Too Big To Trust
REVIEW: 'American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence' by Gerard Baker
(Amazon)
September 24, 2023
If you're a working opinion journalist in America, you've probably spent some time in the past few years toying with a book idea about our national crisis. The atmospherics of the moment all but demand it. What was once quaintly thought of as the news cycle has become a continuous blur of despond. Political problems crossbreed with cultural ailments and split opinions along lines so fresh and inconsistent that the terms left and right lose shades of meaning with each new debate. Wild claims disseminate via digital firehose and service competing ideological camps that no longer share a base reality.
And that's before we get to the significant failings of our recent elected officials, the scandals of our billion-dollar corporations, the prejudices of our legacy media, or the lies proffered by our public and private institutions. In other words, before we can even approach our real-world challenges, Americans are faced with an impenetrable fog of interests and biases that all but precludes thoughtful contemplation.
It's no wonder we've lost trust in just about everything. According to all major polls, American trust is nosediving across the board. We don't trust government, media, education, big business, technology, or one another. And this isn't merely unpleasant background noise. Mistrust and distrust are active players in the political and cultural life of the country, shaping our days as surely as any lawmaker, lobbying group, or media behemoth.
We could really use a grand theory right about now—something ingeniously simple to capture how we got here and point us toward clear solutions. But as Gerard Baker argues in the traumatically brilliant American Breakdown, the origins of our national trust crisis are complex and compounded, and it won't be resolved in one stroke.
Baker, editor at large at the Wall Street Journal, contends that the problem began with the United States' objectively poor performance on a number of fronts. "It's not that Americans have suddenly, for no reason, started distrusting institutions that merit trust," he writes. "It is that the institutions themselves have become untrustworthy." Here Baker wisely resists the low-hanging fruit of Trump-age resentment as an explanation in itself. "To focus on the most extreme and hateful manifestations of public disillusionment is to miss the underlying cause," he writes. "It is the guided leadership of the last twenty years rather than the response to it that explains America's current plight."
The evidence is compelling. As Baker notes, long before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, the United States entered a long and dispiriting foreign war on the strength of bad intelligence, a collapse of the American financial system halved the average net worth of middle-class households, the increasing flow of illegal immigrants was serially ignored, Big Tech grew rich by trading in customers' personal data, and social mobility began to stall. As Baker puts it: "To suggest that [Trump] is the architect of collapsing faith in America would be to assign him the kind of power and influence only he thinks he really wields."
After Trump was elected, he pounded away on the entrenched political establishment as the source of these mishaps. And then the establishment did its best to prove him right with a new batch of bungling and flat-out deception: the false charge of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential election, the now hyper-partisan media's daily catastrophizing about conservatives, and the mistakes and misdirection of public health officials responding to the COVID pandemic. "Leading figures in public health across the country," writes Baker, "essentially inverted the scientific method," starting with answers and culling data to match. Americans noticed.
Baker adds to this run of failure the emergence of two complementary trends that were foisted on the public at the height of our national doubt: First, the rise of an "overclass that has more in common with its counterparts in London, Paris, or Singapore than it does with its compatriots in Louisville, Peoria, or Scranton." This is the Davos crowd, the influencers, institutionalists, and billionaires who disdain national identity and embrace climate change as religion. Baker's portrayal of the Davos set is peerless and one of the book's crowning delights. Consider his summary of Davos Speak: "Wander into a Davos session and you will catch stakeholders dialoguing and mainstreaming multifaceted metrics in a cross-platform environment before actioning toward implementation mode. It's English, Jim, but not as we know it."
