Opinion
If aliens arrive and study our consumer culture, they’d see a troubled society swamped in scams
The ‘trust factor’ in America is lower than it’s been in decades.
The Dallas Morning News Watchdog, Dave Lieber, writes that if aliens were to study our consumer culture, they’d have to say in their native tongue, “Gosh, these beings are gullible.”
I was wrong about one major prediction for 2020. I thought for sure aliens were going to land and say, “Take me to your leader.”
I was close. Sort of. In April, the Pentagon, for the first time, released three Navy videos that showed unidentified aerial phenomena.
Why Are Americans So Distrustful of Each Other?
The U.S. is the only established democracy where the level of social trust is falling instead of rising. Our political leaders can help turn the tide. Illustration: Sonia Pulido Dec. 17, 2020 10:13 am ET
Social trust, the faith that strangers will abide by established norms, is one of society’s most fundamental building blocks. It underlies economic growth, political consensus and effective law enforcement.
But social trust is difficult to restore once lost, and the U.S. is losing it. According to the General Social Survey and the American National Election Survey, in the early 1970s half of Americans said that most people can be trusted; today that figure is less than one-third. And a recent Pew poll found that social trust declines sharply from generation to generation. In 2018, around 29% of Americans over 65 said that most people can’t be trusted, while 60% of Americans 18 to 29 agree. R
Pollsters keep tripping over contradictions in how communities of color talk about cops.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
In 2020, the widespread protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd took both the news cycle and the American conscience by force. The result was an immediate and seismic shift in public opinion: According to the polling from Gallup in June, 19 percent of Americans consider racism an important issue, up from just 4 percent in May. That made these concerns just as important as the coronavirus to the American public.
The zeitgeist-warping power of these protests wasn’t without controversy. More recently, critics of the movement’s endorsement of ideas like “defunding the police” have blamed them for contributing to the Democrats’ losses in swing districts throughout the nation. President-elect Joe Biden has continued to repeat these warnings out of concern that Republicans will paint the Democratic Party as full-bore endorsers of these ideas ahead