Jeff Robbins

In a 2011 Los Angeles Times column titled “When Unity Was All-American,” writer George Skelton marked the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor by recalling a time when Americans respected those whom they elected. “What I remember most,” he recalled about America during World War II, “are home front adults pulling together, willing to sacrifice, committed to a common goal: victory. Gasoline, tires, meat, sugar and shoes, all rationed, and no one really griping. Government was the protector, not the enemy.”

Last weekend saw the anniversary of D-Day, an occasion of mind-bending courage and sacrifice by tens of thousands of Americans tasked with liberating Europe from fascists, so many of whom died in service of that task. Four generations on, it gets clearer by the year that their heroism is remembered less and less. A CBS News poll taken in 1994 found that three-quarters of Americans asked, “What does D-Day refer to?” either answered incorrectly or had no idea. And that was over 30 years ago.

Meanwhile, survey upon survey indicates that as time passes, the trust Americans have for their foundational institutions, and for one another, is badly fraying. A 2024 Pew survey found that just 22% said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing even most of the time. Overwhelming majorities mistrust the Supreme Court, Congress, elected officials generally and journalists. Over 60% of Americans held unfavorable views of the Democratic and Republican parties.

It isn’t only the civic institutions on which American democracy is constructed that engender distrust among Americans. It’s also their countrymen. Another recent Pew survey revealed that most Americans believe their fellow citizens are immoral. What’s more, we are the only country among the 25 surveyed in which polling yielded that result.

Last week was yet another in which cause for cynicism was easily found. The news came that John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor and a harsh Trump critic, agreed to plead guilty to a single count of violating the Espionage Act by retaining classified national security information when he left office. Trump has instructed the Justice Department he controls to prosecute quite a list of individuals who have criticized or opposed him, all the while decrying the fictional “weaponization” of the Justice Department under former President Joe Biden. Bolton is on that list.

On the Democratic side, Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Maine and a progressive darling, sported a Nazi tattoo for 18 years, blamed women for being raped, and published racist and homophobic tropes. He is now the subject of disclosures that he physically assaulted a woman, boasted about the Nazi tattoo that he claims he never knew was a Nazi tattoo and, by numerous accounts, conducted himself in a way that would earn him induction into the Misogyny Hall of Fame. Platner says that the only reason this evidence is emerging is that he is Against Oligarchy.

You’d like to think the cynicism trackers would have some good news one of these days.

But not with this kind of stuff.