Our national politics is white hot. We live in a highly polarized context. Seventy-four percent of people in the U.S. say the country is “on the wrong track.” In the coming months such polarization will fixate on two candidates, and no doubt as anxiety about the American project continues to rise. The historic collapse of trust in government, the media, and one another means that many Americans imagine that a civil war is possible. At the same time, this nadir of trust comes as the price of our politics is at its highest in history: The last presidential election could have paid for the Revolutionary War five times over in 2020 dollars.
So how do we cool things down and get back on track? The Social Capital Campaign was launched in 2021 to check the evidence around the decline in society-wide trust and to generate fresh solutions to it. Scholars and advisers were drawn from a broad spectrum of political teams with staffers connected to Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Mike Pence, Carly Fiorina, Paul Ryan, and Rick Santorum. Over a two-year period, we developed a shopping list of societal ailments that essentially describe an ailing society.
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