For a brief period, early in my childhood, I lived in a tiny apartment with my mother, her second husband, a pair of kids each. This was the early ‘90s, and I vaguely remember being in kindergarten at the time.
Our apartment complex was one of those highway-adjacent, stacked situations that most resembles a fleshed out Tetris “L” wrapping around—in retrospect—a surprisingly clean parking lot, complete with a tall and gleaming flag pole that jutted out of a centralized island of well manicured grass.
I don’t remember exactly when it started, but every morning, being the oldest kid and the only one in school, I would stand outside alone waiting for the school bus, not far from the flag pole, and watch as this older gentleman—I believe he was the property manager—carefully unfurl an American flag, fasten it to the halyard, and carefully raise it to the top, always graceful and never in a rush.
At some point, one of these mornings, after being captivated a number of times by the sight of this, I began saluting the flag with my little right hand, something which I have to assume I picked up from a TV show because this was just before the internet started becoming commonplace in schools, much less runty apartments housing kids on the free lunch program.
This I remember vividly: the gentleman and I never exchanged words, but the first time I did that salute, on my own volition, I had never seen an adult looked so pleased as that man beaming wide at me, this weirdo kid who didn’t really know what I was doing when I made that gesture every morning.
I vaguely recall my mother marveling over a conversation she had with Mr. Ramirez (the flag-hoisting gentleman) about the saluting because, again, kinda weird for a small kid to be into that.
To at least one naïve six year-old’s eyes, the American flag was absolutely gorgeous, albeit full of context and complexity which I would only learn much later.
It also strangely gave me a feeling that I couldn’t quite place at the time and which I only understood later to be: a sense of belonging and security. My parents were a godawful mess, home life was definitely bad on many levels, and this little morning ritual became something of a small celebration. School was a safe place, with structure and empathy and wonder, and that bit of ceremony every morning was a checkpoint-of-sorts.
In a sad way, the American flag and the gentleman pulling it up with profound grace and the school bus arriving to our apartment complex all told me that everything was gonna be okay. There was a whole world out there waiting for me to explore it, far beyond the confines of that shitty little apartment with all its misery, full of some kind of goodness I had to assume was there.
More than anything, that expectation of structure became a weird catalyst for my interest in American government. I loved reading about our history—not always a complete or honest history at that reading level, mind you—and the political leaders who had shaped our path as a nation, for better or worse.
I learned about civics early on. I devoured books in my school library about elections and Congress and presidents and found, quite quickly, that every question answered led to ten more questions in my growing noggin.
And like any committed young political dork, it became easier over time to see patterns in our government — not just the rhythms of electoral changeover but knowing bits of information about our government that were available to all but read by few.
Having lived in our nation’s capital for the past 15 years or so, with tens of thousands of other equally dorky people my age obsessed with government and politics and history, I have noticed over time what can only be described as the slow and incredibly painful devolution of the faith we once held in our institutions.
I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill corruption and nonsense. It wasn’t as though any of us who had read a few serious presidential biographies had arrived in D.C. expecting a glittering presentation of democratic virtues and elected officials dedicated to preserving them. The old adage about “laws and sausages” was easy enough to respect as a warning, and up to that point, there had certainly been brutal chapters in our history—slavery, Civil War, suffrage, internment of Japanese Americans, Jim Crow, etc.—that stripped away much of the unnecessary varnish.
No, I’m talking about the shock of watching our nation increasingly fail to maintain even the already low standards of institutional trust, the collapse of those predictable rhythms in the machinations of political power, the invariably problematic but broadly expected outcomes of a system that was broken, to be sure, but very far from shattered.
For nearly five decades, Gallup has surveyed public confidence in our institutions, and just over the past 20 years—2002 being the starting point, I turned 16 that fall—trust has eroded dramatically across the board, as reflected in the combined total of “great deal/quite a lot” responses from everyday Americans:
Organized religion has gone from 45 percent to 31 percent.
Trust in the Supreme Court has been cleanly halved: 50 percent to 25 percent.
Congress has taken a particularly dismal trend: 29 percent to a mere 7 percent.
Television news has dropped from 35 percent to 11 percent, and newspapers have slid 35 percent to 16 percent.
The Presidency, as an institution, went from a high of 58 percent to this year’s 23 percent, its lowest mark in the history of the annual poll, going back consistently to 1991. To be fair, that was in the aftermath of 9/11, so, perhaps the previous year’s 48 percent is more accurate, but still: that’s more than half.
Even the military, the country’s most trusted federal institution, is at its lowest level of trust in more than 20 years.
Gallup has asked Americans another question semi-frequently since 1979: “In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?”
If you scan through the timeline of reported surveys, it’s easy to notice where low numbers in American satisfaction coincided with less-than-great moments in our recent history (some examples): 12 percent, 19 percent, and 17 percent over the time of Pres. Carter’s twin crises — the oil shortage and the detainment of American hostages by the Iranian government during 1979-81; 14 percent in the summer of 1992 over recession struggles; a stark 7 percent at the height of the Great Recession in 2008; and 13 percent in the summer of 2020, as the nation grappled with COVID lockdowns and massive protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by law enforcement and Trump’s steadfast incompetence in the face of all of it.
The latest figure is 13 percent, surveyed over the first three weeks of June, down from 36 percent a little over a year ago, right as Pres. Biden implemented the final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. It’s important to note this latest survey was completed just four days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, so the next iteration of these figures will certainly be a fascinating gut punch.
Those numbers give us a snapshot of context for this era, but they’re wholly unnecessary to feel that pervasive sense of uneasiness throughout American society. It’s not just that times are bad; it’s that it feels as though there’s an increasing chance things may not get better if something doesn’t change.
Ardent students of American politics have always been able to point to the Pendulum Theory as a crude way of illustrating where our government has come from and where it’s going: basically, you wait long enough, the balance of power will shift from left-of-center to right-of-center and back and forth over time. The pendulum may stall or take its sweet time, but it always comes back. It also suggests Americans, in free and fair elections, will usually split party control between the White House and Congress.
For example, even though Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 crushed their Democratic opponents in three consecutive presidential elections, Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill held an iron grip on his chamber during their tenures. The ‘90s saw the inverse: Pres. Clinton became the first Democratic president properly reelected since FDR (two consecutive top-of-ticket victories) while the GOP took over the House for the first time in 40 years (and held it).
Here’s another one: the party of a first-term president almost always loses seats in the House during Midterms. The sole recent exception was Pres. Bush in 2002, whose party gained eight more seats on the strength of his post-9/11 approval rating.
There are countless examples of these patterns, and in a strange way, they can be somewhat comforting in especially dark times. The Bush Administration, as horrific and brutal as it was, still carried the implication of the pendulum swinging back at some point. And swing back it did: Democrats regained Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008.
After the shock of 2016, the pendulum prevailed again: Trump’s party lost Congress in 2018 in what was recognized as both a backlash against his terrible policies and as part of the long pattern of the president’s party negotiating the public’s desire for split power.
But for the first time in my life, I am at the point where I must fully question whether the pendulum exists anymore, and it scares me.
That will be discussed in Part II on Friday.
Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but if you feel so moved to support my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Founding Member at $210.
Midnight in America, Part 1