The Empty Throne: Why the West No Longer Believes in Its Own Institutions

In January 2025, the Edelman Trust Barometer delivered its annual verdict on the state of global institutions. The numbers were not encouraging. Across the 28 countries surveyed, trust in government averaged 51% — a figure that conceals enormous variation and, in most Western democracies, masks a collapse that has been decades in the making (Edelman, 2025). In the United States, trust in government to “do the right thing” most or all of the time stood at 16%, according to Pew Research Center — down from 77% in 1964, when Americans still believed their government had landed on the right side of history as well as the moon (Pew Research Center, 2024). In the United Kingdom, only 12% of citizens trusted Parliament to act in the national interest (Hansard Society, 2024). In France, trust in political parties had fallen to 9% — a number so low that it suggests the French have more confidence in the weather forecast than in the people who govern them (Eurobarometer, 2024).

These are not marginal figures. These are not the complaints of a disgruntled minority. These represent a structural collapse in the legitimacy of the institutions that underpin Western civilisation: democratic government, the free press, the judiciary, the scientific establishment, organised religion, and the international order built after 1945. Gallup’s long-running confidence surveys show that trust in virtually every major American institution — Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, newspapers, television news, organised religion, banks, big business, public schools — has declined since the early 1970s, most of them precipitously (Gallup, 2024). In Europe, the pattern is the same, though the starting point and the velocity differ by country.

The Roman Senate lasted 900 years. The House of Lords has lasted 800. Congress has lasted 235 and already looks like it needs life support. At this rate, the European Parliament will be lucky to see its centenary.

This is a History Future Now article. So we are going to do what we always do: look at the present through the lens of the past, and ask whether any of this has happened before. The answer, as the historically literate will already suspect, is yes — repeatedly, and with consequences that ranged from the transformative to the catastrophic.

Part 1: The Anatomy of Trust

Trust, in the context of institutions, is not a feeling. It is not optimism, or loyalty, or affection. It is a calculation — a rational expectation that an institution will behave predictably, competently, and in the interests of those it serves. When you trust a court, you expect it to apply the law fairly. When you trust a newspaper, you expect it to report facts accurately. When you trust a government, you expect it to prioritise the welfare of its citizens over the welfare of its officials. Trust is not blind faith. It is informed expectation, built on repeated experience.

Francis Fukuyama, in his landmark study Trust (1995), argued that trust is the foundation of social capital — the invisible infrastructure that allows complex societies to function. High-trust societies have lower transaction costs: people can do business on a handshake, contracts are shorter and cheaper to enforce, government can operate with lighter regulation because citizens comply voluntarily. Low-trust societies must compensate with coercion, surveillance, and elaborate enforcement mechanisms. The difference is visible in everything from economic growth rates to the length of legal documents. It is not a coincidence that the nations with the highest levels of institutional trust — the Nordic countries, Switzerland, the Netherlands — also rank among the wealthiest, least corrupt, and most efficiently governed on earth.

Conversely, low-trust societies tend toward one of three outcomes: coercion, corruption, or charismatic strongmen. If people do not trust the courts to deliver justice, they seek justice through other means — vigilantes, mobs, or powerful patrons. If people do not trust the government to provide security, they turn to whoever can — warlords, gang leaders, or populist demagogues who promise to break the system that has failed them. Fukuyama observed that trust is not a luxury of affluent societies; it is what makes societies affluent in the first place.

The collapse of institutional trust, therefore, is not merely a problem of public sentiment. It is a structural crisis. When trust erodes below a critical threshold, the institutions themselves begin to malfunction — not because they have changed, but because the public’s willingness to cooperate with them has changed. Tax compliance falls. Jury service is evaded. Military recruitment declines. Regulatory compliance becomes adversarial rather than cooperative. The institutions still exist, but they operate in an increasingly hostile environment, which makes them less effective, which further erodes trust, which makes them still less effective. It is a doom loop, and once it begins, it is extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

Part 2: When Rome Stopped Trusting the Senate

The Roman Republic is the Western world’s foundational experiment in self-governance, and its collapse is the foundational cautionary tale about what happens when representative institutions lose their legitimacy.

