when we don't have trustworthy, trusted sources, partly because we've destroyed the ones that used to be trusted, and we have to create new ones.
I think lots of people are working on that problem, but it's going to take a decade or two before we actually rebuild that capability. I would hope we could do things like the following. Why don't we tax the folks who produce social media, who take content for free, by the way, that they haven't developed, take that money and put it into local journalism and local journalism with high standards, so that we have reliable, trustworthy local news, and local news tends to be trusted more than national news. That might be one way to help rebuild the journalistic institution.
How do we break the cycle? Because you want those institutions to rebuild themselves and reform themselves in order to regain, to earn our respect.
Right. This is one that hits close to home for me. I spent a year at a theological seminary after undergraduate school, and I really wanted to go into the ministry as a way to minister to the world. In the end, it turns out, higher education was a better way to do that, because I found that it didn't look like the ministry had any power left, any capability of moving people. And it's gotten worse.
Tim Alberta's new book about Christian evangelicals, which shows how much many of those different churches have decided to go into politics, basically. And he, at least, he's the son of a minister, is very distressed by this. I'm distressed by it because it seems to me what religion has is the power to talk about godliness, Jesus, and what Jesus did, and how Jesus preached, that it was important to be humble, and it was important to help others. That's what religion has. Instead, now some of these churches are preaching really some hideous things about preaching for one partisan side versus another.
It's not what, in my mind, religion should be about. Same thing with universities, by the way. I think the thing that universities have is to focus on the truth. That's what our special power is. And, to the degree that we sometimes don't do that, we know some of the concerns people have about free speech on campus and so on and so forth.
When you wander away from what your fundamental power is, your secret power, then you get in trouble. And that's certainly happened with religion, I think. And I think it's happening maybe a little bit with higher education, maybe even more than that. And I think it's a worry. We've got to find our paths again and.
stick to what we really do. well. Yeah, so we're being very diagnostic here about all of this. I want to come back after a break. We'll take in a couple of minutes to what's going on at our universities.
And of course, no university has a longer history of the free speech movement than UCAL Berkeley. Do you have information about other countries that have gone through kind of a radical plummeting of basic faith in institutions and what happens to them when they get to this point, where there's almost nothing except the military now, for which there's widespread agreed upon respect in American life? So what happens to other countries that have?
been there? Well, I mean, Argentina might be an example. In 1930, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, probably in the top five. It's now 65th in the world in per capita income, and it's got tremendous inequality. It's got lots of problems.
What happened? Well, there was a long period of democracy until 1930.. Then there was a dictator who came in. Then there was Peronism, which really undermined a lot of the institutions because of the various things that happened. And here you are.
And Argentina may be on its way back. I don't know. I'm not an expert on Latin America. But that's an example of how things can go wrong, and that's what we've got to worry about. How to find our way back?
Ultimately, I actually think America will find its way back. I really do, because we have so much in common, and we really all do believe that America is a great country. But we've got to find probably a common theme that allows us all to get together. And unfortunately, neither of the current presidential candidates, I think, are doing a particularly good job of that. Joe Biden talks about a lot about democracy and its importance, but he doesn't have the rhetorical skill of a Barack Obama or a John F.
Kennedy or a Ronald Reagan. And, as a result, I'm not sure that he's going to be able to do it. Nor does he have the vigor, you know,
irrespective of how we feel about his cognitive difficulties or anything else. He's not a young man. You know, JFK was 43 years old when he became president. Theodore Roosevelt was 42 and a half years old when he became president. We're now dealing with essentially octogenarians.
And although Trump seems to have a lot of vigor, we don't know whether he'll survive a second term if he gets there. But, you know, it's hard to believe that a person like Joe Biden, even if he were the best person in the world, with his lack of vigor and oratorical skills, could really.
lift the country. Yep. I think that's a worry. And I think that's why many people are wondering, where do we go right now? And, of course, Donald Trump has all these legal problems that are very worrying.