These mainstreaming multifaceted muckety-mucks often find common cause with another emergent class that also speaks its own language: the radical ideologues of the campus left. What the globally minded Davos folks share with the identitarians and intersectionalists is a messianic disregard for the average American's well-being and, in some cases, a hostility toward his real concerns. Most important, the two elite forces pushed our culture and institutions in bizarre and damaging directions that do real harm to ordinary people. In something like ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) investing, we see clearly how the two groups merge to shortchange everyday Americans in the name of globally minded heroism. ESG-guided funds invest your hard-earned money only in companies that meet certain environmental and social criteria, but they generally underperform funds that are still stuck on the crazy idea that making money for shareholders is paramount. "Not only are [Americans] forced to watch as their corporate overlords use their powerful positions to pursue ideological goals many do not approve of," Baker writes, "but they are actually paying for the privilege of it."
Baker astutely dismantles a slew of ailing institutions, devoting a chapter each to politics, corporate America, news media, science, education, and technology. Each is a gem packed with insight and wit. Noting, for example, in his chapter on education that a recent survey showed 80 percent of Harvard faculty identified as "liberal" or "very liberal," 1 percent identified as "conservative," and zero said they were "very conservative," Baker observes inarguably, "These are North Korean levels of political conformity."
But the book's great strength is in resisting causal reductionism and daring to approach the trust fiasco in its combined magnitude. No single factor can begin to explain it. In his chapter on social trust, Baker considers the three main causes of mistrust cited in scholarly literature: corruption, economic inequality, and racial diversity. They all appear to play some role in our present crisis, but none dispositively. After all, as Baker points out, Transparency International still ranks the United States as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. And from 2011 to 2021, "on an income basis, the United States actually became a slightly more equal society, and yet, levels of social trust have continued to decline." Similarly, polls have shown a gargantuan shift away from bigotry in this country over the last half century, yet "Americans of all races seem to have become markedly more pessimistic about racial harmony in the very recent past."
Baker knows the problem is more massive than any individual grievance. Indeed, he writes movingly about the challenge of massiveness itself. "The vast scale of the institutions may be justified in terms of economies of scale, or by the larger purpose they are serving, but dealing with these Brobdingnagian entities induces a sense of smallness in us," he says. It's an underappreciated point, and it applies to our interaction with businesses, universities, and government. They've become, in some sense, too big to trust.
Baker is modest and uncharacteristically vague about offering solutions. But this is apt, as nothing elicits mistrust as surely as confidently proposed fixes. And grasping the size of our dilemma, he surely understands that the best we can hope at the moment is a good wish list. He'd like media companies and universities to be more ideologically diverse in their hiring. He suggests more transparency from technology platforms, more accountability from big business, and so on.
If there's good news here, it's that opinion writers can stop worrying about their possible books on the great American crack-up. Gerard Baker has beaten them to it with a definitive account of our complicated and uncertain times.
American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence
by Gerard Baker
Twelve, 288 pp., $30
Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of Commentary.
The Evidence Against Menendez
In 2017, New Jersey Democrat senator Bob Menendez endured a three-month trial for eighteen counts of alleged corruption. The procedure ended in a mistrial. Ten jurors found Menendez guilty with two dissenting. Prosecutors can retry defendants in trials that result in a hung jury. The Justice Department opted not to retry Menendez.
Does the prosecution have a sufficient case this time to avoid another mistrial, or is the evidence of corruption weak because this is just another presidential vendetta against Menendez for disagreeing with the Democrat policy agenda?
Per the Washington Post, in that trial prosecutors said Menendez took gifts from Doctor Salomon Melgen, including a luxury hotel stay, private jet flights, and campaign donations, in exchange for which he tried to help Melgen get U.S. visas for his girlfriends, intervened in the doctor’s $8.9 million billing dispute with Medicare (Melgen was subsequently found guilty), and assisted with a port security contract of the doctor’s in the Dominican Republic.
Juror Ed Norris, a 49-year-old equipment operator from Morris County, said that the evidence was mostly emails and that he “didn’t see a smoking gun.’’ “I don’t think the government proved anything,’’ Norris said. “I didn’t see anything bad that he did.’’
Menendez and Melgen were longtime friends. Both defendants denied any wrongdoing, arguing the gifts were merely evidence of their close friendship.
What does a smoking gun in a case like this look like? Per WAPO, Barbara Van Gelder, a lawyer with Cozen O’Conner, “Once you blur business with friendship, it’s very hard to ask the jury to untangle that. . . The jury is looking for a concrete quid pro quo, not just a plausible quid pro quo.’’
Although the Senate Ethics Committee admonished Senator Menendez, he hung on to his seat as Chair of Foreign Relations Committee (FRC). In April 2018, the Committee stated that Menendez “knowingly and repeatedly accepted gifts of significant value from Dr. Melgen without obtaining required Committee approval, and that you failed to publicly disclose certain gifts as required by Senate Rule and federal law. Additionally, while accepting these gifts, you used your position as a Member of the Senate to advance Dr. Melgen’s personal and business interests.”
This time, based on corruption allegations alone, Senator Menendez has stepped down from the FRC. He was found guilty of ethics violations and will be again, in all likelihood. Under the law Menendez merits a presumption of innocence until proven guilty of a felony in a court of law.
Are the current bribery charges just another vendetta like the corruption charges brought by the Obama Justice Department in 2017. At the time, Andrew McCarthy asserted that the original reason for the charges is that Menendez had angered President Obama, who as payback went after him through the Justice Department. Menendez has also not backed Biden’s every policy.
As in the first case, there are rumblings that the Biden administration is pursuing corruption charges motivated by a vendetta against Menendez. Which makes some sense if you consider the Constitution does not prohibit felons from holding elected federal office. Such an action would serve to motivate compliance with the party line without losing a coveted Senate vote. The Democrats can't afford to lose his vote.
All the same, Menendez could face impeachment, which would remove him from office.
NBC News 4 has reported “…criminal investigators are attempting to determine if Menendez or his wife had taken up to $400,000 worth of gold bars from Fred Daibes, a New Jersey developer and former bank chairman, or his associates in a swap for Menendez reaching out to the Justice Department to aid the ‘admitted felon’ accused of banking crimes.”
The bribery charge against Menendez, his wife, and the three New Jersey businessmen alleges that the group schemed to pay Menendez in exchange for political favors.
The Hill is reporting that he and his wife allegedly accepted bribes from a group of New Jersey businessmen on behalf of interests in Egypt, totaling over $600,000. Prosecutors allege that the senator and his wife accepted cash, gold bars and a luxury car in return for assisting the businessmen. Nearly $500,000 in cash and more than $100,000 in gold were found at Menendez’s home in a raid last year, allegedly payment for the bribes.
Additionally, Menendez “allegedly took bribes from interests in Egypt, and in exchange advocated for issues important to Egypt in Congress. That includes pressuring the State Department to encourage the construction of a dam considered important to Egyptian interests and advocating on behalf of the Egyptian military in encouraging U.S. arms deals.”
Menendez also “set up a fraudulent business -- Strategic International Business Consultants, LLC -- to facilitate the bribes, prosecutors allege, as well as used his influence to protect a business monopoly of a second business related to Egyptian interests and the businessmen.”
The Hill further reports that “according to prosecutors, Menendez ‘directly and indirectly, would and did corruptly demand, seek, receive, accept, and agree to receive and accept something of value personally and for another person and entity, in return for being influenced in the performance of an official act and for being induced to do an act and omit to do an act in violation of his official duty.’”
Furthermore, prosecutors allege that Menendez, et al “met multiple times, and communicated via text through his wife. Menendez also pressured New Jersey prosecutors to interrupt the prosecutions of multiple federal and state criminal cases.”
These are serious allegations that could have negative consequences for Democrat political aspirations in 2024. More importantly, if the allegations are determined to be true by a criminal court of law, then justice needs to be served.
Ed Norris wanted to see a smoking gun in the first trial. If jurors need a smoking gun to convict now, then it is hoped that the prosecution can present them with one.
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