Conservative Values, Trust, and the Prospects for Democratic Renewal

There is a crisis of trust in America’s governing institutions. 

We see it in the numbers. In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Today, that number is 17 percent.  

The trust deficit represents more than dissatisfaction with policies or leaders. Democratic governance is increasingly experienced as something done to people by faraway elites, rather than something done for and by the people. Public remedies too often fail to address citizens’ concerns, or worse, inhibit their ability to act, adapt, and solve problems on their own. As trust erodes, respect for democratic norms wanes, and strongman politics gains ground. And all this creates the conditions in which a polarized media stokes the flames that have Americans actively fearing and hating one another.

At the same time, it bears remembering that the loudest, most illiberal voices in our politics and culture do not represent the views, sentiments, and norms of ordinary citizens. This reminder is especially important for those engaged in pro-democracy and bridge-building efforts.

And this is why I was thrilled to read the recently released study, Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans’ Relationships to Democracy, from ReD Associates and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.¹ While deeper understanding is needed on both sides of the political divide, this research takes on an essential piece of the challenge. The ReD/Agora report examines how ordinary conservatives—those who sit well outside the halls of power and influence—see themselves in relation to American democracy.²

As the authors acknowledge, there is no shortage of solid research on what Republicans and Democrats say they believe about various partisan issues and American democracy itself. But, as the authors note, that research “often lacks grounding in conservatives’ first-person perspectives, creating a gap between existing accounts and lived experience.” The ethnographic approach taken in this study captures how conservatives understand, in their own terms, the threats we face as a country, and why they believe their resentments—and in some cases, violations of democratic norms—are justified.³ 

The report’s key findings? Conservatives within these communities operate from a moral foundation that privileges faith, family, freedom, and a commitment to their local community. These commitments represent the pre-political foundation against which conservatives assess our governing institutions and the health of American democracy. And it's these moral commitments, the report observes, that the pro-democracy community too often fails to recognize, missing opportunities to work productively across partisan divides.

Further, the report documents “a fundamental mismatch between what institutions do and what people need from them.” When people need help but the institutions designed to provide that help are “too remote, too bureaucratically impenetrable, or too rigid to respond to their specific circumstances,” they feel abandoned. And when these same institutions show up uninvited, when they intrude in ways that encroach upon the moral foundations of family, faith, or freedom, trust erodes even further. Every instance of failure or intrusion confirms the sense that “institutions have betrayed their core purposes.” What reads from the outside as anti-democratic is, from the perspective of conservatives themselves, a reasoned response to institutions that have repeatedly failed to serve and repeatedly overstepped their proper domain.

As the ReD/Agora report observes, no single episode did more to crystallize the double failure pattern than COVID. For communities organized around faith, family, freedom, and place, the pandemic became a sustained demonstration of why our governing institutions are losing the trust of ordinary Americans. On the failure side: public health authorities presented shifting guidance as settled science, declined to acknowledge uncertainty in a context that was obviously uncertain, and were slow—sometimes resistant—to follow evidence when it pointed in directions that complicated their prior commitments (p 52). On the intrusion side: mandates reached into bodies, workplaces, churches, and family life, domains that sit within the moral foundation (p 32). Perhaps most damaging was the pattern of demonization. Those who questioned official guidance, who weighed the risks differently, who chose not to comply, were not treated as worthy participants in an enormously important public debate. Instead, they were cast as selfish, ignorant, and dangerous (pp 27–28). 

Arguably, for communities that prized independent judgment as an expression of both freedom and faith, that stigmatization was its own form of institutional aggression. In their book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee lend credibility to these concerns. The failure of government health authorities to consider the financial and human costs of lockdown measures, and the active suppression of open debate about the efficacy of certain mandates and potential alternatives to lockdown measures, left a residue of distrust that no subsequent contrition has been able to fully dissolve.

All this rings eerily familiar to me. I too have conducted ethnographic research within a conservative community, namely, the coastal community of St. Bernard Parish, which sits just five miles to the southeast of downtown New Orleans. As part of a broader study of rebound and recovery in the months and years following Hurricane Katrina, our research team interviewed residents, business owners, and local leaders in St. Bernard.⁴

My co-investigator Virgil Storr and I were seeking to understand why and how individuals and communities rebuild and recover in the aftermath of catastrophic disaster. In particular, we wanted to understand which policy interventions were contributing to and impeding those efforts. And crucially, we wanted to understand how people, often with little in the way of financial resources, overcame the obstacles they confronted, from the physical and financial challenges of rebuilding wrecked homes and neighborhoods, to the frustrations and roadblocks associated with post-disaster policy and recovery assistance. 

