#1589 Loss of Respect for American Institutions

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay Jenkinson interviews Dr. Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley about loss of respect for sixteen American institutions, some public, and some private: the police, the church, the Supreme Court, Higher Education, the FBI, the presidency, and, of course Congress. How did we lose faith? Has there been moral and ethical slippage in the last fifty years or are we just more aware of the imperfections of these institutions thanks to 24/7 media, including social media? What role has demagoguery played in the plummeting of respect for our institutions? How do we restore respect and trust in our basic institutions and how likely are we to see those reforms?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to this week's program with Dr Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley.
0:09.4	Dr Brady is the Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Berkeley.
0:16.0	He has turned as Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy.
0:21.0	He's the author of a number of books including letting the people
0:23.5	decide dynamics of a Canadian election, voice inequality, civic volunteerism in
0:29.3	American politics and so on. And a recent issue of Daedalus, you know Daedalus as in
0:34.1	Icarus and Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and
0:37.2	Sciences Fall 2022 institutions experts and the loss of trust.
0:43.0	This is one of the themes that I'm really
0:45.0	passionately interested in.
0:47.0	When I was growing up, there was high regard for the church,
0:49.0	high regard for the police,
0:50.0	high regard for the FBI,
0:51.0	high regard for the judicial department, high regard for the FBI, high regard for the judicial department, high regard for the
0:54.4	presidency, high regard for newspapers, high regard for science.
0:58.6	Not much high regard for Congress, that's never been very high, That's an American habit of skepticism, but high regard for almost
1:06.0	everything else. And now there's very low respect and faith in those institutions. And how did that happen?
1:12.0	Well, there's Watergate, and's Vietnam and then there's the church Senate hearings about America's attempts and sometimes successful to assassinate foreign leaders,
1:23.5	colossal sexual predation scandal in the Catholic Church,
1:27.1	but not just in the Catholic Church,
1:28.8	and the paramilitaryization of our police systems, we get it, right?
1:33.8	We all get it, that there is ample reason to be cynical,
	...

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