The Confidence Gap

...but they conclude, citing a study by Michael Robinson, that since then the media have demonstrated an inherent bias toward reporting "conflict and controversy...

...One cannot ask too much...

...In the first chapter and last, the agriculture minister Bukowski and the peasant union organizer Buk confront each other in the heady fall days of 1981, the days of Solidarity's ascendancy amidst political dissent and an unraveling economy...

...A sense of "malaise" continued to hang over American society--a malaise which President Carter, in a television address, warned was a "crisis of confidence" that took the form of " a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media and other institutions . . . . " The problem continues, and it reaches to the depths of the difficulties recent Presidents have had in gaining public support for their policies...

...Meanwhile, declining confidence in institutions did not reflect reduced personal satisfaction...

...Although an overwhelming majority of people expressed satisfaction at how things were going in their own lives (by a 72-23 percent margin), 84 percent of the same sample expressed negative feelings about events in the country as a whole (with only 12 percent disagreeing...

...But it took thirty years to miniaturize them to watch-size, and even then (1968), the first quartz watches cost over one thousand dollars...

...For instance, the authors explain why surveys conducted by Harris and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) almost always show more negative sentiment than Gallup: GaUup, it turns out, allows two positive responses, HarrisNORC only one...

...The Kuniczak novels are about the experience of Poles, as much as about Poland: appropriate for a people whose national anthem, dating from Napoleon's time, asserts Jeszce Polska nie zgineta, pdki my ~yjemy (Poland is not destroyed/while yet we live), and reflects a long denial of statehood to a nation...

...Martial law, rather than divide et impera, was Jaruzelski's readiest option...

...The consistency of the trends is especially evident in attitudes toward institutions that might seem mutually antagonistic, such as science and religion...

...As Landes says, " I t is hard to love a quartz timepiece," but once a mechanical watch has lost its claim to be the most accurate way of recording time, it ceases to be a true precision instrument and becomes a mere expensive toy, a pseudo-antique...

...A mechanical watch with such capability would not fit in an ordinary pocket, would weigh a pound, and would cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars--if one could find the workers to make it...

...What is the present relationship of chronometry to astronomy, and is the ultimate timekeeper a truly scientific star-clock, thus bringing the wheel of progress full circle...

...After all, if the trends are truly general and confidence would thus decline even without a showing o f any realproblems (e.g., in medicine), then what is the point of investigating all these ref'mements of opinion associated with individual institutions...

...A 1975 Gallup poll, for example, showed a 54 percent positive rating for "free enterprise," in contrast to only 34 percent support for "big business...

...The second focuses specifically on attitudes toward business, labor, and government, and the social and political bases of those attitudes...

...Although consistent hostility was expressed toward corporations, especially large corporations, support for "free enterprise" and small business continued to be very strong...

...Landes writes: Today it is possible to buy a solid-state watch for about $100 that keeps better time than the finest detent pocket chronometer, repeats the minutes, sounds the hours, gives the day and date with due attention to the varying lengths of the months (including February in leap year), measures elapsed time to the tenth, even hundredth, of a second, serves as preset timer, and offers the possibility of setting several alarms to remind the wearer of a succession of engagements...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 words, less "private," and more "public...

...The authors conclude that this apparent tension implied a broad commitment to the system, but general disapproval of the competition for power and profit that is evident in business, labor, and government...

...A. Lawrence Chickering A t the end of the 1960s, conflict and polarization over race and the Vietnam war, among other issues, had reached the point where serious people routinely wondered whether America had become ungovernable...

...The contrast between attitudes toward one's own life and toward the society was made dramatically clear by a Gallup survey taken in July 1979, just before President Carter's famous "malaise" speech...

...The military conflicts of the early centuries were important, to be Walter D. Connor is professor o f political science at Boston University, and writes frequently on Communist affairs...

...Some institutions (such as business) fell further than others (medicine...

...and organized religion, 41 to 22...

...The Thousand Hour Day ends in late 1939 among soldiers who have crossed into then-neutral Romania, refusing to surrender either to the Nazis or Soviets, and looking for a base, political and territorial, from which to renew the fight...

...For this reason, Seymour Lipset and William Schneider's The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind presents a timely analysis, using all of the tools of social science at its best...

...An understanding of the system against which workers revolted would benefit from a chapter on the low points (1949-54) of Stalinism, or one of the pre-1980 high points of popular resistance to the Soviet-type regime (1956, 1970, 1976...

...Warming Up the Corporate Image," Public Opinion, October/November 1982...

...Confidence in the "press" also declined between 1966 and 1981, from 29 percent to 16...

...Make the leaders, in other *I have argued elsewhere that public confidence in corporations is correlated with the degree of social contact between individual industries and consumers--with retail department stores, airlines, and banks having high confidence ratings and a lot of social contact, and oil, automobile, and insurance companies all having both low confidence and little personal contact...

...How much is a novel "worth" as history...

...Low confidence was only weakly correlated with personal ideology except at the extremes, especially on the Left...

...and "major companies" got 20 percent from Harris and 51 percent from GaUup...

...However, I would mention one further cause of the decline in public confidence...