And, in fact, for any other candidate would have disqualified him a.
long time ago. When we come back, I want to ask you first about the health of our universities, which have also lost a great deal of respect in some quarters of America. And then I want to talk to you about your own anxieties or concerns about this country. This is a special edition of Listening to America.
Welcome back to the final segment of today's special edition of Listening to America. Dr. Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley. I urge all of you to consider getting a copy of the fall 2002 issue of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. How did that project come about?
A whole issue.
dedicated to this very crisis. Well, actually, you said you were interested in what's going on in universities. About five years ago, I got concerned about a diminishing trust and confidence in higher education. So I started working with a research assistant, my co-author in one of the papers in that volume, Thomas Kent. And we put together a big data set of all the survey data since the 1970s on confidence and trust in higher education.
But as we went along, we added other institutions as well. And the more we look at them, the more we realized that there was really a bigger project here. And we had to understand why there was this decline in trust in every institution except the military, why there was this polarization and trust in every institution, including the military. And as a result, I then enlisted my longtime co-author, Kay Schlossman, and Kay and I put together that volume where we got really an extraordinary collection of people to write essays. They're really truly excellent.
I'm very proud of what we did there. And then there's a paper by me and my research assistant, now PhDs, who we look over the last 50 years and we show all of the problems that we've been discussing with respect to decline and so forth. So I do worry about higher education and the lack of trust and confidence. Let me start by saying, however, it is still the case that the best higher education system in the world, by far, is the one in America. And one of the extraordinary features is the amazing public universities, the Michigans, the Indianas, the Illinois.
These are amazing institutions. And everybody around the world wants to come to these institutions to get their education. So we've done an amazing job. And I would also, just to make a pitch for public universities, we do it much more cheaply than the private universities. And in fact, one of the amazing things is, in most areas, it turns out, the private sector is better than the public sector.
when they compete head to head. In higher education, it's just hands down. It's public higher education, which does it more cost, effectively and also is cheaper. You can come to Berkeley much cheaper than Stanford, at about a quarter of the cost. And you get an education that's just as good.
I've often said we produce a Cadillac product at a Chevy cost.
That's good. Try to unpack this a little bit. One of the things that you point out in this issue of Daedalus is that Democrats on the whole are more likely to have respect for our universities than Republicans, that in the conservative and Republican circles, universities have lost some ground, particularly recently with the perception that they're all leftists, that they're indoctrinating our children, that everybody's woke, that it's canceled culture, that there's no free speech any longer on campus, that there are crypto Marxists and even Maoists who are indoctrinating our children and teaching them to hate America. We've all heard that litany again and again and again. And some of it, I think, has some basis, in fact, that there is a sort of a leftist crisis going on, I think, in some of our elite institutions and the idea of the enlightenment of the free marketplace of ideas, where all ideas are welcome, even if they're abhorrent to our own opinions and tastes.
There's a sense in which there's a kind of a neo-leftist orthodoxy at our elite institutions, which is driving out lots of people and including sometimes professors. So you agree that that is.
an issue, right? Oh, I think that's an issue without a doubt. I will say that we still, certainly at Berkeley, we spent millions of dollars to allow Milo Yiannopoulos, who is a provocateur, there's really no other way to describe him, to have him come and speak. And when he came and speak, there was basically nobody who wanted to talk with him. But we had spent enormous amounts of money to protect him and to make it possible for him to do it.
But still, the truth is, it is difficult sometimes for people of sensible, and I wouldn't call Milo Yiannopoulos sensible, but of sensible right-wing viewpoints to come and talk. And that's a problem. As dean, I was a proponent of trying to have all sorts of diversity, including political diversity. I thought it was really important, especially in the public policy school that I ran, that my public policy students heard what a large fraction of the American public thought, and that they would be able, therefore, to deal with it and to maybe compromise with those folks and get things done. I worry that it's sometimes hard.
