> Distrust in public institutions is why we no longer live under despots. You need a balance.
People don't mainly trust despots, rather they fear them. Though they may foolishly trust the "image" of the despot when they simultaneously fear the actual apparatus that he created to maintain control.
A fraction of people still blindly trust despots. The larger that fraction is the harder it is to topple the despot. If everyone was like that then the despot would never get toppled.
To add, Democracy is more or less built around having half of all politicians actively working to reduce trust in the current government. That is intended.
I think the problem in USA has more to do with how easily people are swayed by emotional arguments. It is so easy for politicians there to cause people to lose trust in a candidate just by attacking unrelated things about them.
> I think the problem in USA has more to do with how easily people are swayed by emotional arguments. It is so easy for politicians there to cause people to lose trust in a candidate just by attacking unrelated things about them.
In my personal opinion as an American, I feel we've backslid a bit since ~2010. At that point, it seemed like any nearly argument could be won by invoking science (even where it wasn't applicable, such as metaphysical arguments about religion), and now science is merely one of "many Ways of Knowing" and perhaps a racist one at that. We've never had a complete trust in science, mind you, but even on the far right people wouldn't attack the very idea of science and objectivity (even if they had paranoid ideas about conspiracies in the science community and so on). I'm not sure the cause, but it concerns me deeply.
Distrust in public institutions is why we no longer live under despots. You need a balance.