For roughly four centuries, the Roman Senate was the most respected governing body in the ancient world. Roman citizens might quarrel about policy, fight over land reform, and riot over grain prices, but the authority of the Senate as an institution was largely unquestioned. The Senate represented — imperfectly, but genuinely — the collective wisdom of Rome’s governing class. Senators were expected to be men of wealth, experience, and public service. The system worked because enough of them actually were.

The crisis began in the late second century BC, when the Senate became visibly captured by a narrow oligarchy — the optimates — who used their positions to enrich themselves and block reforms that threatened their interests. By 133 BC, Roman public land — the ager publicus, legally belonging to the state — had been overwhelmingly occupied by wealthy senatorial families, in direct violation of the Licinian-Sextian laws that limited individual holdings to 500 iugera (roughly 300 acres). The brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus attempted to enforce the existing law and redistribute the surplus to landless citizens and veterans. The response was not debate. It was murder. Tiberius was beaten to death by a mob of senators and their clients in 133 BC — the first political murder in the Republic in nearly four centuries. Gaius was driven to suicide by senatorial forces in 121 BC. The message was unmistakable: the Senate would kill its own members rather than permit reform of a system that benefited its members (Beard, 2015).

The courts, which should have been the mechanism for resolving such disputes peacefully, were themselves corrupt. Provincial governors looted their territories with near-impunity, knowing that the juries that tried extortion cases were composed of their fellow senators. Verres, governor of Sicily from 73 to 71 BC, stole an estimated 40 million sesterces from the province — artwork, grain, money — and returned to Rome confident of acquittal. It required Cicero’s legendary prosecution to convict him, and even then Verres simply retired to comfortable exile with most of his plunder intact. He was exceptional only in degree, not in kind. The grain supply — the lifeline of Rome’s urban poor — became a tool of political patronage, distributed not on the basis of need but on the basis of political loyalty. Public contracts were rigged. Elections were bought. Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, effectively purchased his political influence, while Pompey received extraordinary military commands that no Republican institution could check.

The result was a progressive transfer of loyalty from the Republic’s institutions to individual leaders who promised to fix them. Gaius Marius, a military reformer from outside the senatorial class, won an unprecedented seven consulships by promising to serve the common people. His rival Sulla marched on Rome itself in 88 BC — the first time a Roman general had used his legions against the Republic — because he believed, with some justification, that the Senate’s institutions had been corrupted beyond repair. Sulla’s dictatorship was followed by Pompey’s extraordinary commands, which gave a single man control over Rome’s military resources across the entire eastern Mediterranean.

Each of these figures exploited the same dynamic: the public had lost faith in collective institutions and was willing to vest power in individuals instead. Julius Caesar was the logical culmination of this process. He crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC not as a revolutionary but as a man whose popular support exceeded the Senate’s institutional legitimacy. When he was assassinated in 44 BC, the Republic was briefly restored — but only in form. The substance was gone. Within fifteen years, Augustus had established a monarchy in all but name, and the Romans, exhausted by decades of civil war, accepted it with relief (Beard, 2015).

The pattern is worth stating explicitly, because it repeats: when representative institutions are captured by insiders who serve their own interests rather than the public’s, the public does not simply endure the betrayal. It transfers its loyalty to outsiders who promise to break the system. The outsiders may be reformers (the Gracchi), military strongmen (Marius, Sulla), or charismatic populists (Caesar). But the cause is always the same: institutional failure creates the demand for institutional destruction.

Part 3: When Europe Stopped Trusting the Church

The medieval Catholic Church was not merely a religious institution. It was the closest thing Europe had to a pan-continental government. The Church administered courts, collected taxes (tithes), ran the only international diplomatic network, operated the continent’s schools and universities, maintained the only coherent bureaucracy, and provided the ideological framework that legitimised every monarch’s authority. To lose faith in the Church was not like losing faith in a modern government department. It was closer to losing faith in the entire operating system of civilisation.

