Over and over again, I find myself revisiting the notion that America’s experiencing an acute, and apparently intractable, institutional credibility crisis.

That’s a recurring theme in these pages. So much so that some of you are probably tired of hearing about it. If that’s you, rest assured: I’m tired of writing about it.

Not much bothers me. Not really, anyway. I’m a loner in what amounts to my second act, I’m well-off and have few cares in the world outside of maintaining my relationship with readers, the only thing that gives my life any real meaning. That to say this: I have no reason to concern myself with the decline of American institutions or the country’s faith in them.

To be sure, the rapidity of that decline is alarming. But barring a truly dramatic turn for the worse, the US government will continue to function sufficiently well for me to live the rest of my days largely unbothered. I’m not old, exactly. But I’m not young, at all. A scenario where the US government implodes in my lifetime would be a collapse scenario, and you can’t hedge that. Not in life and not in your portfolio either.

But on some days, I do genuinely lament the across-the-board loss of faith in America’s institutions because it’s a reflection of the social disintegration that’d make it impossible for me to engage with the rest of humanity even if I wanted to.

Last year, while interviewing Sheila Liming, the author of Hanging Out, a book about America’s loneliness epidemic which I discuss at some length in the next (i.e., forthcoming) Monthly Letter, Ezra Klein cited Arthur Brooks in distinguishing between anger and contempt. Here’s what he (Klein) said:

Anger is often a constructive emotion. It’s an emotion that wants resolution. It’s going too far to say it brings people together. But when I’m angry with you, what I want to do is have some kind of interaction around that anger. Anger is relational. Contempt is the opposite. Contempt is I’m not going to deal with you. You’re beneath notice. You’re not worth engaging with.

More and more (and this is being facilitated by social media), we choose contempt. I do it all the time. In fact, I did it earlier today while responding to a commenter.

Sure, we’re outright angry too. Sometimes angry enough to take extreme measures, like looting, burning and storming the Capitol. But thanks in part to social media conditioning, we’re more likely than ever to simply write each other off entirely when disagreements don’t rise to the level of physicality.

“I think we are quicker to get to the sort of precipice of contempt in online relationships than we are in person,” Liming told Klein, who suggested that as we “get more and more used to that online, it becomes our reaction to conflict in real life.”

That contempt is palpable (indeed it’s almost tangible — you can almost reach out and touch it) in American society and institutional favorability polling is one way to capture it.

If you’re a regular reader, you might recall my repetitive warnings that between i) the Supreme Court’s inclination to lean against the prevailing social winds on key issues like abortion and ii) runaway inflation, the country’s institutional credibility crisis was very likely to entangle the court and the Fed.

Well, sure enough, John Roberts no longer enjoys a majority job approval, according to new Gallup polling, and neither does Jerome Powell.

As the figure above shows, and as Gallup despaired, “no leading elected or appointed figures of the US federal government receives majority approval from Americans.”

To the point about SCOTUS and the Fed, Roberts and Powell suffered the largest declines in approval among top officials when measured against Gallup’s December 2021 poll.

Note that Roberts’s approval prior to the court overturning Roe was 60%, 20 points higher than the court overall. Now, his approval “premium” versus the institution over which he presides is much narrower.

“Powell is the only other leader measured in the new poll whose approval rating has fallen by double digits,” Gallup went on to say, adding that the “decline in Powell’s approval… likely reflects Americans’ holding him at least partially responsible for elevated inflation.” (Yes, “likely” so.)

Perhaps the nation can continue on, miserable, disaffected and contemptuous, without the republic disintegrating entirely. I hope so. And that’s what I generally expect.

But I do worry that America is perhaps closer to the precipice than a lot of us realize, and that all it’s going to take is one (more) hard shove to push us over the edge and into some kind of oblivion.