But as civic institutions lose the authority they once enjoyed, scholars with an eye toward the future appear reluctant to catastrophize the situation.
⦁ In the most recent General Social Survey, a long-running poll from NORC at the University of Chicago, 39% of adults expressed “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community last year amid widespread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, compared to 48% in 2018 and 2021. But even conservatives who have traditionally embraced these institutions have fallen away from them in recent years, she noted.
Robert A. Heineman, a political scientist and a former department chair at Alfred University in New York, said more public school graduates have grown up indifferent to whether institutions such as the government survive or collapse. Theologians say young people, therefore, have grown up with less trust than their parents and grandparents that institutions can tell them the truth about reality.