Trust in an Age of Mistrust: What You Can Do

This article is a plea addressed to campaign managers and politicians: Starting today please—please!—try to regain the public’s trust.
It’s vital to your own campaigns, of course. The public generally rewards people who seem worthy of their trust. But it’s not for your sake that I am writing. It’s for the sake of the country. We no longer can afford your indifference to this question of trust.
First, remember that character counts. Stop with the scandals. Stop sleeping with campaign workers. Stop using the public treasury as your own private piggy bank. These headlines are getting tiresome. How many times must we think, “I’ve seen this movie before?”
Second, start figuring out how to earn and keep the public’s trust in an Age of Mistrust. It’s vital that you solve this problem. For it’s unlikely that we can merrily keep on going as we have, with people disbelieving their leaders. Our form of government wasn’t designed for a country of cynics. It was designed for a country of believers. For this thing called democracy to work, don’t we have to believe in our leaders? For some 30 years, people haven’t. This has been a shock to the system.
Until the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of Americans told pollsters they believed that their government leaders would do the right thing most of the time. Under Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy, 70 percent or more of Americans said they trusted their leaders. Then in the 1970s, trust dropped dramatically. In the ensuing years it was not uncommon for only 30 percent of the public to say that they trusted their leaders. A recent Pew Research Center poll puts the figure at 22 percent.
Can American democracy survive indefinitely with numbers this low? Maybe. But do we really want to use ourselves as experimental guinea pigs to find out? I’m guessing not.
So what can you do to help restore trust? Before we can answer this question, we should probably pause to review the history of how we got here. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough pages in this magazine to address that question. But it may be helpful to draw attention to the complexity of the problem and thereby disabuse ourselves of the notion that it is easily diagnosed.
This short list suggests a range of debilitating factors:
• Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra
• Gotcha journalism
• Investigative reporting
• Slick Madison Avenue marketing
• Biased news media
• Rampaging inflation in the ‘70s
• ‘60s-era suspiciousness of elites
• Slowdown in economic growth over decades and the decline in middle-class wages
• Talk shows which harp on politicians’ flaws
What is obvious from this list is that honesty alone is hardly likely to be the cure for what ails us. Even if all of our politicians were persons of exceptional character, mistrust would linger. The system has to change for people to regain trust. But how?
One common suggestion is making government more transparent. This is a good start but no panacea. While openness in government is in itself desirable, open institutions are more likely than closed institutions to become embroiled in the kind of controversies that breed mistrust. It is likely no coincidence that two of the least open institutions in our society—the military and the Supreme Court—are routinely rated more trustworthy by the public than more open institutions such as Congress.
Some historians argue that mistrust is endemic to the sort of big government with which we have become comfortable. Inevitably, a government that promises to take care of the poor and the aged falls short, leading to disillusionment. Add to that the federal government’s recent bank bailouts—under both a Republican and a Democratic president—and you have a seemingly insurmountable series of barriers to trust.
Given all this, what can politicians do? Gaining trust back is more difficult than raising donations, gaining endorsements, or winning converts. Politicians have been doing those things for the last 30 years with great success without being able to gain back the public’s trust. Fortunately, a recent development in technology offers politicians a practical practical tool they can use to help ameliorate the trend toward mistrust: social networking. It gives voters a feeling of control over a process that otherwise appears remote, manipulative, and artificial.
To some, social networking is the next revolution in communications. Whether you agree with this premise or not, it is obvious that social networking is changing elections. Ordinary people with few ties to established political institutions are using social networking to gather in groups and exercise power. The left did this through Barack Obama’s campaign, and now the right is doing it through the Tea Party. This appeal is featured on a website of the Tea Party Patriots. Below the appeal is this smart come-on: “Share this on Facebook, then visit the Tea Party Patriots Facebook page and tell us what sign or number you are in the comments section.”
Politicians have been quick to respond, throwing up Twitter and Facebook buttons on their websites. The more Twitter and Facebook grow, the bigger the buttons keep getting. But this me-too marketing is not a strategy; it’s a reaction. It’s a little like what happened in the 1980s when television stations across the country started buying live microwave trucks to broadcast local news in their communities. Once one station in a market got a truck, every station had to have one. But what to do with the thing, no one was sure. That quickly became apparent when stations started going live for live’s sake, even when the event they were “covering” was long over, leaving the reporter to broadcast from an empty parking lot.
The equivalent today is throwing up those giant social networking buttons, hiring a kid to run your pages on the sites, and then wondering what to do with them. Having a presence in social media is one thing. Using them to communicate is another. If you’re not going to communicate, don’t bother. It’s a waste of time and money.
Social networking only works if you fully integrate it with your campaign, as candidate Obama did. Many politicians resist this because, like the rest of us, they don’t like change. They’d rather keep doing what they have always done. Furthermore, they don’t like giving voters control over their campaign, which is what social networking does. Obama discovered this during the campaign in 2008, when he reversed his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Irate supporters, using the social networking tools available on Obama’s own website, created a group imploring him to change course. Obama resisted, but earned the group’s respect by engaging in a vigorous debate. This bolstered his credentials as a politician supporters could trust.
Note the terms of the transaction. In exchange for control, Obama gained trust. This is common in social networking. The more control you give up, the more likely people are to trust you. This is the message Jeff Jarvis preaches in his book, “What Would Google Do?” His advice is aimed mainly at corporations seeking to navigate their way along the Internet superhighway, but it applies with equal force to politicians. If you want the voters to have a stake in your campaign, you have to give them a real role in it. That was one of the brilliant innovations of the Obama campaign. Contrast the way supporters in the old days—say, 2004—would help a campaign knock on doors with the way Obama’s supporters did it. In 2004, a campaign field operative would gather the supporters at a ramshackle storefront, hand out printouts with the names and addresses of voters ,and then bid them farewell. At the end of the day the supporters would gather back at the headquarters and turn in their sheets.
In 2008, the Obama campaign allowed its supporters to pull down call sheets from the Internet, print them out on their home computers, and then earn points every time those supporters succeeded in contacting voters. Pretty soon his supporters were competing with one another to see who could get the most points. The experience of the Obama supporter in 2008 was vastly different from the experience of the supporter in 2004—different and superior. The 2004 voter was told what to do. The 2008 supporter did what he wanted to when he wanted to.
Giving up control isn’t easy for politicians. Like corporations, they are used to operations that run in one direction— from the top, down. And with social networking comes risks. As Obama discovered, what you want to talk about and what your supporters want to talk about may conflict. On the other hand, supporters treated with respect will be inclined to stand by a leader even when the leader on occasion disappoints them. Given the opportunity, what politician in his or her right mind wouldn’t take this gamble?
Using social networking in this way means politicians will not only be helping themselves, they’ll be helping society. If you are a politician reading these words, consider the country you want to leave to our children. Isn’t it a place where voters trust leaders?Rick Shenkman is vice president of media and partnerships at VoteiQ.com, the first major social networking site expressly designed for politics. He is an associate professor of history at George Mason University and founder of the History News Network.