As Pat Buchanan, the future White House communications director for President Reagan, put it: The “busing of economic parasites and political illiterates” to the polls would mean the end of the insurgent New Right.

“The more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows.”

The explosion of information has led to a collapse of meaning, which has been replaced by pure negation. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han succinctly said in a 2022 interview in Noema , “The more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows.”

Sometimes called “the last innocent year,” 1964 was the high point of American institutional trust at 77%, per Gallup polling. Both the failed Vietnam War and corruption scandals at home — such as Watergate and the findings of the Church Committee on CIA abuses — deeply damaged public faith in the following years. By 1979, it had plummeted to 29%.