Restoring Trust in American Institutions with Yuval Levin | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 what we find happening on a University campus rather than the formation of the minds of the students rather than teaching and learning you find a lot of performance art a lot of people standing and yelling standing and yelling is very different from teaching and learning they can both involve expressions of views but they’re not the same thing and

0:21 when we come to think that the only purpose of every institution is in one way or another to stand and yell about oppression then it becomes very hard for our core institutions to do their essential work and the fact is we need the work they do we need universities we need newspapers uh you know we really do we need science we need we need

0:41 Corporate America we need each of these institutions to do its own job when they all instead are doing another job a kind of combination of politics and entertainment it becomes extremely difficult for us to believe that anybody in any institution is doing anything other than trying to advance a partisan agenda

1:01 [Music] foreign [Music] for this episode of scholar talks The Guiding question is how can we restore trust in American institutions now you’ve all I’ve been as a senior fellow as well as the Beth and Raven all Curry chair in public policy and the director of social cultural and constitutional

1:23 studies at the American Enterprise Institute he is also the editor-in-chief of the journal National Affairs and is the author of three bucks including the fractured society and a time to build about American culture and Civil Society I am Tony Williams Senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute and I’m pleased to welcome you to another episode of The

1:45 Scholar talks Topics in government and Civic series and so my first question is you describe the the decline of Institutions as one of the great stress points causing this disunity and the culture War today can you give us some examples of an institution and why we

2:05 just trust them so much well thank you very much I appreciate that and I do think it’s important to look for for Hope in these kinds of moments uh like the kind of social crisis that we’re living through and part of what it means to look for hope is to look for diagnosis for practical understandings of the sources of our challenges and I do think that in our time that means in

2:25 particular looking at our institutions institutions often are invisible the term is so broad that it can be a challenge to Define but I would say that I think of Institutions as the durable forms of our common life there the Frameworks the structures of what we do together so some institutions are organizations like

2:46 a university a hospital a school legislature a company a civic association these are institutions that have a corporate form they’re technically legally formalized but some institutions are durable forms of a different kind maybe they’re shaped by Norms or laws but they don’t have that kind of corporate structure the family for example is the first and

3:07 foremost institution of any society um you might think about the institution of marriage or a particular tradition or profession as an institution the rule of law itself is an institution the fact that they’re durable is one thing that is essential to their being institution an institution keeps its shape over time it changes relatively slowly

3:28 incrementally but most important I would describe each institution as a form of of Association for a reason what’s distinct about it is that it’s a form in the deepest sense it’s a structure a shape a contour and so what it does is it organizes people into a particular form together shaped by a common purpose

3:49 a goal they have in common uh characterized by the structure of the institution itself each person is given a role role in relation to the others and in relation to the goal they have together and so you’re not just a person out there in the world you’re a student in this particular school which means you have a certain relationship to the

4:10 teachers in the school to the principal to the other students to the parents the institution gives each of you a role in relation to all the others and in relation to what you’re trying to achieve together our society just works this way it absolutely requires institution anything we do together is ultimately done through some set of institutions but a further reason why it’s important

4:31 to think in terms of form is that institutions are also formative they shape us they shape us into a particular kind of person the capacity of our institutions to form Us in ways that allow us to do their work responsibly is really crucial and the the diminishment of that capacity is a big part of what’s gone wrong in our society man

4:52 right uh and and you touch on this just a little bit but what role do institutions play in forming us and promoting better social interactions and and more of a spirit of a common purpose yeah so you know each institution in our kind of society has a purpose it it plays some particular role

5:13 um and you know maybe that purpose is to educate children maybe it’s to enforce the law maybe it’s to provide a particular product or or or or or or service in society and in in performing that task it also shapes the people within it to do it in a particular way to do it responsibly to do it reliably

5:33 it it builds an ethic um and oftentimes our trust in institutions is a function of our sense that it does build that ethic we trust a business because it seems to promise quality and reliability and it forms people who take that really seriously we trust a profession because it poses rules or standards on its members and it