Yes. And I think sometimes our students are engaged in too much cancel culture. If you don't agree with them, they find ways on the internet and otherwise, to be highly critical. And I think we constantly try to say, no, no, listen to everybody. Turns out, even people you don't think you agree with might have some very.
good ideas sometimes. How is this playing out at the University of California at Berkeley? How difficult is it to maintain those enlightenment values in the face of the pressure cooker that?
this thing has become? Well, it's difficult, but we certainly have been trying to have seminars which try to explain different perspectives. One of the problems that I think sometimes young people face is they actually don't have as much historical knowledge as they think they do. And they sometimes have simplistic formulas for understanding the past. And so I think it's really important that we have those seminars where we explain the nuances and complexities of history.
And also one of the things I think it's important to maybe teach people is it's possible to have two thoughts in your head at the same time. One thought could be that Hamas is a terrible organization, monstrous in what it did on October 7th, to be absolutely condemned, but that at the same time the death toll in Gaza is too high and that there are all sorts of humanitarian problems there that need to be dealt with. And both things can be true. And if you said
that in public at Berkeley today, what kind of blowback would you get? I'm afraid you'd get it.
from both ends. Yeah, no, I'm sure that I would. I am sure that I would. It would be a difficult thing to say. And, you know, I'm not an expert in the field, so that probably not best for me to get up on a stage and try to make that case.
But I and I really was just trying to say there even that, you know, you can have more than one perspective and that they can coexist, and you can be distressed by several things at once, and you don't have to be all on one side or the other.
side. Of course, you know, and just across the bay, of course, there was a scandal with the president of Stanford about research, which led to a resignation at Harvard, a complicated situation. But Claudine Gay was forced out in some part because of a plagiarism scandal. A.I. is going to create enormous difficulties along these lines.
If the university systems in America, and I agree with you that they're still spectacularly good, if they're going to rebuild public trust, they're going to have to really get on top of this set of issues, too. It's really.
distressing to see these incidents occurring. I remember once I was doing research on welfare recipients and as I put together my final paper, I said to myself, you know what, this paper has a point of view and it says certain things should be done. What if I'm wrong? And then I redoubled my looking through the paper to make sure that everything I had said I could really verify was based on the data we had, and that, as far as I knew, it was right, because otherwise I might actually be hurting people. So the notion that people would publish articles, especially in the medical field, but probably in any field, that are wrong and it might mislead researchers and take them down a wrong path, is so disturbing.
I mean, it's really, really, really disturbing. I guess we need to vet.
our leaders more assiduously than we have, right? Because it's not, I mean, it's one thing to have committed these academic sins, but it's another thing for the vetting process to let people slip through and then it becomes a crisis eight months or eight years later. No, I think we have to, and.
make sure that we don't get folks who could have problems along those lines, because it just really is a black mark for academia. Because, again, what is our superpower? Our superpower is the truth. We've got to make sure that in every way we can claim that as much as possible and in every way we are seeking the truth and that the truth is our lodestone. And in all of these instances,
we're sort of coming to the place where we have to try to bring some of this together. So if the church is going to restore its credibility, it has to self-police, self-correct, insist on greater integrity, be less tolerant of failures and slippages. The same would be true of media. The same would be true of institutions of higher education, policing, and so on. It just feels like there has been slippage.
It's not that we're more corrupt necessarily than we were in 1950 or 1970, but there has been a kind of a sloppiness that has set in and slippage in these institutions. And a lot of things have been allowed to sort of percolate out there without being identified quickly enough and addressed in a public and candid way, and then overcome with real reforms. In academia, at least one of the reasons we get.
some of these perverse kinds of behaviors, I think, is because there's such tremendous competition to publish or perish. And I think it's really important to have enough integrity not to decide to publish something until you're absolutely sure that you think it's right. And I'd like to think I've run my career that way. And we in academia recognize the people who do that. And we try to root out the people who don't.
One issue that comes up in several of the papers.
is that economic inequality turns out to be a multiplier effect for all of these issues.
Explain that. Yeah, I think there's two changes in America over the last 50 years, which may be creating some of the distrust and polarization and trust. One is inequality, and there's no question that there's been an increase in inequality. And I think that makes people who are working hard every day, going to the office or going to the assembly line and doing their job, feel cheated. And I think it's a reasonable thought.
