A low-trust society is a society in which you constantly fear getting ripped off. Most Americans have an intuitive understanding of what high and low trust looks like now. Amazon could not have become a retail behemoth unless Americans trusted each other not to steal cardboard boxes from each other’s stoops and front doors. Its achievement was during the success of a high-trust society. Now, we see retailers in major American cities adjusting to a spike in petty crime and lawlessness. They are failing in a lower-trust society. The surge of retail theft now means the toothbrushes are locked-up merchandise in some urban pharmacies. A low-trust society is one in which you spend a lot of your time trying not to get ripped off. It’s a society in which you start videotaping your every move in a car, or your interactions with strangers.
Progressives may be seeing what crime does to the trust level of their cities, but something stranger is happening to conservatives who are losing trust in their society generally. American conservatives don’t trust media, even most conservative media. Since the pandemic, they don’t trust “the science” or the scientists much anymore. They don’t trust the electoral system. They don’t trust the universities.
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