American institutions aren’t coming apart only because of a single cause or in a single way.
American institutions aren’t coming apart only because of a single cause or in a single way.
T he discontents of our era have multiple causes. One of them is the across-the-board collapse of Americans’ relationships with institutions. The gig economy is just one facet of a wider gig society.
The leg of the stool whose collapse is best-known is trust in American institutions, and especially public institutions: politicians, political parties, civil government, the military, law enforcement, the courts, the press, universities, schools, Hollywood, churches, Big Business, the financial system, the unions, Big Pharma, doctors, the public health system, and so on. And yet it’s easy to focus so much on feeling one part of the elephant that we fail to feel all of its parts.
The list of triggering events is extensive and spans decades. It includes the O. J. Simpson trial, the Clinton impeachment, the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment, the Florida recount and Bush v. Gore, the 9/11 intelligence failures, the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandals, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis and subsequent bailouts, the Obamacare rollout, the Ferguson riots, the inability of the political system to stop the rise of Donald Trump, the Russiagate probe, the Me Too movement and its many revelations of sex abuse and cover-ups across multiple institutions, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, the pandemic and the many abuses and cover-ups by government that it revealed, remote schooling and what it disclosed about our education system, the George Floyd case and the resulting riots, woke censoriousness on campuses and in workplaces, the mass mobilization of institutions for leftist cultural politics, the 2020 election controversies and January 6, anti-Trump lawfare, men in women’s sports, the cover-up of Joe Biden’s mental decline, and the riot of campus antisemitism after October 7, 2023.
Over and over again, in ways various enough to disillusion people of every political and social persuasion, it was revealed to us that major institutions were run by knaves, fools, or, at a minimum, people who had no interest in being good stewards for the purposes for which those institutions were created. If they weren’t in it for themselves, they were revealed to be more interested in using institutions for purposes other than what is supposed to be their actual job. The effect is cumulative. Once you reach this conclusion with regard to one major institution, it becomes easier to reach it with yet another, and so on with each succeeding revelation.
The second, now broken, leg was Americans’ participation in civic institutions. Go down the list: church attendance, PTA, VFW, scouting groups and Little League and bowling leagues, all the sorts of men’s and adult volunteer and civic groups — rates of participation are down across the board. (Tim Carney has written extensively about this phenomenon.) Many of these once tied Americans to their neighbors but also enabled them to run the local chapters of national institutions, giving them a sense of investment in those wider institutions. Even the relatively few civic activities that American adults do pursue today are often ad hoc, such as book groups, fantasy sports leagues, or independent prayer and Bible study.
The third leg of the stool was employment. In the second half of the 20th century, it was common for American workers to have an institutional relationship with their employers. A great many Americans worked for large organizations for many years, sometimes for their whole working lives, and not just for pay but for benefits and pensions. They gathered in large, common workplaces, and until sexual harassment laws changed workplace culture beginning in the 1990s, it was common for men and women to meet at work and go on to get married. Long tenures in the same offices and factories meant that, for many people, their co-workers made up their social circle.
This wasn’t always the case. Before the rise of large factories and government bureaucracies, the economy of pre–Civil War America was dominated by independent farmers and “mechanics” (self-employed tradesmen). In the early republic, outside of the tiny professional Army and Navy, the Americans most likely to have an institutional relationship with their employers were plantation slaves.
Today, we’ve increasingly departed from the 20th century model. It is much easier and more common for the typical worker to change jobs, whether by choice or because jobs are less secure. More people work remotely; more people are independent contractors. Few expect an employer-provided pension at the end of the rainbow. If anything, my own career has been atypical in that I’ve changed my job only once in 29 years — and that was for a complete career change. The last bastion of institutional employment is the government. But Elon Musk and his DOGE team have come into the federal government from working worlds where that kind of relationship is an alien phenomenon. For many federal workers, the DOGE experience has been a rude awakening to the reality that they inhabit a world that is increasingly rare in the private economy.
When we think about these three trends together, we can see the outlines of a broader collapse in the relationships between individual Americans and institutions. As people have become ever more detached from large institutions, which they once saw as an extensions of things they knew up close, social trust has declined and conspiracy theories have flourished. Our communities have increasingly become things we experience through our phones rather than through our workplaces and church halls. We’ve only begun to see the full ramifications of the gig economy — ever more part of a wider gig society — on how we live and how we govern ourselves.