You know, why is it that the top 1% are getting so much of the wealth? And the other thing is that the increasing diversity in America, partly the result of immigration, partly the result of lower birth rates amongst the white population than among other populations, has created a situation in which many people feel tribal, that they feel that it's not clear to them, that their tribe is getting enough attention and that somehow it's been relegated to a secondary position. That's a problem. Sometimes it's not justified, but it's nevertheless felt. And if it's felt, something has to be done about it.
And I think the chaos we have on the border right now and our inability to find a way to, in an orderly fashion, deal with that is only making things worse.
So I want to turn to science. I think one of the arguments that you all make in this issue and in other books and articles about this is that science is doing a little better than most of the other 16 institutions. It's not as high as the military, but it's not as low, say, as the police or Congress.
You know, that's true. At the same time, scientists have to get beyond, as we had during the COVID epidemic, the mantra of trust, the science. I think they have to recognize that when science becomes part of a public decision, like whether or not to close schools, that the science per se doesn't really necessarily give you the answer. It can tell you something about how communicable diseases were. And what's interesting there is.
it turns out that the science was pretty clear, that for older people, COVID was really dangerous and deadly. For younger people, it wasn't so dangerous and deadly. And so it wasn't clear that closing the schools was necessarily the right answer. Yet people kept saying, well, the science says that if you get together, people will communicate the disease, and this will be a bad thing. Yes, but there's all sorts of diseases we've lived with for millennia.
And if in fact, and again, I'm not a medical person here, I can't say for sure, but if in fact the problem wasn't so great for young people, maybe more thought should have been given to keeping the schools open, especially given the costs of having those schools closed and children not having a chance to get educated. My daughter's a high school teacher. She saw firsthand the chaos that created and the difficulties it created for her students, who she couldn't even contact at times during the COVID epidemic and who essentially lost a year of schooling. So I want to turn to demagoguery.
and you tell me if I'm wrong. I don't think that 40 or 50 years ago, our major political figures were denigrating our basic institutions. You heard it here and you heard it there, but it wasn't a systematic thing more recently. And I don't mean just to point to Donald Trump, but major political figures are saying, don't trust the judiciary, don't trust the FBI, don't trust this institution or that institution. And when major figures like Donald Trump, who is the hero of 40 or 50 million people, say things that degrade our basic institutions and encourage people to be cynical or to distrust, that surely is an important factor.
Is this a?
new phenomenon, or has it always been the case? Well, our memories are short. And I think in the 19th century, there was probably more demagoguery than we know about, because we don't remember it. We can read about it in the history books. And I certainly think some of it was there then.
But how bad it was compared to today, I really can't say. I will say that it's clearly true that in the last 50 years, I think we have more of it. It's very worrisome to see this kind of thing going on. It is a problem for America. One of the things I worry about is that what's become important is to get on the news media and perform, and not necessarily to actually get something done, say, in Congress or even as president.
You may remember, for example, that Donald Trump every week was telling us it was infrastructure week and we were getting an infrastructure bill passed. He never passed an infrastructure bill. He also was going to repeal and revise, in a better way, Obamacare. Never did that either. But we certainly heard a lot about it.
We keep hearing a lot about it. Joe Biden, by the way, did actually modify Obamacare and make it arguably better. He also got an infrastructure bill passed, which every locality, whether Republican or Democrat, is enjoying the fruits of. right now. The problem seems to be that this performativity, this just impeaching Mayorkas, but not solving the problem at the border, gets you as much credit with voters as if you actually solve the problem.
To some extent, voters are to blame. They really need to demand solutions, even if they involve compromise, rather than this performative, I'm going to stick to my guns and take the hard road of just not allowing anything to happen. Well, that's not a good position.
All right, so it's 2024.
