Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty notes a Gallup poll showing that public confidence in the military has declined lately:
As the perception developed that progressives have taken over the top brass in the military, the most important cohort for military recruiting — existing military families — has been pulling away from the U.S. military as an institution.
That's not really a serious response, but it raises the question of what did cause the decline—which is real. Here's a time trend from the General Social Survey:
Confidence in the military is down 15 percentage points since 2018, though some of this is due to normal reversion after an artificial spike in confidence following the 2017 strike on Syria. Given the timeframe, the most obvious possibility is that it's due to some kind of COVID effect, but if that were the case public confidence would have declined in everything, not just the military.
This got me curious, so I took a look at the 2018-22 decline in confidence for everything that GSS asks about. It's worth noting that some institutions had such low confidence already (Congress at 6%, for example) that they really couldn't decline very much. So the only way to measure this properly is to calculate the percentage change from their starting points in 2018. Here it is:
The military doesn't look all that special now. It went from 61% to 46%, a drop of one quarter, or 25%, which puts it right in the middle even though it's coming off an artificial spike.
I don't know why COVID did this. Maybe people just express lower confidence in institutions when they feel frustrated and scared. But whatever the reason, COVID seems like the culprit, not wokeness, and the military doesn't look to have done any worse than average.
My confidence in the National Review continues to plummet
"As the perception developed that progressives have taken over the top brass in the military,"
Gee I wonder they got that impression from? Oh yes, the pages of the National Review.
We're talking a four point decline here. Everyone calm down.
I'd be curious to see numbers for confidence in the military as an institution extended out to Vietnam and WWII if that data exists, guessing that the general increase in the first chart above is a reversion from a deep dip in the 1960s-70s.
Yes! Not to mention Korea.
Maybe something to do with a president that does his best to degrade the government and bad-mouth everything else?
It's former president.
Yes it's when the president and conservatives turned on the military when they did not back them up on all the crazy things they wanted in Trump's term.
Incessant propaganda that all institutions, especially anything connected to government, are a liberal joke and a rip off.
The military can only go so low though. Barring some black swan event.
Well, there's always the causation vs. correlation thing...but in this case it's not hard to guess what could possibly have polarized the populace and reduced trust in just about everything as a result of (our response to) COVID...
The combined effect of our less than stellar withdrawal from Afghanistan and Republican polarization against military aid to Ukraine.
They said the same thing about Dunkirk back in the day...
This is really just crap. Our military can apply force anywhere in the world in relatively little time, almost the hand of a god.*
This poll is literally just a measurement of the effects of the media on people.
*As a veteran I know intimately the horribleness of service, the spartan if not poisonous facilities, the herding of young wildlings into training that accidently kills them while they learn to kill and then releasing them into the wild with money and no place open up steam vales except in strip clubs and tattoo parlors, the corrupt use of money and contacts to provide services and equipment...on and on, even while preeminent.
It's not just covid - Republican propaganda has been continuously attacking a lot of these things. Then they themselves have been undermining the Supreme Court, religion and part of the "press".
Fox News plays a dual role here, attacking real news media while just being a propaganda outlet and disgusting the normal half of the country. Kevin usually assigns Fox a major role - why leave it out now?
Kevin's chart doesn't give any indication of *who* is less confident in the institutions listed. I suspect that you are right that Republican propaganda plays a significant role. I would guess that the decreased confidence in the Supreme Court is largely the result of people on the left reacting to the Court's move to the right, in particular the to Dobbs decision on abortion. And, contra Drum, I wouldn't be surprised if the decline in confidence in the major companies and the military are in large part due to social conservatives coming to realize that those institutions are pretty much in the mainstream when it comes to views on social issues. If there is polling on confidence in institutions that breaks out various subgroups, that would allow us to see whether these speculations are consistent with the data.
No, the decreased confidence on 'the left', as you so charmingly put it, is associated with the specidious reasoning and outright lies used to justifiy those extreme and precedent-defying right-wing decisions.
Covid drove a lot of uncertainty and unhappiness. That increases distrust in general.
Anecdotally, I feel it. I am generally more likely to assume bad motivations and less trusting in general. And when other people are doing the same, it feeds on itself.
Republicans are trying to capitalize on all that, of course. Fear is their primary, and lately, the only lever they use, at least at retail. But that's all downstream. The illusion of a stable civilization was dented, and all those institutions that are supposed to be stabilizers didn't help that. So people begin to discount them.
