{A } low-trust society is a society in which you constantly fear getting ripped off. Most Americans have an intuitive understanding of what high and low trust looks like now. Amazon could not have become a retail behemoth unless Americans trusted each other not to steal cardboard boxes from each other’s stoops and front doors. Its achievement was during the success of a high-trust society. Now, we see retailers in major American cities adjusting to a spike in petty crime and lawlessness. They are failing in a lower-trust society. The surge of retail theft now means the toothbrushes are locked-up merchandise in some urban pharmacies. A low-trust society is one in which you spend a lot of your time trying not to get ripped off. It’s a society in which you start videotaping your every move in a car, or your interactions with strangers.

Progressives may be seeing what crime does to the trust level of their cities, but something stranger is happening to conservatives who are losing trust in their society generally. American conservatives don’t trust media, even most conservative media. Since the pandemic, they don’t trust “the science” or the scientists much anymore. They don’t trust the electoral system. They don’t trust the universities.

I think the recent drama surrounding the president of Harvard illustrates why conservatives are reacting the way they are to the society around them. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, was exposed as having committed serial plagiarism. Gay is black and a woman, but she was also given a very traditionally elite formation at her prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy. She played academic politics hard. As dean of Harvard’s Arts and Sciences, she pressured the institution to strip Professor Roland Fryer, who is black, of his tenure for sexual-harassment allegations, many of which had not stood up to even the slightest scrutiny. His ultimate suspension, some suspect, was connected to his research indicating that cultural attitudes among American blacks, rather than white oppression, were holding them back from academic achievement.

Gay survived an initial controversy about the flourishing of antisemitic sentiment on the Harvard campus. And in reality, she has survived the plagiarism scandal as well — she is going to continue to teach at Harvard for an exorbitant salary of $900,000 a year. Conservatives who followed this can see that Harvard threw away its standards to attack a professor whose research gave aid and comfort to the conservative enemy. And it threw away its standards again in order to protect a progressive in good standing.

In fact, the crux of the matter is that Harvard never sought to resolve this scandal by reference to its own institutional standards, or to the standards of higher education generally. For weeks, when the controversy was focused on her lackluster response to antisemitism on campus, we were bombarded with stories about how figures such as former president Barack Obama had supported keeping Gay on as president. Why? The media came out and offered weird defenses of Gay. The last, most exasperating intervention was from the Associated Press, an institution meant to walk the line of consensus in American politics. When Gay resigned, the AP headline read: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism” Essentially, this surrenders the idea of academic standards entirely. The fact that the Right was calling attention to these standards meant that they no longer applied.

Here is how the New York Times describes the shift in politics that led Havard’s board from protecting Gay as president to asking for her resignation:

Harvard Corporation members also scattered to vacation homes and resorts around the world. Ms. Pritzker, a former secretary of commerce and an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, spent time in Aspen, Colo. Kenneth I. Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express, went to Miami. Mr. Barakett was also in Florida, while Karen Gordon Mills, a former leader of the Small Business Administration and an heir to the Tootsie Roll fortune, was at an economic conference in India.

The board members had received plenty of advice and criticism by others in their wealthy circles, Harvard alumni and donors. But when they arrived at their vacation spots around Christmas they were besieged by a new wave from friends and relatives. Some people told Ms. Pritzker that she might be forced to resign from the Harvard Corporation because she had helped choose Dr. Gay and stood by her.

More than one board member had children studying at Harvard. At least one worried that other students would harass them because of their parents’ roles on the board and the bad press, according to two people who spoke with corporation members.

Again, at no point were the standards of academic work, of Harvard University, ever put forward in a definitive way to resolve the question. Instead, everyone on the board had their finger in the air, constantly testing the direction of overall liberal opinion and what it might mean for them. The board members ultimately want to stay on the right side of Barack Obama, and the AP, if they can help it.

That’s what frightens conservatives. Progressivism acts like a blob that is indifferent to the institutions in which its members play roles. That’s why during the pandemic, the rules against gathering more than ten people together that prevented religious people from worshipping were lifted or ignored by the public-health authorities themselves, when they wanted to enable progressives to protest racism.

In this environment, conservatives are the ones who feel like they are subject to lawlessness. They are the ones who are slowly going to lock their lives down and stay quiet, lest a stray remark of theirs at work goes viral and gets picked up by the AP, and suddenly the president of Chase Bank is wondering whether Barack Obama or his friends in Aspen want him to cancel your checking account, too.

But the worst danger isn’t just to those of us on the wrong side of the blob’s opinion; it’s to everyone who relies on these institutions, which are being prostituted for ends they were never meant to serve. In serving themselves as political actors and activists, progressives are destroying the institutions that give their rule any legitimacy and purchase at all. What will be left over once they are done with them?