. How worried are you about the future of this country as we approach the 250th birthday of the United States? Well, on the one hand, I'm very worried,
because I'm really unhappy to see how much polarization there is in trust in institutions, because I don't see how we reform those institutions and make them better when there's such disagreement about whether there's a problem or how to solve the problem. On the other hand, Americans really do have some very powerful things. They have a constitution they agree upon. They have a Declaration of Independence, perhaps the most powerful of all the documents, because it talks, unlike the Constitution, which has the terrible three-fifths clause, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person, the original sin of American politics, without a doubt. The Declaration of Independence talks about freedom, independence, equality.
That's a powerful, powerful document. And so it seems to me if we could just find a way to get back to understanding that that's what we're about, and that might help us get back together. But we need to find the leaders who will do that. We need to create institutions that don't push people apart. We need to have a media that does a better job of trying to actually help people understand issues and the importance of solving problems, instead of just making problems worse by constant, incessant fear-mongering.
Do you think things are going to get worse before they get better? I think it may depend on the 2024 election. I think it's my opinion that Donald Trump could be a great danger for the republic. I mean, partly, I just don't think he's competent. And you get people like John Bolton, a very conservative person who served as his national security advisor, who says he's absolutely unfit to be president.
That worries me. Joe Biden forgets things, and I worry about that. But that's nowhere near the danger of somebody who really basically doesn't understand basic things, who goes around saying that he would encourage Putin to invade NATO countries that he thinks are not doing their share. That's just awful talk. It's just unacceptable, and it's not the way we're going to put things back together.
So that also raises the question of loss of faith and expertise. So think of the number of major conservative thinkers who have broken with the Republican Party and with Trumpism, and have written extraordinarily intelligent books about this. Think of people like George Will, for example, or David Brooks, and the list goes on. No matter how many of these people say, we're on the wrong path, the party has lost its way. If you re-elect this person, you are flirting with autocracy.
You would think that the lifetime of work of someone like George Will would earn him a measure of respect and deference when he makes a pronouncement of that potency. And yet, a hundred of these people have spoken out in the last eight or nine years, and they've all simply been dismissed, and often degraded, and sometimes have their lives.
threatened. It's astonishing to see how many members of Trump's cabinet have come out and said he really shouldn't be president. It's always true that after a presidency, there's maybe one or two discontents, but to have essentially double figures of discontents, I think there's about 20.. That's a lot, and that's very revealing. And yet, again, as you say, it doesn't seem to move the needle.
It's really hard to know what's going on with the American electorate right now. I think they're fearful, and I think there are media outlets which actually fan that fear and create even greater fear on their part. And they somehow think, according to Tim Alberta's book on the evangelical Christian right, those folks think that he's a terrible person, but they also believe that they need a terrible person somehow to save them at this point. And they even make biblical references to people in the Old Testament. There's no such person that I know of in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament, there are some terrible people who help the Jews.
I mean, Jesus wasn't that way. That wasn't Jesus at all. But that's what they think, that somehow he's a terrible person, but he's our terrible person, and he's going to save us. And how do you break through that?
Unclear how we break through that. I have just a couple more questions in the short time we have left. First of all, Tim Alberta is one of the people I really respect. I loved his American Carnage, which I thought was the best single book explaining what happened to the Republican Party and the rise of Donald Trump, and now the Kingdom and the Power, this more recent book. He is himself an evangelical Christian, the son of a pastor, as you said, deeply worried about what's happening to the Church, how the Church is inevitably going to lose ground for having attached itself to a movement that is anti-Christian, I think, in its foundation.
Yep. I mean, New Testament's clear on this. Give unto Caesars what is Caesars, but give unto the Lord what is the Lord's. And these churches have broken down those boundaries, and they're giving unto Caesar things that, frankly, should be given to the Lord. And I say that as an ex-divinity student.
And so it's very worrisome when you read his book. It's really frightening to see that there's these congregations which sit around and pray for awful things to happen to people just because of their partisan identity. That's just not the way religion should be, in my mind, at least. And furthermore, it's just not the case that American religion is in dire straits in terms of being persecuted in the way that these folks have come to believe. I mean, if you look at most of the recent court cases, religion's done very well.
