The Quiet Erosion of Public Trust (🇺🇸 US-UK🇬🇧 Edition)

Democracies rarely lose public confidence all at once.It happens gradually: an inconvenient statistic is challenged, professional expertise becomes politicized, an agency once trusted for its independence begins sounding like the administration it serves.Eventually, citizens add a question that once seemed unnecessary:Can I trust this?In this Season 3 capstone, I look beyond the immediate controversies of the Trump presidency to something potentially more enduring—the erosion of confidence in the institutions of democratic government.From Watergate and Jimmy Carter to today’s struggle over professional government and democratic restoration, the essay asks what happens after the presidency changes hands.Laws can be rewritten. Executive orders can be rescinded. Officials can return.But trust cannot simply be ordered back into existence.And perhaps the most important measure of whether it has returned will not come from a poll.It may be whether Americans believe sufficiently in democratic government to participate in it.— Dunneagin📖 To read the text of this essay and explore the catalog, visit Civics Unhinged on Paragraph.☕ Reader editions and collected volumes—including Volumes 1, 2, 3, and The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy—are available on the Fourthwall bookshelf.Reader and listener correspondence is always welcome at [email protected]. Questions, observations, or a note on how you first stumbled into the chronicle are particularly appreciated.— F.P. Dunneagin | Civics Unhinged Get full access to ~ Civics Unhinged: Dispatches From Trumpistan ~ at dunneagin.substack.com/subscribe