A Wave of Digital Distrust Is Sweeping Representative Democracy
Elites have lost the trust of the public. To regain it, they need to change their operating model.
Die Deutsche Version finden Sie hier.
Trust is the gravitational bond that holds representative democracy together. Representation is a kind of symbolic mirror: the public must see itself reflected in its elected officials – not only in the matter of opinions and policies but of morality, character, and way of life. Without trust, the mirror cracks and the system flies apart.
That accurately describes our current predicament. Since the turn of the century, democratic nations have experienced a traumatic and progressive collapse of trust. The hemorrhage has extended well beyond government and politics to most of the institutions that organize modern life – media and the scientific establishment, for example. A destructive conflict, fought out every day on digital platforms and often enough on the streets, has erupted between the public – ordinary people – and the elites who act as their mediators and representatives. This conflict now consumes the political life of Europe and the United States – and is, in fact, global in scope.
Internet is corrosive of trust
Evidence of decline is easily obtained. According to Pew Research, the share of people who trust in government in the United States has plummeted from 77 percent in 1964 to 17 percent in 2025. This generic measure reflects a loss of faith in actual elected officials. Whereas John F. Kennedy averaged an approval rate of over 70 percent in his brief tenure, Barack Obama, a two-term president, averaged only in the mid-40s, and both Donald Trump in his first iteration and Joe Biden sputtered along in the low 40s until their eventual defeat.
The trend is even more pronounced in Europe. Generic trust in government, as measured by Edelman, stands at 48 percent in France, 43 percent in Britain, and 41 percent in Germany. But approval rates for many current heads of government have fallen to unprecedented lows, touching 14 percent for France’s Emmanuel Macron and 13 percent for Britain’s Keir Starmer. Established parties that once welded together a broad range of opinions have lost the confidence of the public, regardless of ideological orientation: Britain’s venerable Conservative Party received 23 percent of the vote in 2024; Germany’s Social Democratic Party was down to 16 percent in the 2025 election. The rise of sectarian parties has made it increasingly difficult to obtain a governing majority. France has had four governments in the last year; it took 72 days after the last election for German parties to form an uneasy coalition of dogs and cats.
On both continents, the implosion of trust has coincided with the rise of digital platforms as the dominant forum of public discourse. Few dispute that this entails cause and effect. Which aspects of the internet and social media are corrosive of trust, however, remains a controversial question in the extreme. For the elites, the web is the mother of lies – a Wild West saloon that must be brought under the yoke of manners and civilization. Elite-run governments consider themselves to be arbiters of truth and falsehood: “We continue to be your single source of truth,” New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern proclaimed during the pandemic, “…Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.” Accordingly, the European Union enacted the Digital Services Act and Britain the Online Safety Act, to purify the digital universe of “disinformation” – often blamed on Russia – and of opinions deemed destabilizing or hateful by the state.
The effort to protect truth can at times deteriorate into a crusade against the purveyors and users of digital technology. On various pretexts, the predominantly American social media companies have been fined over $30 billion by the Europeans, the latest instance being a $140 million fine against X, the platform owned by that object of elite loathing, Elon Musk. In France, Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, was arrested because his platform offended the authorities; meanwhile, Macron has fantasized about tagging digital content with state-approved labels to prevent confusion among the young. In Britain, police make 30 arrests per day for online speech crimes – more than 12 000 arrests for 2023.
The idea seems to be that if the web can be converted by brute force into, say, a version of Le Monde circa 1960, distrust will disappear. This theory, of course, has been market-tested by the Chinese Communist Party – it barely works in China and, as we have seen, has been an abject failure in democratic societies. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the attempt to censor and punish the public has engendered more, not less, distrust.