Freedom of religion is alive and well in America and extremely strong. So it's not the case that there's persecution going on. So somehow, somebody has to break through and start saying, no, no, it's not what you think it is, and this is still a great nation for us as well as everybody else. Let's turn to Archimedes as we close. Tell.
me where to put the lever, and I will move the world. If God called you and said, Dr. Brady, where should we start? Where should we start to rebuild America? What are the things we need to do?
that will begin the long and agonizing process of rebuilding trust in our basic institutions?
Well, it's a lot of small and little things. First of all, I'd say to the institutions, get your house in order. You just have to. Stop having ethical scandals. So that would be one thing.
The second thing I'd say is let's try to find ways to communicate with people that there's not as much difference among us as they think there is, and that there are things in which we agree. And furthermore, I would want to get better civics courses. One of the sad stories in America has been the decline of civics education in the last 30 or 40 years. We need better civics education, and it's got to be civics education that emphasizes. compromise is not a dirty word.
It's the way a society moves forward. And it's okay to compromise. It doesn't mean that somehow you're giving up on your principles. And so those are at least some things I do. Oh, and another thing I do is, I'd say, let's reform some of our institutions and maybe have more conventions, choosing candidates, or at least top two primaries, which is the device used in California, which tries to push people towards the center instead of apart, as the current partisan primaries.
do. It's sometimes said that national service, broadly defined, could save America. What do?
you think? Oh, I'm a big believer in national service. My twin brother went into the Peace Corps and it changed him forever in a very, very good fashion. And I think he would be the first to say it was the defining moment of his life that made him into a person who then went on to become a school teacher, a high school teacher, a high school basketball coach, and an incredible contributor to American society. I think national service would bring people together of different beliefs, different perspectives.
They would learn that there may be more alike than different. That's the most important thing I always said to my students. We're more alike than different. Let's focus on how we are alike rather than how we're different. By the way, that comes from the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, who was a very prominent psychiatrist in the 30s and 40s.
We're more alike than different. Last question for now. Are we going to collapse? No,
I don't think so. Although, footnote, I worry about 2024.. I worry about Donald Trump, not just because of things he'll do that I think will be against my partisan predispositions, but I just think he's incompetent. And I think an incompetent president can get us into all sorts of trouble. He was lucky in his first term.
And even so, he didn't handle all pieces of COVID particularly well. If you remember some of the briefings where we all got tired of hearing him come up with half-baked ideas of how to solve the problem, he did have the project to create the vaccine. That was great. But a lot of other things he didn't do very well. So I worry that in a second term, unleashed from having smarter people around him, more able people, more capable people, more talented people, more experienced people, who knows what he could do?
Because he's full of bile and vindictiveness. And presidents of that sort will not be able to really do the.
job. Let's say we're having this conversation 10 years from now. Are you more likely to say, we started to climb our way out, and this is, it's not great, but it's on the whole good? Or are you?
more likely to say we reach bottom and we begin to dig? I think that 10 years from now, with a little bit of luck, we're going to be in much better shape, because we will have figured out a lot of the problems that we're facing. One of the things we're facing, though, is the rapid rate of technological change. We do have to, for example, get a handle on AI, because this is going to be another big change. And, as a society, we just can't keep taking all these monstrous changes and thinking that we can cope with them.
Think, for example, of the average American parent, who now worries about whether their child is on social media, whether they're getting bullied, whether they're looking at things they shouldn't look at, whether they're being made anxious by the news items that they're being sent by the social media. This didn't happen 30 years ago. It now is happening. And we have to anticipate these kinds of things and find ways to control it so that we don't end up in more of a mess. I'm sorry to say.
we have to leave it at that for the.
moment. I've been talking to Dr. Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley. And again, everyone, the issue of Daedalus, the Journal of American Academy of Arts and Sciences from fall 2022, is must reading for anyone interested in the loss of faith and regard for basic American institutions. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os