The erosion of that faith took centuries, but its causes were structural rather than theological. Simony — the sale of Church offices — was endemic. Bishoprics and abbacies were bought and sold like commercial properties. Absenteeism was rampant: bishops collected income from dioceses they never visited. The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377), during which the popes resided in France under the effective control of the French crown, shattered the papacy’s claim to spiritual independence. The Great Western Schism (1378–1417), during which two and eventually three rival popes simultaneously claimed authority, made the Church’s institutional crisis impossible to ignore. For nearly forty years, European Christians were told that the head of their Church was simultaneously in Rome, Avignon, and Pisa, and that each of the three claimed the other two were frauds (MacCulloch, 2003).

The parallels with modern media are instructive. The medieval Church was, functionally, the information monopoly of its age. It controlled education, literacy, and the interpretation of the only texts most people encountered — scripture and liturgy. When the Church lost credibility, it was not merely a spiritual crisis. It was an information crisis. The institution that people relied upon to tell them what was true had been revealed as self-serving, corrupt, and internally contradictory.

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517, are often treated as the cause of the Reformation. They were not. They were the match. The kindling had been piling up for two centuries. What made Luther’s protest different from previous reform movements — the Waldensians, the Hussites, the Lollards — was technology. The printing press, invented by Gutenberg around 1440, had by 1517 created a continent-wide network of printers, booksellers, and readers. Luther’s theses were translated from Latin into German and distributed across the Holy Roman Empire within weeks. His subsequent pamphlets sold in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in European history, a dissenting voice could reach a mass audience faster than the institution it challenged could suppress it (MacCulloch, 2003).

The printing press was, in this sense, the social media of its day: a technology that broke an information monopoly, amplified dissenting voices, and accelerated the collapse of an institution that had lost its credibility. The Church’s response — censorship, the Index of Prohibited Books, the Inquisition — followed the same pattern as modern institutions attempting to suppress online dissent. It did not work. The more the Church tried to control the flow of information, the more it confirmed the reformers’ argument that the institution was more interested in preserving its power than in serving its flock.

The Reformation produced, eventually, religious pluralism, the nation-state, parliamentary government, and the scientific revolution. It also produced the Wars of Religion, which killed an estimated eight million people. The transition from one institutional order to another is rarely gentle.

Part 4: The Modern Collapse — The Data

The decline of institutional trust in the modern West is not a perception. It is a measurable, documented, multi-decade phenomenon that spans every major institution and every major Western democracy.

In the United States, Gallup has tracked confidence in institutions since 1973. The trend lines are relentless. Confidence in Congress has fallen from 42% in 1973 to 8% in 2024 — the lowest figure for any institution Gallup measures. Confidence in the presidency has declined from 52% to 26%. Confidence in newspapers has fallen from 39% to 13%. Confidence in television news has fallen from 46% (in 1993, when Gallup began tracking it separately) to 11%. Confidence in the Supreme Court has fallen from 49% to 25%. Even confidence in the military, long the most trusted institution in America, has declined from 85% in its post-9/11 peak to 60% (Gallup, 2024).

In Europe, the pattern is consistent if less uniformly measured. Eurobarometer surveys show that trust in the European Union fell from 57% in 2007 to 35% in 2024 across member states. Trust in national governments varies widely — from 65% in Denmark to 12% in Croatia — but the overall trend in most Western European nations is downward (Eurobarometer, 2024). The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that in six of the seven G7 nations (the exception being Japan), fewer than half of citizens trusted their government. In France, the figure was 34%. In Germany, 37%. In the United Kingdom, 33% (Edelman, 2025).

