You tell me it's the institutions

Last week Yuval Levin had a piece in the New York Times saying that there had been a "collapse of our confidence in institutions — public, private, civic and political."  He proposed an explanation:  "we lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role of teaching the people within it to be trustworthy" and that most institutions are no longer doing this.    He mentioned politics, "the sciences, ... law and ... other professions meant to offer expertise," "the academy," religion, and "artists and athletes."  He then said "the military is the most conspicuous exception and also the most unabashedly formative of our national institutions — molding men and women who clearly take a standard of behavior and responsibility seriously." 

I had a post a few years ago about confidence in various institutions, and it has declined for most since the 1970s, with the military as the one clear exception.  So that seems to fit with Levin's account.  But I also had a few posts about a lesser-known series of data about the "honesty and ethical standards" of various occupations and professions.  There have been some declines, but more increases.  For example, evaluation of the standards of funeral home directors and realtors have generally increased since the 1970s; lawyers declined from the 1970s to about 1990, but have increased since then.  In this group, the military no longer seems so exceptional. 

That suggests another explanation, which I implied in my earlier posts:  confidence has declined in institutions that are connected to politics, especially national politics.  Most of the "big" institutions--education, business, religion, etc. are involved in politics, either because they taking sides or because they are subject of political controversies.  People don't like political conflict, so as polarization has increased, confidence in these institutions gets pulled down as well.  The military is unusual because it has a strong tradition of staying out of partisan politics and because both parties avoid criticizing it.  Although Democrats tend to favor lower military spending, they rarely make negative statements about the military--they just say that we already have the strongest military in the world.  As a result, the military doesn't get pulled down by association with political controversy--it may even gain because it seems to be above politics. 

The larger issue here is that Levin holds that political polarization is a symptom of a general social crisis:  "We can see that in everything from vicious partisan polarization to rampant culture-war resentments to the isolation, alienation and despair that have sent suicide rates climbing and driven an epidemic of opioid abuse."  The alternative, which seems more convincing to me, is that political polarization is about politics, not a symptom of something else, and that there are specific social problems but no general social crisis.