Even though this research and the ReD/Agora report pose different questions, focus on different places, and are separated by two decades, they speak to one another. Most striking are the similar ways in which research participants described what makes their communities special and what values define them. Also familiar is the sense of neglect and betrayal that community members expressed at the hands of institutions purportedly designed to help ordinary people, and the resentments that failure leaves in its wake.

For anyone interested in rebuilding Americans’ trust in our governing institutions, and in one another, these similarities are worth examining. It’s worth recognizing the patterns that transcend our current political moment and persist across time and place. It’s worth understanding what institutional failure looks and feels like to ordinary people. And it’s worth recognizing how such failure sets the stage for and justifies, in the minds of otherwise law-abiding citizens, rule-breaking and norm violations. 

Parish Values: Family, Faith, Hard Work, and Independence

As Hurricane Katrina gathered strength in late August 2005, St. Bernard first responders and school district staff, including school superintendent Doris Voitier, prepared Chalmette High School as the community’s shelter of last resort. With no Red Cross presence in the parish, this was routine. At daybreak on Monday, August 29, it looked like the storm had spared St. Bernard. By 8:30am, everything had changed. A 20-foot tidal surge had breached the Industrial Canal levee, which protected New Orleans’s Ninth Ward and St. Bernard. As the crisis management team moved people to the second story of the building, they saw a wall of water rushing toward them. They managed to get all 250 people—including the elderly and disabled—to the second floor, but they lost most of their provisions. Soon after, hundreds more arrived, rescued from windows and rooftops by neighbors with boats. Without food, medical supplies, electricity, or bathroom facilities, it would be three days before helicopters finally arrived. 

For weeks, the entire parish remained under 8–14 feet of standing water. When the Murphy Oil Refinery ruptured, a million gallons of mixed crude oil spilled into local neighborhoods. It was the first time in American history that an entire parish or county had suffered complete devastation. Given the level of destruction, recovery and rebuilding in St. Bernard were far from certain. 

St. Bernard’s history is long and complicated. In 1780, farmers, trappers, and fishers from the Canary Islands began migrating to the area. By the time Katrina hit, Spanish surnames and a distinct accent still marked the parish as a distinct place. A predominantly white community, residents we interviewed were well aware of St. Bernard’s history of racial intolerance and exclusion. Nonetheless, when asked to describe their community prior to the storm, they described the parish as a special place: tight knit, family-oriented, and hard-working. It was common, for example, for residents to report that five, six, or more households within the same extended family all resided within Chalmette, the parish’s population center. As local school administrator Robert F. described,⁵

In St. Bernard, family, faith, and place intertwined.⁶ Residents described relationships in St. Bernard as “three generations of knowing, and going to work, school, and church with the same families.” Backyard gatherings had “a church atmosphere because we all knew each other from the church.” The intersections between faith, family, and neighborhood, in other words, meant that the church was not merely a place of worship but a primary institution through which social bonds were formed and maintained across generations.

Residents described St. Bernard as a blue-collar, working-class community, which in turn fueled an ethos of hard work. Michael F. noted that “because of the nature of the people that live in St. Bernard Parish—we’re a blue collar community—we’re not afraid of work. We know what work is.” People took pride in a willingness to do any job, no matter how difficult or dirty. Frank W., a successful hardware store owner, noted that he “had options.” He could have used the insurance money to pay off his mortgage, but instead, he put the money back into the business. With no income coming in during the months of rebuilding, Frank and his wife took to gutting houses to make ends meet. “You do what you gotta do.” Recalling that they never missed a single mortgage payment, Frank said, “You know, we’re not lazy people. We work. So you know, we’ll go sweep the street if we have to. You know, so that’s not a problem there. Both my wife and I are the same way.” 

The prevalence of skilled trades within the community held special significance in the post-disaster moment. As pastor Thomas B. remarked,

For Frank W. and other business owners, the ethic of hard work and the connection to place translated into a duty to rebuild. When asked why he chose to rebuild the business, Frank said, “This is my all, you know, this is my job. This is where I set out and have worked my entire life.”

In addition to narratives of family, faith, and hard work, and akin to the foundational value of “Freedom” that the ReD/Agora study identified, St. Bernardians saw their community as one that is fiercely independent and self-reliant. As Michael F. observed, “We in The Parish, we are a self-sufficient type of community.” David B. observes that the community “had the reputation of taking care of its own,” and that “people down here are just a very self-sufficient, industrious sort of people.” If they don’t see support coming through official channels, David observed, “they’re just gonna do it themselves.”

