Dare I say it, my respect and trust of institutions and the people in them is badly tanking.
And so is the respect and trust of the majority of Americans. That can’t be a good thing and it is worth exploring ‘why’.
Says Pew Research: “Today, 29% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they trust government just about always or most of the time, compared with 9% of Republicans and Republican-leaners”.
And last month, a Quinnipiac University poll “found 30% of registered voters approved of the Supreme Court while 59% disapproved”.
Today, disturbingly, only 61% of adults believe the Biden victory in 2020 was legitimate. The rest, almost 40%, don’t trust the results.
Those are hardly encouraging statistics.
Much has been made of the signoffs by Justices Bryer, Kagan, and Sotomayer in their angry 60-page dissent from the majority decision in the Supreme Court landmark abortion case of Dobbs, overturning Roe which ended with this statement:
“With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.”
What’s missing is the one gracious word that can traditionally be found at the end of Supreme Court dissents, symbolic of polite disagreement among different jurists as to how they interpret the law and the Constitution, “We respectfully dissent.”
‘Respect’ has been lost.
The absence of ‘respectfully’ speaks volumes of the fierce philosophical and, I suspect, personal divide on the court, a divide similar to the red and blue one that plagues the country.
How else could the non-respectful dissenters skewer the right-wing Justices who wished to interpret the Constitution using ‘originalism’, imagining how its authors perceived the issues when writing the original document than to dissent but without respect.
The dissenters argued that only ‘men’ ratified the document, men to whom equality for women was not a prime consideration.
How much is the growing lack of trust in our institutions the result of a reasonable assessment of performance and how much is it the result of our leaders’ signal comments?
How are we to respect the Supreme Court when President Biden, visibly upset by the court’s recent ruling on affirmative action says that this is not a ‘normal’ court, and it has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history”?
‘Politico’ summed up the national angst calling attention to a “deep well of people in this country who are sure the system is not working for them.”
In the world of legislators where courtesy often trumps outrage, the exceptions to the rule are two of MAGA world’s biggest stars Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Col).
For media attention they continually play a ‘can you top this’ messy feud game which recently burst into public view when Rep. Taylor Greene on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, called Rep. Boebert a “little bitch” to her face, instead of behind her back which would have been more usual for politicians.
It’s a bit hard to have respect for this elegant exchange when two of the nation’s representatives, instead of doing anything productive or in the nation’s interest, got into a vulgar public slanging match.
House Rules for the US Congress require members to conduct themselves in a manner that reflects creditably on the Congress.
Neither of these ladies would seem to be obeying them.
Respect has even disappeared from movie theaters. Social media is full of accounts of drunken outbursts, public nudity and nonstop cellphone use disrupting packed theaters.
The Washington Post reports “amid the “Barbenheimer” boom, there have been numerous reports of disruptive behavior.”
Is nothing sacred?
Ex-president Donald Trump’s call-out as a finale to an Independence Day rally speech that this is “the most dangerous time in the history of our country” and only he can save the nation, is hardly a confidence builder.
Nor are the special counsel’s charges in the recent ‘must read’ criminal indictment Trump of making “knowingly false claims appear legitimate” and creating “an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Can we ever regain the respect and trust, which was once the glue which held together a diverse population with myriad differing backgrounds and strong conflicting opinions?
What the indictment is about is the effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power through free and fair elections, a bedrock function of the United States federal government, one which is built on trust and respect.
Democracy is at issue here, nothing less.
The 2024 election will be the first national test of whether trust in free and fair elections remains as the foundational principle of American democracy or whether we must descend into a dystopian world of unbridled vulgarity with the loss of respect and trust in our institutions and one another?
Tens of millions of voters will become the jury and deliver the ultimate verdict.
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