Who do you Distrust?

Photo by roya ann miller on Unsplash

Why does the country seem so divided right now?

I have friends who see the same news item, and come to completely different conclusions. Part of this is how the issue is portrayed in the media.

One example? This past Thursday, the Justice Department dropped all charges against General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security advisor. The headlines on the New York Times?

“Justice Department Drops Case Against Michael Flynn, Extraordinary Move After Two Guilty Pleas”, and an editorial headlined “Don’t Forget, Michael Flynn Pleaded Guilty, Twice”.

At the same time, on Fox News, the headlines read:

“COMING UP EMPTY, Top Obama officials had no ‘empirical evidence’ of collusion, once-secret transcripts show”, and “GREG JARRETT: Ending Michael Flynn prosecution exposes and destroys Trump-Russia collusion hoax”.

Same event, completely different conclusions as to what it means. It’s like one is a funhouse mirror image of the other, and your opinion as to which is real and which is the distortion depends on which side of the red/blue line you fall.

But even disregarding media input, I see people look at published information and still have completely different interpretations. Are the numbers of recorded deaths as a result of COVID-19 understated or overstated? Democrats and liberals point to the lack of testing, delayed reporting, and the likelihood that some are dying without diagnoses, and conclude the numbers are really much higher than we hear. Republicans and conservatives note that many who are listed as victims of COVID-19 had various co-morbidities that may have been the actual cause of death, and hear that hospitals may receive more money under Medicare if they report a death as due to COVID-19, and conclude the numbers are in fact lower than the official figures.

Needless to say, we just don’t have the data right now to know which is the case. Most likely, there is both overreporting and underreporting, but we really can’t tell right now which is greater. As more data becomes available, a clearer picture may become evident. But in the meantime, I see my friends quite ready to accept one set of these factors while being entirely skeptical about the other set, again all based on whether they fall into the red or blue camp.

Millions of gallons of ink, both real and metaphorical, have been spilled analyzing the red/blue split in the US. And it likely goes without saying that there are many forces behind this division, and not all that are typically grouped together in fact pull in the same direction. Religion, gender issues, racial issues, regional culture and traditions, family background, education and financial status, among many others, all play into how one views the world and what policies one prefers. I am not a sociologist, and will leave it to the professionals to truly seek to understand this phenomenon.

But I would like to propose a factor that seems, to me, to be a defining characteristic that heavily influences where one falls on the political spectrum.

Who do you distrust?

No, not who do you trust. Who do you distrust?

Think of a problem that needs to be addressed which involves either business or the free market, but is also in some way already regulated by the government. Maybe it’s automobile safety, or pharmaceutical prices, or employee wages.

Do you distrust business? Then you likely think the right answer is more regulation. Do you distrust the government? Then you instead probably think existing regulation is in fact the problem.

Examples are too easy to come up with. Take the 2008 financial crisis. Whose fault was that? If you’re conservative, you point to low interest rates by the Federal Reserve, the market distortion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and other government policies that promoted home ownership. The lesson is then obvious: get government out of the housing market, and the financial crisis never would have happened.

If you’re liberal, on the other hand, the fault lies with banks that engaged in predatory lending, securitizing their loan assets to shift risk to others, and insufficient capital and regulatory oversight. So again, there is a clear path forward: more regulation to punish banks that defraud their customers while ensuring they maintain adequate risk management, capital and liquidity.

Does the conservative necessarily “trust” banks and other businesses? Maybe not. I have one friend who worked in a senior staff position in the House on the Republican side, and has had no end of problems with companies. If someone’s airline ticket will be mistakenly cancelled, someone’s guaranteed car rental fail to be available, or someone’s internet mysteriously stop working, it’s him. He seems to magnetically attract these problems. Yet, and even though he worked in government for much of his life, he implicitly distrusts government solutions to problems. Thus, he is and remains a Republican.

Does a liberal necessarily “trust” government? No, but their distrust of business and the consequences of an unregulated free market is far greater.

So, they see the same problem, but come to completely different solutions. For one, the answer is less government, while for the other, it is more government.

You can apply this to many issues of our day. Gun control? We need new laws banning firearms and making registration and background checks mandatory; or the laws we already have strip away the ability of law-abiding citizens to protect themselves, and any new laws would be unfair and do nothing to reduce violence. Health care? We need government-provided universal health care; or we need to get rid of government regulations that make things worse and open up competition to get cheaper, better health care. The COVID-19 crisis? We need to maintain laws shutting down the country to limit the spread of the virus; or we need to open up the country and let folks make voluntary decisions to protect themselves.

Sometimes, this implicit bias affects what facts we decide to believe. Should nations take regulatory actions to mitigate climate change? If you’re a liberal, you tend to support more governmental regulation, and accept the research that tells us climate change is real. If you’re a conservative, you usually don’t support more governmental regulation, and are more likely to view such research skeptically (and be more willing to accept evidence to the contrary).

Now, as I said, there are a lot of other factors that go into one’s position on any of these or other issues, and no one factor is always determinative. Some people are one-issue voters: for example, they may largely prefer the policy proposals of the Democratic Party, but because of their opposition to abortion, always vote Republican. Many conservatives do accept the science behind climate change. And some issues, like immigration, seem to be driven almost entirely by other factors. But if you tell me whether you distrust government or business more, I can probably guess where you fall on many issues.

But here’s the thing. Both government and business are worthy of some trust and some distrust. It really isn’t either/or. Sometimes laws and regulations are just stupid, and have consequences that were either unintended or downright harmful. And sometimes businesses, and even entire industries, do things that hurt third parties and even the economy at large, for which the operation of the free market has no cure.

So, the next time you encounter an issue and have a reaction, I have a suggestion. Think for a moment: who do I distrust here? Is that distrust really warranted? Are there facts that support my distrust, or is it just my knee-jerk reaction? Then take a look at the facts, to the extent you can without bias, and see where that leads.

If more of us did this, really did this, I think we just might see a little less of the division that currently plagues our nation.