To Rebuild Public Trust, Americans Must Get Back in the Same Room

That unlikely conversation was possible because a museum built a room for it, a shared physical space where two strangers could recognize themselves in each other’s history. Institutions like the Reagan Foundation do some of the most important civic work left in the country: not only preserving history but connecting it to the present and future, rebuilding the public realm in the process. As Americans grow more isolated, more distrustful of our institutions and more disconnected from the people who live down the street, that work is more important than ever. 

According to the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, over the last few decades the average American spends 24 more hours a month alone and 20 fewer hours a month socializing with friends in person. Civic and social life has migrated out of shared physical space and onto screens and social media platforms, where the average American adult now spends roughly seven hours a day. Online, we encounter others’ ideas in an anonymized fashion, making it easy to forget that a real human being stands on the other side of the screen. 

The share of adults who agreed that “most people can be trusted” declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, according to Pew. This trust deficit has real implications: Americans who trust others are more likely to attend community meetings or help their friends and neighbors, bringing them a meal or loaning them money in an emergency, because they think their generosity will be reciprocated in their own time of need. Americans who don’t trust their neighbors are less likely to do all of these things. 

We’re not only less trusting of our government, our institutions and each other, but we’re less present to each other, because we spend less time together, rarely discussing important political and social problems together in person. 

It’s for this reason that civic institutions like museums and libraries matter enormously. They are among the last places built specifically to put experts, politicians, thought leaders and everyday Americans all in the same room around something larger than themselves: a piece of history, a live debate, a shared celebration. Conversations about our country’s founding, its commitment to liberty and free markets, and our posture towards allies and enemies carry more weight when they happen face to face, between people who have to sit with each other’s disagreement rather than scroll past it.

Public debates not only hash out divisions over the moment’s big issues, but they also mirror how those with strong disagreements can still respect each other, while giving the audience the chance to ask questions and meet fellow citizens they’d likely never encounter in their own daily, algorithmically sorted lives. 

The Library of Congress, for instance, draws tens of thousands of readers, authors and total strangers into the same rooms each year for its National Book Festival, turning a quiet research institution into a weekend-long public argument about the power of books and ideas. In Virginia, Mount Vernon does something similar with George Washington’s life and legacy, mixing candlelit tours and Revolutionary War encampments with debates on the same grounds where the founding generation once wondered how to build a new country.

Likewise, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, a range of forums, exhibits, and other events draw wildly different crowds through the same doors over the course of a year. From a conversation with documentarian Ken Burns, to an exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the annual Reagan National Defense Forum, and yearly 4th of July celebrations with patriotic music, historical reenactors and presidential look-alikes, the Library manages to be a dozen different institutions at once: a museum of ancient texts, a policy conference venue, a small-town festival. 

In such places, especially those that cultivate a diversity of programmatic offerings, people show up for one reason – a documentary, a concert, an exhibit, for instance – and leave having absorbed something else without meaning to. They can meet people, learn something, test their ideas, celebrate their country’s history and feel themselves a part of something bigger than themselves, all in one visit. 

As trust erodes and screens absorb more of civic life, places still doing the work of getting people into the same room, across generations and reasons for coming, deserve more credit than they get.

What made that moment between David Lenga and Ariel Ein-Gal matter was two human beings, generations and continents apart, recognizing each other’s dignity and struggles face to face, and sharing that moment with a live audience. That’s something a headline about antisemitism or an online policy debate about it could never fully capture.