Not long ago, the ladies of The View displayed the number of associates of Donald Trump who have recently* gone to prison as evidence that “the system is working.”  We’d be in better condition as a country if more people realized that the very same visual leads to opposite conclusions for different people, creating a dangerous conundrum for building a civic system.  My reaction, for instance, is that “the system is working” as a corrupt totalitarian state looking for pretense to jail its opposition, often for actions that are entirely ignored when done by people who are not its opposition.

In the absence of mutual trust in the other side’s fidelity to the fairness of the system, everything has two broad explanations.  Either The View’s villains are being prosecuted because they constitute a gang of criminals, or the government is persecuting them because it represents a gang of criminals.  The exact same action can be either the rule of law or a crime depending on the perpetrator and the circumstances, and the two tiers are excused in the name of protecting the system.

The difficult question for anybody who wants to step outside the tribes and understand what’s really going on is: How do you tell which is which?  It’s not easy, because so many of the measuring sticks are subjective and applied in an environment of necessarily incomplete information. Meanwhile, the partisans rush out to turn the wheel to spin in their preferred direction.

I have my own thoughts on which side is more-fundamentally to blame, but allotting blame shouldn’t be the primary goal.  The only solution to renew shared trust is to shrink government as part of a broader effort to disperse power.  If we must form different tribes along separate axes, we be both allies and adversaries to everybody else.  I might be your ally in local government, but your adversary in private business.  I might be an obstacle to your achieving your preferred policy on Y, but an important support for policy Z.  The purpose of a charity that you support might promote a cause that is mutually exclusive to the purpose of a charity that I support.

Whether the big-government types are the side responsible for our current distrust, big-government per se definitely is.  When “the system” decides everything, fairness and justice become unreasonable restraints on its execution of power.

* Note the relevance of “recently” for analysis. The story would be quite different if these were people sent to prison over decades and under different administrations.

Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40 and Photoshop AI.