The digital tsunami
There can be no doubt that the web is a factory of falsehoods, but it’s a lot more than that. The amount of information it produces far exceeds the capacity of our ruling institutions to process. These institutions were constructed along industrial lines – they are steeply hierarchical, plodding, and process-obsessed. In the 20th century, they were accepted as legitimate because they held a monopoly over the flow of information. That time is over. The digital tsunami has smashed away their authority and legitimacy. The public now communicates at the speed of light and can’t understand why the politicians remain ensconced in their immobile pyramids. The elites, for their part, stand exposed in their human failings – every policy mistake, wrong prediction, foolish statement, shady deal, and sexual escapade at the top takes place on center stage, under the astounded eyes of the multitudes.
The alternate explanation for the collapse of trust is the exact opposite of the first: it’s the digitally disseminated truthabout the elites, rather than lies, that has brought about a crisis of alienation and repudiation. Like the Roman plebs, the public has seceded from the political class. From the Spanish indignados and Occupy Wall Street of 2011 through France’s Yellow Vests and Chile’s “social explosion” in 2019 to the successful 2025 street revolts in Nepal, Madagascar, and Bulgaria, frequent eruptions of rage have kept the global atmosphere in a state of permanent turbulence.
Populists who exploit the public’s mutinous temper have won elections in important countries. In some cases – Trump in the US, Javier Milei in Argentina – they have begun to dismantle the “deep state.” To retain control, panicked elites have had to resort to blatantly anti-democratic measures – for example, canceling the first round of Romania’s presidential election because the populist candidate had won. Such abuses have only widened the breach between voters and their formal representatives.
At the deepest level, the struggle transcends politics and acquires an almost metaphysical aspect. The elites look back with longing to a high modernist era imbued with purpose and engaged in heroic projects of improvement. A background condition of populism is the impulse to reconnect, as a community, with traditional sources of meaning and spirituality. In both cases, a sterile nostalgia has conquered creativity. The rift between the classes, from this perspective, appears as a surface manifestation of the fatal flight of the civilization of the Enlightenment away from its own historic mission.
But that is a story for another time.
Governments should be more like Amazon
How can the public’s trust be regained? Evidently, the information system should be regarded as a tool to be exploited, not an enemy to be opposed. Institutions should be reconfigured to maximize digital capabilities – in brief, they will be flatter, faster, and more interactive. It isn’t true that all institutions are equally despised by the public. Millions trust Amazon with their financial information, expecting an honest transaction and the purchased goods to be delivered, magically, to their doorstep.
National governments should look and act more like Amazon and less like the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. Political parties should look and act less like military command structures and more like reddit, where issues of interest to the greatest number get “voted up.” Artificial intelligence (AI) will make it possible for the reconfiguration of government to be functional rather than structural. AI can turn the walls of the bureaucratic labyrinth to glass, exposing what was always done in the dark.
Because the fracturing of society has a geographic dimension, decision-making and policy implementation will be pushed down to the local level. Each village and valley will have a choice in the application of the healthcare system and the kind of immigrant it will admit. Controversies will be settled by direct democracy in the form of digital referendums. In one possible future, every democratic nation will be Switzerland.
A multi-generational project
A new set of elite behaviors will also be needed for the reconquest of trust. Politicians must embrace and enjoy the new proximity to the public, real and virtual, even when that entails potential embarrassment and physical danger. A new electoral rhetoric of humility and uncertainty will replace the modernist illusion that intractable socioeconomic conditions – poverty, unemployment – are mere “problems” to be “solved.” Those who are elected will be admired for their dexterity with digital tools and their ability to navigate the online universe, as well as for their transparent integrity. While a new generation of elites will help promote change, this won’t be enough – there are, unfortunately, too many young people with old heads. Only a profound cultural transformation will revive the sense of identity between leaders and led.
Above all, we should remember that adapting to a new information system is a multi-generational project. Today we think of the printing press as a liberating innovation, enabling the scientific, American, and French revolutions. Yet, initially, the printed word contributed to the religious distrust that led to savage slaughter during the 30 Years’ War. Nothing that horrific has transpired with the internet. We should be thankful for that – and we should remember that the clock of history measures centuries, not minutes, as we refit representative democracy, and ourselves, to the rigors of a brave new digital world.