The triggers for this decline are well-catalogued. In America: the Vietnam War and the credibility gap. Watergate. The Iraq War and the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The 2008 financial crisis, in which the institutions that caused the collapse were bailed out while ordinary citizens lost their homes. The opioid epidemic, enabled by regulatory capture. COVID-19 and the contradictory, often politically motivated guidance from public health authorities. Each episode taught the same lesson: the institutions are not working for you.

In Europe: the Eurozone crisis, in which unelected officials of the European Central Bank and the Troika imposed austerity on democratic nations — Greece’s economy contracted by 25% between 2008 and 2013, equivalent to the American Great Depression, while the institutions that had approved the reckless lending suffered no consequences whatsoever. The migration crisis of 2015, during which over one million migrants entered Europe while governments alternated between open-borders rhetoric and panicked fence-building, unable to agree on a policy and unwilling to acknowledge that their citizens’ concerns were legitimate. Brexit — whatever one’s view of its merits — was an explicit vote of no confidence in a supra-national institution by 17.4 million people who were immediately characterised as stupid, racist, or misled by their own governing class. The gilets jaunes in France, who occupied roundabouts across the country because a carbon tax designed by Parisian technocrats would have fallen disproportionately on rural workers who had no alternative to driving. The rise of populist parties in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Spain — parties that the established order has spent a decade trying to quarantine rather than understand.

But it is essential to distinguish triggers from causes. Vietnam did not cause Americans to distrust their government. It revealed that the government was lying to them. The financial crisis did not cause Europeans to distrust banks. It revealed that the regulatory system designed to prevent catastrophic failures had been captured by the institutions it was supposed to regulate. COVID did not cause people to distrust public health authorities. It revealed that public health authorities were capable of issuing guidance that was politically convenient rather than scientifically sound, and then labelling dissent as “misinformation.”

The structural cause — the cause beneath the triggers — is the same one that destroyed the Roman Senate and the medieval Church: institutions that have been captured by their own personnel, serving their own interests rather than the public’s. Consider the revolving door between government regulators and the industries they regulate. In the United States, over 60% of former members of Congress who left office between 2000 and 2020 went on to work as lobbyists, consultants, or advisors to the industries they had overseen (OpenSecrets, 2021). In the European Union, a 2019 study found that one-third of departing European Commissioners took positions in the private sector within two years, often in fields directly related to their former portfolios (Corporate Europe Observatory, 2019). The people who make the rules and the people who profit from the rules are, increasingly, the same people — and the public has noticed.

Ronald Inglehart, in Cultural Evolution (2018), demonstrated that the collapse of institutional trust correlates with the rise of post-material values — but it also correlates with something more prosaic: the growing perception that elites benefit from the system while ordinary people do not. When Inglehart’s data is disaggregated, the pattern is clear: trust has fallen fastest among those without university degrees, those in rural areas, those whose real wages have stagnated or declined since the 1970s — in short, those who feel, often correctly, that the system is rigged against them. In the United States, real median household income grew by just 17% between 1984 and 2024, while real GDP per capita grew by 95% (Federal Reserve Economic Data, 2024). Someone captured the difference, and it was not the median household.

Part 5: What Fills the Vacuum?

The empty throne never stays empty. When institutional legitimacy collapses, something always replaces it. The question is what.

In Rome, the vacuum was filled by strongmen. The Republic’s institutions were replaced not by better institutions but by charismatic individuals — Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Augustus — who offered personal authority in place of institutional authority. The Roman people did not choose this outcome because they wanted a dictator. They chose it because the institutions that were supposed to represent them had become instruments of oligarchic self-enrichment. Caesar was not a disease. He was a symptom. The disease was a Senate that had stopped serving the public.

In Reformation Europe, the vacuum was filled by new institutions. The universal Church was replaced by national churches, which were in turn gradually superseded by secular nation-states. The process took two centuries and cost millions of lives, but the end result was a new institutional order — parliamentary democracy, the free press, the scientific academy, the independent judiciary — that proved more effective, more legitimate, and more durable than the one it replaced. Until, of course, it stopped being those things.