5:56 seems like those members take it seriously so ideally when a professional you know when a scientist says something you have a sense this has been through a process of verification but more and more often in our time now we have lost that sense that confidence that when a scientist says something to take that example that this person is saying it because their professional

6:18 work has enabled them to prove it or when a journalist says something that it’s been through a process of verification um increasingly now we find that rather than be formed by the institutions they’re part of a lot of people in our society are using those institutions as platforms for themselves for their own promotion uh to build their social media

6:40 following to build their own brand as we say now and that makes it very hard for us to know who to trust and what to believe so that the loss of institutional Integrity is really Central to the loss of trust that we all feel in our society right and yeah and so I was going to ask you about a little bit more about that

7:00 how have institutions become platforms for that self-promotion for even that performative sort of moral outrage rather than the healthy Civic organizations that that promote that common purpose and service and and so forth I think a lot of powerful people in various institutions in our society have

7:20 come to see those institutions not as imposing constraints on them but as precisely providing them with a platform to be elevated to be promoted to uh to to build their following um generally speaking participating in the work of an institution should feel a little constraining you’re not just out there doing what you want you have a

7:41 role you have a job you’re the CEO or you’re the worker or you’re the student you’re the teacher and that means there are certain things you do and certain things you don’t do now this is really important to building trust because actually one of the most important things about trust one of the most important sources of trust is a sense that the other person is constrained we trust somebody when we

8:01 feel like there are things this person would never do to me right so you might trust an accountant not just because he knows the tax laws but because he’s not going to sign his name to something they doesn’t think is true uh when when that’s no longer the case when you no longer can really believe that people are constrained by the institutions they’re part of but you

8:22 think they just use those institutions to elevate themselves it’s very very hard to trust them and we see that transformation from people seeing institutions they’re part of as molds and constraints to seeing them as platforms or stages you see it all over American Life obviously in politics think for example about uh about Congress being a member of Congress

8:44 means having a particular role to play but increasingly a lot of members of Congress run for office not so much to be involved in that internal legislative work is to have a particularly prominent platform in the culture War a place to stand and be seen and build a following and get a good time slot on on cable news and that means that they’re using

9:04 the institution to to promote and Elevate themselves they’re using it as a place to perform and whatever that makes them it isn’t a legislator right and in fact you find people openly saying that when they run for office I promise you I’m not going to work with the other party well Congress is a place where you work with the other party there are a lot of places in American

9:25 life where you don’t have to do that you could try to get another job but if you’re running for congress you’re running to be part of the work of an institution and when people aren’t willing to do that the institution and those people become impossible to trust we’ve seen the same kind of transformation in the presidency where our presidents think of themselves more as celebrities than as Bound by the

9:47 constraints of executive power we’ve seen it outside of politics you think about journalism as a profession with a lot of constraints and a lot of layers of of uh of of of formation but now I mean just check on Twitter you’d find a lot of journalists using the the capital of their institutions as a way to build their own following and just standing

10:09 out there on their own on a stage performing as individuals that makes them very hard to trust you see scientists do this you see corporate Executives do it ever everybody feels like the work they should be doing is culture War performance you know we support that law too or we’re for voting rights too well okay but you know you make shoes why do I care what you think

10:29 about voting rights it’s impossible now to just make shoes right you have to be out there saying what your politics are all the time and that’s what society looks like when institutions become platforms um instead of being formative venues ways of shaping people to do a particular kind of work right and you know I like to joke that

10:51 even my my donuts and my sneakers and my coffee and and what have you are part of the culture were but it’s not really that funny right they are a part of it uh they’ve made themselves part of it and it’s not funny it’s very hard now to get away from the culture war and that makes it very hard for us to live together you know we’re always going to have to live with people who don’t think the way we do and we

11:12 shouldn’t make that hard harder than it needs to be it has to be possible to work with somebody or to go to a doctor or to go to a business even if those people voted the other way than I did once that becomes impossible life in a free Society becomes impossible yeah and you know I find it personally also just very fatiguing and I was

11:33 tiring instead of just kind of constantly being bombarded by this daily and especially on social media I it’s really tiring um but but these are some great examples from the book which is just really really fascinating and so can you provide a few more examples of this Decline and maybe explain you know why it’s occurred in these institutions yeah