...One will look in vain for the reasons in Poland...

...Kuniczak's are novels of endings, of efforts fruitlessly but willingly spent, of desires denied...

...His Poles are anarchic and heroic, admirable and incomprehensible, and seemingly fated to lose, partially regain, and lose again that for which they strive...

...This is not surprising: Trust, after all, is a feeling people have toward individuals, rather than "institutions," and the trouble with large as opposed to small institutions is that individuals are too remote to generate trust.* Trust is easiest to feel for people close by...

...Average confidence in all institutions studied declined from 48 percent to 23 percent...

...I t is impossible to read this book without enormous admiration for the painstaking care the authors have taken in analyzing multiple surveys, comparing them, trying to explain anomalies...

...These thoughts suggest that one way large organizations, including businesses, could try to improve public confidence in them would be to increase personal contact between the public and their individual leaders-ending the vague idea that large corporate business is run by a bunch of grey, shadowy figures, who are committed to private greed over public good...

...If the feeling now widespread is that "America" as a community no longer matters, that sentiment may be a reflection of a nation-state no longer compelled to perform any ultimate political and social function...

...On the contrary, during the entire period 1966-1981, personal satisfaction remained remarkably stable and high...

...Harris-NORC, on the other hand, will list only three: "a great deal," "only some," and "hardly any...

...here, Michener scores about B-minus...

...I have no doubt the authors are essentially correct about the media...

...But of course there is no long-term future in that strategy, either, as the British also discovered...

...in leaders of major companies from 55 to 16...

...and vice versa...

...I t is clear that the public continued to express strong support for America's basic institutions and values...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 37...

...The Michener historical novel formula--geographical part for the whole, a few families for an entire civilization, traced through the centuries--continues here...

...The sharpest decline occurred between 1966 and 1971--the period of the worst political and social problems...

...It is not that the bomb has made us feel too threatened, as the nuclear peace groups would have it, but that it has made us feel too safe...

...A. Lawrence Chickering is Executive Director o f the Institute f o r Contemporary Studies...

...I wish Landes had given us a final chapter discussing the future o f timekeeping as the experts now see it...

...Even from "Bukowo," 700 years is a lot of history...

...education, 61 to 34...

...Poland has stood for some time at the top of the best-seller lists...

...Very revealing indeed...

...Confidence in congressional leaders declined in the same period from 42 to 16 percent...

...At the same time, the military received 23 percent from Harris and 57 percent from Gallup...

...Accurate, perhaps, to a point, yet a view tilted overmuch toward internal squabbling, and especially inappropriate in the 1981 chapters, which make more of the conflict between workers and farmers than Polish workers and farmers ever did in that time of national unity...

...But if novels propose to depict history, one can ask that their selectivity convey relevance to the audience...

...In the end, Lipset...

...Kuniczak's trilogy, whose final volume, Valedictory, reached the bookstores almost simultaneously with Michener's...

...This was especially true during the Watergate period, when confidence in the executive fell from 25 percent to 16, but rose in relation to the press from 20 percent to 28...

...Still, I had the feeling that the authors were not completely sure what to do about the generality of trends...

...Among the fascinating analyses provided by Lipset and Schneider is a revealing look at how differently worded questions can produce very different results...

...Sprung from the same roots in the fictitious village of Bukowo, they are the living descendants of families through whose lives Michener traces Poland's history...

...The middle section of the book considers more detailed, specific issues related to public attitudes toward business, labor, and government-issues such as attitudes toward specific industries (banks come out best), or regulation (people oppose more in general but want more for specific industries...

...sure--but the interwar years of independence, barely touched, are history and memory to many living Poles...

...And a final part tries to analyze causes, effects, and possible solutions...

...It is curious that although the problem is posed as one of confidence in institutions, institutions were nevertheless, in the authors' words, "more popular than their leaders . . . . [The data revealed] more confidence in 'business' than in 'business leaders' and more confidence in 'organized labor' than in 'union leaders.'" Similarly, "medicine" got higher ratings than "doctors...

...As it is, the years between 1945 and 1980 are empty, the meaning of 1980 diminished...

...From the Thousand Hour Day (1966) through the harrowing pages of The March (1979), the PolishAmerican Kuniczak has chronicled Poland's experience from the German invasion of September 1939 to the dispersal of its defenders at the end of the European war...

...Yet during this period attitudes toward these two institutions tended to rise and fall together...

...Valedictory's angle of vision encompasses combat and diplomacy-the Polish squadrons flying with the RAF from English bases across the channel, the exile government in London striving to retain a weakening grip on the consciences and priorities of the Western allies against the brute fact of the Soviet march westward...

...But perhaps this is to be ungrateful to Landes, who has written a highly original book which, for the general reader, opens new windows into the story o f human progress...

...Thus, Harris gave a 14 percent positive confidence figure for organized labor in early 1977, while Gallup gave 39 percent...

...As with all great new technological advances, the refinements and cost reductions, when they came at last, arrived with devastating speed, leaving the Americans and Japanese in the van, and the Swiss (like the British before them) taking refuge in the upper end of the market...

...By bombarding viewers with information that is both critical and negative, the media have altered American perceptions perhaps irreparably...