Narratives of Institutional Failure and Betrayal

Perhaps the most striking similarity between the two research studies is the sense that when they were needed most, formal institutions failed their community. For ReD/Agora study participants, COVID lockdowns—of churches, schools, and local businesses—represented a clear case of institutional failure and intrusion. Similarly, St. Bernard residents we interviewed universally understood their community as neglected and left behind, particularly with respect to federal and state government response to Katrina.  

Complaints about the government’s slow, complicated, and ham-handed response to Katrina’s devastation were ubiquitous across all the communities we studied. But St. Bernardians interpreted institutional failure as a consequence of the fact that St. Bernard is not part of New Orleans proper. Respondents frequently pointed to the fact that Royal Canadian Mounted Police were the first outsiders to respond to the crisis; some took it as a sign that Louisiana and U.S. officials did not care about St. Bernard or its residents. From the perspective of many people we interviewed, St. Bernard did not get the support it needed because it was a predominantly white working-class community; residents also said that greater media attention, resources, and sympathy were directed toward poor Black communities in New Orleans. As Alana F. saw it, after the storm, “you didn’t hear much about St. Bernard. Like my brother said, ‘Are you sure there’s a place called St. Bernard Parish?’ And it always amazed us that there wasn’t one house that wasn’t flooded [in St. Bernard], but you never hear that. You hear Ninth Ward, Ninth Ward, Ninth Ward. I think that makes a lot of people upset.”

It’s important to note that residents in Ninth Ward communities had a very different interpretation—that it was their status as a poor Black community that made them particularly vulnerable to predatory forces seeking to “push out” Black residents in favor of high-end developers. The point is not to assess the merits of these competing narratives. Rather, the point is to understand how conservative communities like St. Bernard make sense of their encounters with formal institutions. Perceived neglect is an important piece in that puzzle.

Schools, Local Heroes, and Institutional Failure

In the weeks that followed the storm, Doris Voitier faced a daunting challenge: getting a school back up and running. Her logic was that without a functioning school system, firefighters and sheriff’s deputies with young families would not be able to return. Without those first responders, no one else would feel safe enough to return. The surging flood waters had destroyed nearly all the school district’s facilities. The few that were salvageable were filled with mold, snakes, contaminated mud, and marsh grass. Nonetheless, on October 15, Voitier pledged that the district would have a place for any student who registered at the November 1 registration. Voitier had expected about 50 students to sign up. Instead, 703 students enrolled.⁷ The reopening of the school was the sign that many families needed to know that St. Bernard had a chance of rebounding, and that life after the storm might be livable. 

At first, Voitier was hopeful when she heard that FEMA was sending an education task force, which she assumed would provide the support and expertise she needed. Disappointment set in immediately, when, at its kickoff meeting, the 27-member task force introduced themselves. Voitier recounts:

From Voitier’s perspective, the federal agency responsible for providing relief failed, in large part because it saw its principal role as ensuring compliance, not offering relief. Voitier took care to operate within official guidelines, but doing so diverted precious time and attention. Further, the guidance kept changing. Just as a FEMA supervisor gained familiarity with the circumstances in St. Bernard, he would be rotated out and a new one rotated in. As Elizabeth B. observed, 

Resisting FEMA, in other words, was not considered a norm violation. It was considered essential in the defense of the parish and the families who called it home. 

Worse than ineffective, in the eyes of St. Bernard residents, FEMA was an outside intruder, actively working against local recovery efforts. With so many students returning, Voitier needed additional trailers to use for classroom space. At first she turned to the Army Corps of Engineers, but she was informed that it could be as late as April before they were delivered. “Now this was back in October,” recalled Voitier. 

FEMA did supply some trailers, but the doors were too narrow to meet local fire code for student use. Voitier navigated layers of bureaucracy to gain FEMA’s permission to widen the doors. Knowing that would take time and seeing an opportunity to put a trailer to good use in the meantime, she sought and received permission from a FEMA supervisor to put washers and dryers in one of the unused trailers so that the teachers living in the school’s parking lot could wash their clothes. Soon afterward, that supervisor was rotated out. Seeing how the trailer was being used, the new supervisor placed Voitier under investigation for “misuse of federal property.” FEMA eventually backed off, and nothing came of the investigation, but the sense deepened that FEMA officials were intruding upon the work of local leaders working hard to rebuild the community. 

This entire saga—the care local leaders provided to the community’s most vulnerable before the storm, crisis management during the flooding, and the heroic reopening of the school district—reinforced what members of this community saw as their core values. Theirs was a hard-working, self-reliant community that put families first. It also reinforced their perception of neglect, intrusion, and mistreatment at the hands of a faceless bureaucracy.

Lessons for Democratic Renewal

One of the most important contributions the ReD/Agora report makes is that it helps stakeholders in the democracy-building community understand the conditions under which conservative communities find norm violation justified: when institutions fail at the moment they’re most needed and when those same institutions are perceived as undermining the community’s core moral commitments, as they understand them. With respect to their encounters with FEMA, St. Bernard residents saw the actions of local leaders as common sense prevailing over pointless bureaucracy. 

Amidst an FBI corruption investigation, for example, St. Bernard Parish president Henry “Junior” Rodriguez and members of the parish council gained folk hero status for defying FEMA to get trailers to local residents. Though thousands of trailers were needed, by December 2005, FEMA had delivered only 55 to local residents. Without waiting for permission, Rodriguez made arrangements with a private contractor to deliver 6,000 trailers. Because the purchase had not been authorized, FEMA kept them locked in a storage facility. In February 2006, members of the parish council took matters into their own hands, delivering trailers to local residents without authorization. 

Debbie C. acknowledged that St. Bernard politics could sometimes be “shady and questionable” but that following the rules just wasn’t working, and that local leaders had to “get really creative” to get things done and that they had “worked day and night really hard to do what they have done, so I can’t fault anybody.” The point here is not to condone rule-breaking, much less the willful acts of public corruption of which Rodriguez was accused. Rather, the point is to acknowledge that when people are frustrated by bureaucratic delays and intrusiveness, especially when they rub against foundational values, we should not expect appeals to formal rules and procedures to carry much weight. 

And that goes to the core of what it takes to rebuild institutional trust.

The same is true of the institutional encounters the ReD/Agora report documents during COVID. Two decades apart, in communities facing very different crises, we find the same conclusion reached by the same reasoning: the institutions built to help ordinary Americans failed when they were needed most, encroached on foundational moral commitments, and consistently seemed to answer to remote bureaucratic systems rather than to the people in front of them. That conclusion, independently and repeatedly reached, is what makes the current crisis of democratic legitimacy so serious and so difficult to reverse. There is no way to “message” our way out of it.

Institutions worthy of public trust demonstrate, in their actual operations, that they exist to serve the people in front of them. In practice that means that when a Doris Voitier calls, someone picks up the phone—and that person has the authority and discretion to actually help. It means that when a community needs trailers, the measure of success is families in trailers, not paperwork filed. And it means that when federal institutions venture into the domains of family, faith, and community life, they should do so as partners drawing on local knowledge rather than as regulators hamstringing local efforts.

This has direct implications for the relationship between local and higher levels of governance. The closer institutions are to the people they serve, the more naturally these qualities emerge. But more distant layers of governance can be redesigned to replicate, even if imperfectly, the benefits of proximity—by devolving discretion to those with local knowledge, by building accountability mechanisms legible to ordinary citizens rather than to oversight bodies alone, and by measuring success in terms of outcomes for people rather than compliance with process. The FEMA task force that arrived in St. Bernard with historical preservationists and environmental compliance officers in a community devastated by a catastrophic flood and oil spill was not staffed by bad people. It was designed by a system that had lost sight of its purpose. Redesigning that system is the work that needs doing.

The test ought to hold regardless of who is doing the centralizing: a federal government that overrides local election administrators in the name of protecting democracy fails it as surely as a task force that overrode a local superintendent trying to reopen her schools.

Legitimacy, in this framework, is earned through demonstrated service—which may mean that it can be rebuilt the same way. Institutions that want to recover the trust of disaffected citizens do not need to win a values argument. They need to start by actually working—by delivering, concretely and visibly, on those things a constitutional democracy is uniquely positioned to provide, without encroaching on the domains that individuals and communities rightfully see as their own.

Liberal democracy cannot survive as an abstraction. It survives—or fails—in the lives of people who either believe its institutions serve them or have concluded that they don't. Democratic renewal does not hinge on the next election cycle or the next round of civic messaging. It requires the harder and slower work of building institutions that demonstrate—in practice and at human scale—that self-governance is something done for and by the people, not to them.

Notes