Better at letting go than holding on

Ask Americans whether their culture is broken and a large share will say yes, and then disagree completely about what broke. One person means faith and family, another means guns and inequality, a third means manners, phones or the young. The word carries a mood more than a claim. It cannot be checked because it never says what a working culture is supposed to do.

Whatever else it values, a culture has to keep its people safe from one another, let them live long lives, let them trust strangers enough to cooperate, give them company, give them institutions they will accept, and give the young a reasonable expectation of doing as well as their parents. Score the United States on those, using long series that do not depend on anyone's politics, and the answer is neither "broken" nor "fine". It is lopsided. Over the last several decades American culture has become much better at protecting people from one another and much worse at holding them together.

What got better

Violence is the clearest case. By FBI figures, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, with robbery down 74% and murder down 34%; property crime fell 59%.¹ The trend is not smooth. In 2020 the murder rate had its largest one-year increase on record, and in 2022 it was still well above its pre-pandemic level.¹ But a person in the United States today is far less likely to be robbed, burgled or assaulted than a person in the early 1990s.

Acceptance of other people's choices has changed even more. When Gallup first asked in 1958 whether people approved of marriages between Black and White Americans, 4% said yes. In 2021, 94% did, and the gaps between races, age groups and regions had nearly closed.²

Participation has held up. Despite a pandemic, the 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout of the century so far, with 17 million more people voting than in 2016, and turnout rose among the young and the old, women and men, and White, Black, Hispanic and Asian citizens.³

And people live longer than ever. Life expectancy at birth reached a record 79.0 years in 2024.⁴

What got worse

Trust is the other column, and it is falling at both levels. In 1964, 77% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. In September 2025 it was 17%.⁵ Trust in other people has fallen more slowly but steadily. In 1972, 46% of adults said most people can be trusted; in 2018 it was 34%, and a Pew survey in 2023-24 found the same 34%. Each recent generation is less trusting than the one before, so the average falls as older cohorts die.⁶

Company is falling too. Time-use diaries from 2003 to 2020 show social isolation rising and time spent with friends, neighbours, acquaintances and non-household family falling. The pandemic sped this up, but time with household family and shared leisure were declining years before it. The steepest drop in time with friends was among young Americans.⁷

The expectation of progress has weakened as well. Of Americans born in 1940, about 90% went on to earn more than their parents had at the same age, adjusted for inflation; of those born in the 1980s, about 50% did. That fall appears in every state and across the income distribution, and is largest for the middle class.⁸

Long life, the one bright number, has a qualification. The 79.0 years of 2024 is still 3.7 years below the average of comparable wealthy countries, and the United States has the lowest life expectancy among them for both women and men.⁴ It is improving, but from behind.

The line between the columns

The obvious sort, material against relational, does not fit. Trust in government is an institutional measure and it has collapsed; mobility and life expectancy are material and they lag; tolerance is a relational attitude and it has improved the most.

The sort that does fit is protection against connection. What improved are the things that protect people from one another: less violence, and far more acceptance of how others choose to live. What declined are the things people do or count on together: believing that a stranger will deal fairly, spending an evening with friends, believing the shared government will act in good faith, and believing the shared economy will carry the next generation forward. In a phrase, the culture got better at letting people be and worse at holding them together.

The two columns may be connected. A culture that leaves people alone more easily also asks less of them together, and the institutions that once forced company, churches, clubs, unions, the single evening television schedule, are the ones that thinned as tolerance grew. It is also possible that they are separate trends that happened at the same time. These data cannot tell the two apart.

The list of functions is also a choice, and another list would change the picture. Someone else would score religious attendance, marriage and birth rates, or the gap between rich and poor. Most of those are things people do or hold in common, so they would probably add weight to the declining column rather than move the line.

Why it feels broken

If the culture is lopsided rather than broken, why does "broken" feel accurate to so many? Part of the answer is that the connective column is the one people feel. Safety is mostly an absence, of the crime that does not happen, while loneliness and distrust are felt every day.

The other part is that low trust distorts the view of the improving column. In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys since 1993, at least 60% of Americans said there was more crime nationally than the year before, through decades when crime mostly fell. Far fewer have said crime was rising where they live.¹ People report their own neighbourhood roughly as it is and the country as worse than it is. A population that trusts strangers less will read the country, which it knows mostly through other people's accounts, more darkly than the street it can see.

So both sides of the argument are reading real numbers, from different columns. The person who says the culture is better than ever is pointing at safety and tolerance and is right. The person who says it is broken is pointing at trust, company and the future and is also right.