Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
No worthwhile human relationship can flourish absent trust. Without trust, people will not come together in friendship, work, marriage, or faith. Love cannot exist where trust is absent, nor can freedom, nor can any form of human society beyond slavery.
In a harsh and dangerous world, we each strive to survive in isolation. Such lonely struggle produces a life that, as Thomas Hobbs once said is, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Only when another individual demonstrates that they are trustworthy can we lower our guard in relation to them. Only then can we genuinely cooperate. Trust is indispensable in making any collection of individuals come together to become more than the sum of their parts.
This is why the most important quality of any social institution is its legitimacy: its intrinsic right to exist, its moral right to rule. Within personal relationships, friends must be true, spouses faithful, and colleagues dependable. In government, no one can inspire positive devotion without being seen as legitimate.
Illegitimate governments always fail because, sooner or later, they are revealed to be nothing more than a group of thugs who wield power by brute force. Such anarchy always collapses under the stresses of mutual suspicion, factional strife, and attacks from within and outside. Sometimes, like in Somalia and the South Bronx, a roiling chaos becomes perpetual.
This is why it is crucial for any social institution, especially government, to be legitimate. Only then will people offer the trust and loyalty necessary for all stakeholders to work together. Only then can a mob of individuals form a society, a culture, or a civilization.
Monarchies acquire legitimacy by associating themselves with a religion which asserts that the royal government is divinely ordained. Theocracies dispense with a separate royalty, consolidating all authority in the priesthood. Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist totalitarianisms are just different variations of theocracy. In all authoritarianism, a shared belief confers legitimacy.
Our American Republic has always been an especially productive and coherent society because we rely upon citizens and our elected officials to be trustworthy. Elected officials have a limited authority within a narrow scope. Each takes an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This oath is to ensure that liberty will endure the perils faced by every generation.
Citizens have God-given and inalienable rights, granting a scope to American liberty that is truly shocking when measured against those enjoyed within the rest of the Free World. Our First Amendment assures us that our right to express trumps the wishes of others to silence dissent. Our Second Amendment entrusts the individual citizen to preserve life and freedom, even with deadly force.
All of this is because we trust one another to behave constitutionally, lawfully, rationally, and ethically. Elected officials and citizens, Americans all, are free only because we trust that the vast majority of us will responsibly exercise our liberty.
This is why our current moment in the United States is so acutely perilous. For decades, public trust in our institutions has been squandered by certain elected officials, political movements, Federal and State bureaucracies, intelligence and security services, media and schools, and even by many in our churches. A critical mass of trust has been lost.
The fanaticism and mental illness that provoked the assassination attempt on President Trump is bad. The rank incompetence and apparent cover-up related to this horrific event, perpetrated by officials like the Secret Service’s former director, Kimberly Cheatle, is worse. The bizarre behavior of many of these officials before, during, and after the shooting comprise the raw material for every type of conspiracy theory about what really happened, who did it, and why.
The result is that, more than at any time since 1861, we citizens do not trust one another to be fair and rational. We do not trust our government to be honest with us, or to impartially fulfill their Constitutional responsibilities. We do not trust our elected officials and public servants to act in the national interest, fearing that instead they will abuse their trust to serve their own personal interests at our expense.
We no longer trust, as a free people must. Unless we citizens elect officials who will repair this trust, and unless we each hold them accountable, we cannot expect to long remain free.
