Another group is speaking out, too: people who believe the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas was staged, and that students like Gonzalez are actors, not victims. Far-right provocateurs have focused on David Hogg, a 17-year-old student who had the self-possession to interview his classmates while the shootings were taking place. Hogg’s composure in interviews, his criticism of President Donald Trump, and the fact that his father is a retired FBI agent have fueled a conspiracy theory that claims Hogg has been paid—by Hillary Clinton, George Soros, or favorite figures among conspiracy theorists—to promote an anti-gun agenda. Supported by media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, the conspiracy theories have received a big boost from YouTube, with its algorithms that push videos targeting Hogg to the top of trending video lists. [...]
In the mid-1960s, 77 percent of Americans reported trust in the U.S. government to do the right thing all or most of the time, according to surveys from Gallup and the National Elections Survey. Asked the same question in a Gallup poll late last year, only 18 percent reported trusting the government. This isn’t a Trump-specific phenomenon. Trust has been falling in the United States for decades, and it hit comparably low points during the Clinton and Obama presidencies. [...]
Despite having good reason not to trust the political process, the students are doing what we’ve been taught to do as citizens: tell our legislators what we think, and if they don’t listen, demand to be heard. So far, that’s not gone especially well. One group of students traveled to Tallahassee to meet with legislators and instead watched 71 Republican legislators block debate on bills to limit high-capacity magazines. A town meeting with legislators, televised by CNN, went little better, as politicians squirmed uncomfortably and failed to answer the blunt questions put forward by students. [...]
Mistrust is expensive. When people worry that the media is being manipulated, it takes work to get to a set of facts we trust, and more work to get to a common set of facts we can discuss or debate. When people worry legislators aren’t listening to citizens, but to corporations and lobby groups, they move beyond letters and phone calls to protests and rallies. Two decades ago, the author Frank Fukayama posited that high-trust societies were wealthier than low-trust ones because fiscal transaction costs were lower. As Americans experience an increasingly paralyzed and dysfunctional federal government, it’s clear that mistrust is raising the costs of representative democracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment