Trust the saying goes, once lost is not easily regained.

I think most of us trust each other fairly well. We trust our family, our friends, and the people we do business with on a local level. So much so that when we experience betrayal at that level it is a shattering experience.

Of course most of us have acquaintances or family we keep at arm’s length because we don’t trust them fully. And perhaps we know people who are by nature suspicious and untrusting of pretty much everybody. We tend to avoid them too because there’s something “not quite right” about them.

But while we enjoy high levels of trust in our personal relationships we can’t say the same about the institutions we deal with on a daily basis.

Studies over the past 60 years at least have shown declining levels of trust in every institution that matters to us: government, news media, medicine, the justice system, the electoral process, and the military.

According to Pew Research Center since the beginning of the Johnson administration (1964) trust in the federal government “to do the right thing almost always or most of the time” has declined from 77 percent to 20 percent at present. There have been ups and downs, briefly peaking during the elder Bush administration (1991) at 47 percent and the younger Bush administration (2001) at 60 percent, but the trend line has been downward throughout this century and quite possibly has never been lower.

I can remember when doctors and lawyers were neck and neck for most prestigious profession.

Now according to Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research just 34 percent of Americans said they “had great confidence in medical leaders,” a decline of more than 75 percent since 1966.

(And what an odd way to put it, “medical leaders.” As if the medical system was your boss rather than professionals you do business with.)

According to Gallup polls only seven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” of trust in the media, 29 percent say they have “not very much” trust, and 34 percent have “none at all.”

And most alarmingly according to an Ipsos poll commissioned by ABC news, only 20 percent of Americans have confidence in the honesty of elections.

By party affiliation that’s 13 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats, but for different reasons. Republicans are more likely to believe in electoral fraud, Democrats in voter suppression.

The military still enjoys a higher level of trust than any of the others, but is now at 56 percent, down from 70 percent in 2018, according to the Reagan National Defense Survey.

Of course the next question that arises is, can we trust the polls?

Especially since right up to election day 2016 some trusted polling organizations were calling it 97 percent for Hillary Clinton.

That does seem to be just a tad outside the margin of error.

What this means for the country as a whole we don’t know — but it’s probably not good.

The good news is, the closer we are to our institutions the more we trust them. Trust in local government is still high. And my impression is we still personally trust each other regardless of our differences of opinion. I know people I disagree with on almost everything, but I’d still lend them money if they were hurting.

As long as we have that I think we’ll be OK. But if we lose it…

— Steve Browne is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent