Trumpism and Social Trust

The roiling post-Tuesday debate about polling and polling errors is almost all heat and no light. It’s mostly emotionalism from people who are mad that the result wasn’t precisely as they’d seen predicted or been told or believed — conflating that with their unhappiness about the result itself. It’s also furious efforts to insist that polls being off confirmed their preexisting critiques of Biden or BLM or the left or the establishment or whatever. But there’s one thing I’ve heard over the last 72 hours that strikes me as real and meaningful and connects the largely meaningless debate about polling accuracy with quite critical questions about what is animating politics itself. And that is trust.