The United States Has Become a Low-Trust Society — and That Changes Everything

Why America's Plunging Trust Levels Are Tearing Us Apart

I have spent much of my professional life thinking about trust—how it forms, how it erodes, and what happens to democratic systems when it collapses. For years, declining trust in American institutions was treated as (sometimes consequential) background noise: unfortunate, but manageable. Something to be lamented, not confronted directly.

That assumption no longer holds.

Public trust in the federal government is at its historic lows, according to long-running surveys from the Pew Research Center. Only a small minority of Americans say they trust the government to do what is right most of the time. Fewer still believe it does so consistently. This is not a short-term partisan dip or a cyclical downturn. It is a structural condition—one that is quietly reshaping how American politics, governance, and social cooperation work.

What matters most is not simply that trust has declined, but that we are learning how to operate inside a low-trust equilibrium. We govern differently. We argue differently. We interpret institutional action differently. And once a society settles into that equilibrium, the downstream consequences compound.

How We Got Here

The United States was not always a low-trust society. In the decades following World War II, trust in government regularly exceeded 70 percent. That confidence peaked in the mid-1960s and then entered a long, uneven decline.

Vietnam and Watergate shattered assumptions of elite competence and honesty. Economic turbulence in the 1970s eroded faith in state capacity. The end of the Cold War removed a unifying external threat. More recent shocks—the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19, and contested elections—accelerated a process already underway.

What distinguishes the current moment is that trust no longer recovers. Earlier crises produced partial rebounds. Today, they do not. Trust has become tightly coupled to partisan identity, rising or falling depending on who holds power. That is a fundamentally different phenomenon from generalized confidence in institutions themselves.

From a political science perspective, this matters enormously. When trust becomes partisan, institutions lose their ability to function as neutral arbiters. Politics stops being a contest over outcomes and becomes a struggle over legitimacy and intent.

The Long View: Trust Over Time

Figure 1. Public trust in the federal government, United States (1958–present).

Percentage of Americans saying they trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” Data compiled from Pew Research Center surveys.

The figure illustrates not only the long-term decline, but the failure of trust to rebound after major political and economic shocks.

Figure 2. Public trust in the federal government, by partisan identification, US (1958-present).

This figure captures the central empirical fact of the current moment: trust has not merely fallen—it has ratcheted downward. Each crisis lowers the baseline, and recoveries are partial at best. The result is a society operating with historically low institutional confidence as its default condition.

What Low Trust Does to Politics

In high-trust societies, policy debates are primarily about effects: Will this work? Who benefits? What are the tradeoffs?

In low-trust societies, debates shift toward motives: What are they really trying to do? Who is this meant to punish? What comes next?

You can see this dynamic clearly in contemporary debates over taxation, regulation, elections, public health, and national security—you name it.

Proposals are no longer evaluated on their merits alone. They are interpreted as signals of hidden agendas. Even good-faith reforms are processed as threats.

This is not an argument for or against any particular policy. It is an observation about political cognition under conditions of distrust. When institutional legitimacy is weak, compromise looks naïve, restraint looks suspicious, and enforcement looks tyrannical.

Gridlock and gatekeeping become rational behavior.

Democracy, under these conditions, starts to resemble a courtroom with no shared rules of evidence, no shared reality even.

The Administrative Cost of Distrust

Low trust does not just poison political discourse; it degrades state capacity.

Decades of comparative research show that societies with lower institutional trust experience higher compliance costs, weaker public administration, and slower economic growth. The logic is straightforward. When citizens do not trust institutions to act fairly, voluntary cooperation declines. Governments respond with increased monitoring and enforcement. Administrative costs rise. Legitimacy falls further.

In the United States, this shows up in places we rarely connect to trust: declining interest in public service careers, persistent recruitment challenges in the military, resistance to census participation, and skepticism toward regulatory agencies. Each weakens the state’s ability to function effectively—and each, in turn, reinforces public doubts about competence.

This is a feedback loop, not a coincidence.

Social Fracture and the Amplification Effect

Trust also shapes how societies process failure.

In high-trust environments, institutional breakdowns are treated as problems to be fixed. In low-trust environments, they are treated as proof that the system is fundamentally corrupt. The same event produces radically different reactions depending on the baseline level of legitimacy.

This is why fraud scandals, administrative failures, or enforcement lapses now carry outsized symbolic weight. They are no longer isolated incidents; they become narrative accelerants.

Recent high-profile welfare fraud cases illustrate this dynamic. While such cases are not representative of broader communities or programs, they nonetheless erode confidence precisely because trust is already thin. In a low-trust society, oversight failures are interpreted as intent, not error. The damage is social as much as fiscal.

Public health provides an even clearer example. Vaccine hesitancy during COVID was not simply about misinformation. It was about credibility deficits that predated the pandemic. Once trust was gone, expertise alone could not compensate.

The Hollow State Lens

One way to conceptualize these dynamics is through what security analyst (and old friend) John Robb calls the “hollow state.” The concept is not a diagnosis so much as an analytic lens.

A hollow state retains formal power—it collects taxes, enforces laws, fields a military—but struggles to deliver public goods in ways that command broad loyalty. Authority becomes performative rather than substantive. Citizens experience the state primarily as constraint, not coordination.

Whether the United States fully fits this model is debatable. But the direction of travel should concern us. Hollow states do not collapse quickly. They persist, often for decades, while social trust erodes and governance becomes increasingly brittle.

Why AI Raises the Stakes

And, of course, right on cue, artificial intelligence enters this picture at exactly the wrong moment.

AI promises productivity gains and efficiency, but it also threatens to accelerate labor displacement, deepen inequality, and concentrate decision-making power. Surveys already reveal a striking paradox: many Americans use AI tools while simultaneously distrusting the institutions deploying them.

This is classic low-trust behavior—reliance without legitimacy.

If large segments of the workforce experience technological disruption without credible pathways to retraining, mobility, or protection, trust will not merely decline; it will fracture further. And unlike previous technological transitions, this one is unfolding faster than our political institutions are adapting.

The danger is not AI itself. It is AI layered onto already-weak institutional trust.

The Hard Truth About Rebuilding Trust

There is no single reform that restores trust. Transparency helps, but transparency without legitimacy often backfires. Participation helps, but participation without efficacy breeds cynicism. Expertise matters, but expertise without accountability invites resentment.

Trust is really only rebuilt slowly, through competence, fairness, and restraint, demonstrated repeatedly over time. That is difficult work in a polarized environment. It requires institutions not only to perform well, but to be seen as acting in good faith—even when outcomes disappoint.

Low-trust societies can function. They can even appear stable at times. But they are brittle, and each more-likely scandal takes a toll.

And brittleness is not a quality you want in a democracy facing rapid technological, economic, and geopolitical change.

The data are clear. The question is whether we are willing to take them seriously.

At some point, we will realize that the only way out is through, but that requires escaping the clutches of this late postmodern moment we find ourselves in.

More about that in my next piece.