On Our Present Anti-Institutional Age

By any reasonable metric, Americans have developed a profound distrust in our social and political institutions. Gallup reports a significant decline in public confidence across eleven of the sixteen institutions it tracks. As of 2023, fewer than one-third of Americans express confidence in the medical system or organized religion, while only about a quarter of Americans express confidence in the Supreme Court, banks, public schools, the presidency, tech companies, and organized labor. Confidence drops below one in five for major pillars of public life—news media, the criminal justice system, and big business. Congress sits at the very bottom, with an abysmal eight percent confidence rating. The only institutions that retain the trust of a majority of Americans are small businesses and the military—and even those have declined in recent years.