...In exploring possible reasons for the decline in confidence, the authors note the importance of the country's broad political problems, especially relating to race and Vietnam, before 1971, and the country's growing economic problems since then...

...What is most striking about the masses of data in this book is the generality of the trends...

...I would argue, however, that it can...

...and Schneider conclude that the generality of trends implies that business, for instance, can't do very much to improve public attitudes toward itself...

...By depersonalizing war, the bomb has deprived the citizen of the existential sense that he may be required to make sacrifices to fight for his country...

...The first analyzes general patterns of confidence in institutions and reports the wealth of survey data showing that public confidence in all social institutions--including government, religion, labor unions, medicine, science, corporations, and related subcategories--began to decline in the mid-1960s and continued to decline through the seventies and even into the early eighties...

...For example, Harris polls taken between 1966 and 1981 show that the percentage of people expressing " a great deal of confidence" in the leaders of the executive branch of government declined from 41 percent in February 1966 to only 24 percent in September 1981...

...The Swiss are falling back, therefore, on nonfunctional snobbery, selling the watch "that tells you something about yourself" or "the most expensive watch in the world," or encrusting timepieces in diamonds...

...The March follows civilian Poles into the hell of Siberian deportation, soldiers into the Katyn forest massacre, and remnants of I~oth into the long trek out of the USSR, disgorged by Stalin after Hitler's attack on Russia to fight with the Allies in the West...

...The Swiss thought they could ignore the challenge, though at their own central research laboratory in Neuchatel in 1967 a quartz marine chronometer achieved an accuracy score of 0.0099 (0 is theoretically perfection) against a mechanical record of 2.3...

...This explains why confidence did not return after the 1960s, and in fact continued to decline long after the worst political problems (race and war) had been resolved...

...Judging overall causes is enormously difficult...

...Since fighting wars (or preparing for them) is the only social function the nation-state must ultimately perform, it is reasonable to suppose that confidence in the society and its institutions is in some way influenced by this essential point of existential contact between citizen and his country...

...Lipset and Schneider concede that the first years of the period under discussion saw a great deal of bad news to report...

...There was no significant difference between average confidence expressed by blacks and whites, although their confidence toward specific institutions did vary substantially...

...and "the educational system" received higher marks than "professors...

...Giving people an additional opportunity to be positive will naturally increase the likelihood of a positive response--and result in wildly varying impressions of public confidence...

...Although the general trend was down, there were variations...

...The only exceptions to this general rule were judges and pollsters--possibly, the authors surmise, because they were not identified as "leaders...

...But it is selective, and one can at least quibble with times left out whose exploration through peasant Buks and petty noble Bukowskis might have better illuminated the Poland of the 1980s...

...I have in mind the advent of the bomb...

...Q u i t e different, and altogether more revealing, are the novels of W.S...

...The authors' data show highest distrust of a) individual leaders, rather than institutions, and b) leaders associated with large institutions...

...Average confidence during this time fell from 48 percent to 28...

...But once a technology is outmoded, "quality" offers no hiding place...

...Then the war wound down, things started to improve, and most observers assumed the problems that seemed so extreme in the sixties were safely behind u s . At the end of the seventies, it was clear they were not...

...The overwhelming belief--which may be incorrect, but is nevertheless perceived--is that the next war will be fought by technicians in underground command centers...

...An American firm made the first quartz clock in 1928, and one which tracked time within two-thousandths of a second per day was installed at Greenwich as long ago as 1939...

...Intervening chapters cover Tartar invasions, struggles with Teutonic knights, Swedes, and Turks, independence lost in the Prussian-Russian-Austrian partitions of the late 1700s and regained in 1918 for twenty years before Hitler and Stalin partition and occupy the unfortunately located nation...

...But their most provocative conclusion is that the mass media bear principal responsibility for the decline of public confidence in American institutions...

...Not surprisingly, confidence in the press and in the executive branch showed a moderate negative correlation: When confidence in the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 35 executive branch was down, confidence in the press tended to rise...

...There is nothing so remorseless as advancing technology, to whose verdicts there is no appeal on grounds of sentiment, beauty, or past record...

...Minority problems with Ukrainians over the centuries are recognized, but where, in heaven's name, are the Jews, so intertwined in the histories of Poland and the Poles...

...In each novel, the central characters are different, but several make their way through the trilogy--notably the tragic General Janusz Prus, to suicide in a London bedsitter in rejection of the fate of a refugee with no future in a Poland war has placed in, and diplomacy cannot rescue from, Soviet domination...

...established religion" was preferred to "ministers and other religious leaders...

...Thus, in asking for expressions of confidence, Gallup will list four responses: "a great deal," "quite a lot," "some," and "very little"--two positive, one neutral, and one negative...

...The vibrations were extraordinarily rapid and could be made stable, thus (in theory) ensuring an accuracy of beat unattainable by the balance-wheel and hairspring, however refined...

...These results show almost no correlation with either education or socioeconomic status...

...The book is divided into three parts...

...And the trend was not always down: The coming of a new President (Ford in 1974, Carter in 1977, and Reagan in 198 l) brought a brief recovery each time...