Reality in America, and our perception of it, appear to be two very different things
President Biden has a public approval rating just shy of 40%. Not very good. But better — in most cases, far better — than the public’s perception of Congress, the Supreme Court, American medical care, churches, public schools, universities, banks, unions, big business and tech companies.
Of Gallop’s annual survey of American institutions, only small business and the military exceed 50% approval. Two more divergent entities are hard to imagine, but their relative approval rate makes perfect sense, as you’ll see.
For the most part though, we have become a nation that hates everything.
Sometimes the public’s crisis of confidence is for good reason. The Supreme Court has had individual justices in its history who were reviled, but Americans trusted it as an institution to closely and consistently follow the law. Today’s court has been packed with political activists who ignore precedent and wobble wildly from one decision to the next, often contradicting its own previous legal reasoning.
In 1999, prior to the court’s political drift that began with Bush v. Gore, nearly 30% of Americans had a “great deal” of trust in the court, with another 51% expressing general approval. So it's small wonder those who have a great deal of faith in the court today languish in single digits.
But why the deep unpopularity of the medical profession or public schools, two institutions that produce generally successful results? Most kids graduating from public schools are reasonably equipped to begin the next chapter of their lives; most people who visit the doctor end up feeling better. So why would two-thirds of the country give the medical profession failing marks, and why would three-quarters of America be disillusioned with public schools?
The answer, of course, has nothing to do with their performance. The answer is that advertising works. When Lee Atwater turbocharged negative political advertising nearly 40 years ago, we all assumed that before long it would lose its effectiveness because people would get sick of it. Apparently not.
Our social media channels took very little time at all to devolve from photos of our dessert into a populist ad agency, filling our screens day after day after day with negative messaging.
If, every day, you are deluged with attacks on public schools, it’s easy to become obsessed with nebulous wokeness, trans kids on the softball team and Critical Race Theory, that they don’t even teach — forgetting that schools are far more focused on teaching kids to read and write and learn skills in chemistry, biology, math and the trades that will be foundational for a good, productive life.
Day after day (hour after hour, really) doctors were attacked during COVID for — the gall — wanting to save lives. Doctors and nurses at great personal sacrifice put their lives on the line, working to the point of exhaustion. The government and the pharmaceutical industry turned around a vaccine in record time, protecting millions of people. Indeed, many of those who died were the ones who took to Facebook blathering about how COVID was all a big hoax.
Commentators have started noticing the disconnect between the way things are in America, and the way we think they are. The economy is on a historic roll, yet 45% of Americans say it’s poor and 63% say it's getting worse. Crime is dropping precipitously (property crime is the lowest it’s been since 1961) yet 80% believe it’s going up.
Notably, pollsters are revealing an enormous gap between an individual’s personal situation and their view of the nation as a whole. Their economic condition is fine, but they believe America as a whole is one big line to a soup kitchen. Crime isn’t an issue where they live, but they’re sure the nation as a whole is a lawless, dystopian hellscape.
Foreign disinformation specialists trying to weaken America are responsible for much of this. The person you see on Facebook named “Barb” from Ordway, Col., is more likely to be “Ivan” from Leningrad.
Yet much of the negativity is homespun. We’ve seen the Sinclair company buy up local television stations, then focus their news departments into piping out crime stories around the clock.
Whatever your political tastes, a dramatization of your fears — be it police brutality or an immigrant murderer — is just a social media scroll away.
Now consider, why is small business the institution in which Americans have the most faith? Because it might be the lone institution that isn’t bombarded daily with negativity. For one thing, there’s no point trying to make political hay out of a three-store hardware chain that no one outside of your county has heard about. And, two, they seldom make a scratch on the national consciousness.
So when you see negative poll numbers, remember that in 2024, 40% might be about as good as it gets.
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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: These days in America, we seem to hate everything. Should we?