The answer is in the political split in that Gallup poll.
GOP taking pot shots at the military because it's being led by a Democrat.
OT: The remains of the PAC-12 were presented a media package this morning.
An all-Apple deal with options for others to purchase sub-rights to individual games, so technically not an all-streaming deal but close to it. Escalators based on number of subs (an add-on package to the base Apple streaming), can increase compensation, but is still lower than Big-12.
It's unclear how staying is better than leaving. Yesterday, Arizona scheduled an emergency board of regents meeting for today at 3:30. There's momentum that the remaining 3 of the four-corner schools are going to leave together.
For background, you need 6 schools to be considered a conference in FBS NCAA.
Confidence in organized labor is up by a lot. How about that?
Republican candidates and right-wing media have not really been attacking unions, as far as I know (not watching Fox). They do oppose teacher's unions in a perfunctory way. If Trump said "now hate unions" their rating could change rapidly.
Confidence in the military to do what? Defend America? Defeat China? Stay out of politics? Abide by the right "values"? Reject "wokeness"? Reflect "my" personal priorities? The question is so open to interpretation, the responses are impossible to interpret. It's yet another illustration of the public opinion industry's decline into irrelevance.
OT2:
Trump J6 indictments have been handed down. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.1.0_1.pdf
Follow Teri Kanefield's thread in real time: https://law-and-politics.online/@Teri_Kanefield/110816553095903298
Popehat says he's doing emergency podcast: https://mastodon.social/@Popehat/110816563147439847
Well, if you are "liberal" perhaps the stories about all the right-wingers and crypto-fascists in the military. If you are "maga" or the like, perhaps the renaming of military bases in the South.
The pandemic was one of the few times that people had real expectations for a lot of areas simultaneously, those expectations were particularly extreme on both ends of the political spectrum, and people didn't get what they wanted.
Everyone had something to hate. Almost no one thought the various organs of government and society were doing about the right thing. Some people were mad that they had any restrictions imposed on them at all, others were mad that people weren't jailed for walking through the park maskless.
The mainstream media response to our withdrawal from Afghanistan was one of the most hysterical and lopsided narratives I've ever had the misfortune to experience. There were entire broadcasts (radio, tv, podcast, or whatever) just given over to bashing Biden and the withdrawal. There were no other perspectives provided. To say that there was no nuance would be like pointing out that grass is green. The lack of any substantive analysis was just that obvious. In fact, I remember reading updates from non-MSM sources (blogs, substacks, twitter, etc.) stating that anyone offering any sort of contrarian view, let alone (God forbid) a defense of Biden and our military's actions during the withdrawal, were just turned away from mainstream outlets. The MSM went out for blood. A declining trust in the military is not surprising. What remains to be seen is the extent to which such hyperventilating may or may not have helped re-elect trump.
It takes a great deal of substantive analysis to overcome the likes of: https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/08/16/kabul-clinging-to-airplane-taking-off-tarmac-afghanistan-ward-vpx.cnn
Like +50! And as the withdrawal process stabilized and more and more folks were flown out of Afghanistan, both US and Afghan, numbers were reported while the criticism continued to rain down.
There was absolutely NO comparison to the Vietnam Bug-Out, except that Biden's was just the opposite. Not that Americans could be told this.
Agreed -- the MSM acted like a bunch of teens whose nudie mags got snatched away from them right in the middle of a good wank. They were *pissed*. Left unmentioned the entire time, of course, was that a unilateral withdrawal was originally *Trump's idea* -- a mess Biden was left to deal with. His options were: essentially reinvade and re-occupy Afghanistan with 10's of 1000's of troops in a quixotic attempt to hold the Taliban at bay and stabilize the utterly incompetent and corrupt Afghan government, or order a withdrawal as quickly as possible even if it was messy. He made the right decision, and the MSM will never forgive him for it.
Amen.
Authoritarian autocrats don't have to get people to trust them. All they have to do is get people to not trust anything.
In other words, the stats seem to indicate that their implicit strategy is working. Solution: don't be naïve, but don't stop trusting.
Isn't some of this just due to the fact we aren't involved in a "war" anyplace right now? I know we have operations all over the world, but it's all done on the down low. People just aren't thinking about it as much.
The "Syria Strike"? Does this refer to when Trump ordered a Syrian/Russian airstrip bombed in "retaliation" for Assad using chemical weapons and acted like it was on par with Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb? Good grief, how did that turn out to be a post-9/11 high point in people's "trust in the military?"