This is an excerpt I posted as a comment at Steve Boriss’s futureofnews site, but worth repeating here. It’s from 1983, and it’s Theodore Lowi reviewing Seymour Martin Lipset and Bill Schneider’s trust epic The Confidence Gap. I think Lowi has probably the neatest re-framing the whole trust conundrum:

If the so-called confidence gap is relabeled distrust, then I for one need to replace malaise with another diagnostic concept. Reaching back into the American tradition for such a concept, I find vigilance – the vigilance that has something to do with the price of liberty. Distrust, which is as well grounded in the survey data as the confidence gap, and vigilance, which is just as logical a diagnostic concept as malaise, seem to be appropriate if not downright healthy responses to the rise of big institutions.

In the past 50 years, the United States has emerged from an 18th-century system of weak national government into a modern, massive national presence. Mainstream ideology, once deeply anti-statist, now holds that the state is virtuous. In the last 50 years national government not only became big; it adopted policies whose purpose was to underwrite most of the other big institutions, so that we now have socialism for the organized and capitalism for the unorganized. So different is this modern system from the system preceding it that it deserves to be called The Second Republic.

All the survey data on which Mr. Lipset and Mr. Schneider relied to document their confidence gap can also be used to demonstrate that the American public has responded to The Second Republic with appropriate attitudes. In other words, although it took two or three decades, the American people during the 1960s and 1970s began to see their system for what it really is.

As Mr. Lipset and Mr. Schneider say, the American people do not reject their system; they see it as a source of hope and of very great danger. The reputed decline in public confidence or trust can be seen as the emergence of a mature, modern citizenry appropriate to a mature, modern state. In such a situation, there would be cause for real panic about a real malaise only if the survey measures showed no confidence gap at all.