> what can be done to restore trust?

given the foregoing, are you sure you want people to trust the government?

It would be nice if people could trust the outcome of the election. More specifically, it would be nice if establishment media and political figures didn't respond to this distrust with castigation.

Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.

Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.

> It would be nice if people could trust the outcome of the election.

Well I don’t know, in 2017 a professor asked us if democracy was in crisis and I thought “its never been healthier”. For the first time I can remember, people were actually trying to hold the President accountable for something. Now it is true that most of that was driven by the fact that they didn’t like who the President happened to be at the time, so maybe we can get that to work in our favor again.

> More specifically, it would be nice if establishment media and political figures didn't respond to this distrust with castigation.

Well on the one hand I agree with that, but on the other hand this is the result of some complicated interactions (no matter how you view the facts on the ground). If their distrust is actually motivated and harmful then I’m sure its not an act for those establishment types to castigate it. On the other hand such activity is sure to increase distrust. So we’re stuck again.

> Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.

I agree generally

> Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.

I agree

The plan was enacted over the weekend... Only you never saw it.

Biden, his cabinet, and tons of both Dem and Republican senators and other officials were arrested. Proof of their vast crimes was shown. They were court martialed and found guilty.

However, it was decided this was too much for the American people to accept. Overturning the election and showing the crimes of these politicians could lead to Civil War.

So an agreement was reached: Biden and other deep state elements wI'll be allowed to move freely and serve their terms. President Trump would "concede" and leave office. But this is all for appearances.

Behind the scenes, Donald J. Trump is still President. This plan, known as SHADOWPREZ, was seen as a last resort. But it worked.

Anything that happens in the next 4 years is actually President Trumps doing.

Was this just creative writing or are you saying that that line of thought is out there and some nutcases actually believe it?

I've seen it (i.e., first-hand) in private groups on Facebook.

It's a copypasta[1] that's been making the rounds on the internet. It's a tongue-in-cheek way of poking fun at Q supporters, not some real delusions the OP is having.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copypasta

That scenario has potential to be developed in to an interesting novel or movie.

Now Trump is the deep state.

Clearly the steps being taken are not restoring trust in political institutions.

As I think you've gathered, I'm coming from the "the trust is already gone" side.

I wasn't inclined to reflexively trust gov, even before this debacle. That's neither here nor there. I try to keep my bias out of it. Otherwise, someone from the opposing spectrum will take it as an invite for a useless argument.

What steps can practically be taken to restore trust for the average person, who might not be as cynical as myself?

Nothing at this point.

Nixon killed any real trust in the 70s generation that raised the 90s kids, and Bush v. Gore, the war in Iraq, and Obama era drone strikes on US citizens without trial have killed any real trust in the 90s kids who raised the current generation. The current adult generation is having that killed by what is going on right now.

There's been three generations of general distrust (if not outright cynical belief that the government is _always_ lying), and that's not going to come back any time soon. I'm not sure there is anything that you can do beyond radical transparency and time.

The government is made of people. It's inherently fallible and manages a lot of power. It's a recipe for disaster.

We're at this intermediate stage because the previous solution was to just give all the power to a bunch of people, likely the ones that killed more people.

Using elections instead of military power is an improvement over middle age, but you still have a bunch of people with a lot of power.

There's absolutely zero trust possible.

Maybe after western social democracies wreck the economy for the umpteenth time, people will try to remove power from governments until they disappear.

It's not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We've spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity-based system back, and the other half wants a tech-humanism that is anathema to the first half.

If either side is genuine about their beliefs, a first step is probably enforcing single-issue bills in Congress.

> It’s not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We’ve spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity back

“Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were campaigning against the single largest Christian denomination in the country (Catholicism) as vigorously as against non-Christians, and many of our key religious freedom rulings were a result of Christian or Christian-adjacent groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses figure particularly prominently here) resisting impositions by more dominant Christian groups. Kennedy got much the same kind of attacks for being an (actual) Catholic as were directed at Obama for being (supposedly) a Muslim.

And if the short history in America were not enough, look at the troubled history of Christian-Christian relations in Europe and the Near East.

That's fair, I'm just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was, and I think Jesus factors in there somewhere, in name. As a Catholic myself, I know well that actual religious belief isn't the main driver. Maybe I'm wrong and there never was an American mythos, but there's a palpable sense of change that isn't just outright racism.

> That’s fair, I’m just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was

The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.

>> The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

> It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.

In our & our parents lifetimes, we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.

America's divides have been terribly vicious in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War), and some of the current things that divide us even have their roots in that era.

> we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.

And even then, the Civil Rights and Anti-War and other internal conflicts of the 1950s-1970s weren't insignificant.