11:55 you know I think examples often have this shape where rather than having an internal institutional life where you work together around a common purpose institutions come to be outward facing all the time they become transparent um and all they’re doing is performing for an outside audience and so

12:17 what happens uh within a congressional committee room is really just a way of producing YouTube clips um what we find happening uh on the universe City Campus rather than the formation of the minds of the students rather than teaching and learning you find a lot of performance art a lot of

12:38 people standing and yelling standing and yelling is very different from teaching and learning they can both involve expressions of views but they’re not the same thing and when we come to think that the only purpose of every institution is in one way or another to stand and yell about oppression then it becomes very hard for our core institutions to do their essential work

12:59 and the fact is we need the work they do we need universities we need newspapers uh you know we really do we need science we need we need Corporate America we need each of these institutions to do its own job when they all instead are doing another job a kind of combination of politics and entertainment it becomes extremely

13:19 difficult for us to believe that anybody in any institution is doing anything other than trying to advance a partisan agenda and it is very hard to trust people with power in our society if it seems to us that all they’re doing is advancing their own agenda so I think the the crisis of trust that we’re living through is very deeply connected

13:41 to this idea of Institutions and we can’t really understand it unless we grasp this complicated concept of what an institution does and what it’s for and by grasping that we can also begin to see how we could turn things around how we could make things better which really does begin with ourselves as individuals operating within the institutions that we’re part of

14:01 right and and that leads us to our original question and and perhaps the most important one in this discussion right how can we restore the health and Trust of American institutions those institutions that that United are suffering real problems yeah I I think the key to that really does begin with each one of us we can’t look at this

14:22 problem and say other people are behaving badly that’s certainly true but the fact is we’re all doing this in one way or another and the way to turn it around has to begin with a very simple question that takes our institutional responsibilities seriously the question is given my role here how should I behave given that I am a parent or a

14:44 neighbor or a worker or an employer a teacher or a student given that given that I’m a member of Congress or a journalist how should I behave not just what do I want not just what am I after but given the particular role I have in this situation what should I be doing I think we all have the experience in our lives of that kind of question being very formative in a morally reinforcing

15:07 kind of way you know you’re sitting in the car and somebody cuts you off and you’re about to yell what you think about them then you realize I’m a parent and I’ve got three kids back there I’m just not going to say that that’s in a way what we should all be doing and large swaths of Our Lives now is is say well you know I’m a member of Congress maybe I just shouldn’t be saying this maybe I should actually do something

15:27 else here or I’m the president maybe my job here is to be above this particular thing and whether it’s in in the workplace whether it’s in our religious communities whether it’s in the University um or just in our in our neighborhoods we have to ask ourselves given the role that I am asked to play here what should I be doing that very small question can

15:50 be the beginning of a kind of transformation of assumptions and attitudes and then we have to demand that other people in our society ask that question too the people with real power um ask that question too and say you know I’m I’m the CEO of this company should I really be using it as a platform to show that I am uh you know in this party or that part probably not

16:13 um and and to hold people accountable for the ways in which they fail to ask that simple question because ultimately that question points to responsibility and responsibility is a lot of what we’re lacking taking ownership not only of our privileges in American life but of our obligations too that always come with them to be a citizen and a republic

16:33 is to recognize that you’ve got obligations to other people and I think a loss of of institutional responsibility often looks like a loss of that kind of sense of obligation and so we have to start with that very simple question and let it lead us in the direction of various kinds of institutional reforms that create

16:54 incentives for asking the question that create incentives for responsibility I think trust is going to be a function of demonstrated responsibility and that means the problem is not that people don’t trust institutions the problem is that the institutions are not trustworthy and the way to change that has got to be from within well that is really important suggestions and as

17:15 you’re saying you know we have rights and freedoms but we also have uh important responsibilities and duties in society so you’ve all I want to thank you very much for joining us thank you very much and thank you for joining us on this episode of scholar talks please check out our other interviews in the topics in government and Civic series on

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