In the modern West, the vacuum is being filled by several forces simultaneously.

The first is populist leadership. Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Geert Wilders — these figures did not create the crisis of institutional trust. They exploited it, in the same way that Caesar exploited the crisis of the Roman Republic. Their appeal is not ideological in the traditional left-right sense. It is anti-institutional. They promise to break a system that voters believe is broken. The Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — is the most explicit version of this impulse: a formal project of dismantling institutions that have failed, led by a figure (Elon Musk) whose legitimacy derives from success outside the political system rather than within it.

The second is conspiracy movements and alternative epistemologies. When people stop trusting mainstream institutions to tell them the truth, they do not stop wanting the truth. They seek it elsewhere — from influencers, from podcasters, from anonymous internet communities, from anyone who appears to stand outside the discredited establishment. QAnon, anti-vaccine movements, and the proliferation of alternative media are not evidence of mass irrationality. They are evidence of a rational response to institutional failure: if the institutions that are supposed to inform you have been caught lying, it is not irrational to look for information elsewhere. It may lead to worse information — but the impulse is sound.

The third is algorithmic trust. Increasingly, people trust the recommendations of algorithms — social media feeds, search engines, recommendation systems — more than they trust traditional gatekeepers. A 2024 Reuters Institute survey found that 30% of adults under 25 used TikTok as a news source, while only 15% read a daily newspaper in any format. This is not a generational quirk. It is a transfer of trust from institutions that have lost credibility to systems that, whatever their flaws, feel more responsive, more personalised, and less condescending.

These responses — populism, alternative epistemologies, algorithmic trust — are routinely characterised by the institutions they threaten as pathologies: disinformation, extremism, the “post-truth” era. This framing is convenient for the institutions, because it locates the problem in the public rather than in the institutions themselves. But it is historically illiterate. The Romans who supported Caesar were not deluded. The Germans who read Luther’s pamphlets were not victims of “misinformation.” They were people responding rationally to the failure of the institutions that were supposed to serve them. To call the response a disease while ignoring the cause is to mistake the immune system for the infection.

Part 6: What Comes Next

History does not predict the future, but it constrains it. The patterns of institutional collapse and renewal suggest several things about what lies ahead.

First, the current crisis is not a passing mood. It is a structural transformation of the kind that occurs perhaps once or twice per millennium. The fall of the Roman Republic, the Reformation, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century — these were not bad years. They were phase transitions, in which one institutional order was replaced by another. The decline of trust in Western institutions that began in the late 1960s has now lasted over fifty years and shows no sign of reversing. No amount of “rebuilding trust” through better communications strategies will fix the problem, because the problem is not communication. The problem is performance.

Second, the transition will be turbulent. The Reformation produced parliamentary democracy and the scientific revolution. It also produced the Thirty Years’ War, which killed a third of the population of Central Europe. The Roman transition from Republic to Empire produced the Pax Romana — two centuries of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It also produced decades of civil war, proscriptions, and political murder. Transitions between institutional orders are never smooth, because the incumbents of the old order fight to preserve it and the architects of the new order disagree about what it should look like.

Third, the new institutional order is already emerging, even if its final shape is not yet clear. Digital identity systems, decentralised finance, AI-mediated governance, direct democracy enabled by technology, network-based trust systems that bypass traditional gatekeepers — these are not speculative technologies. They exist. Estonia governs through a digital-first system that makes most traditional bureaucracy unnecessary. Switzerland’s system of binding referenda gives citizens direct control over policy decisions that, in other democracies, are delegated to representatives who may or may not represent them. Blockchain-based systems offer the possibility of transparent, auditable institutions that cannot be captured by insiders because their operations are visible to everyone.

Fourth, and most importantly, the empty throne never stays empty. The institutions of the post-war Western order — the ones that currently command the trust of 8% to 35% of their own citizens — will either reform themselves or be replaced. The Roman Senate was not abolished; it was hollowed out, its authority transferred to an emperor who claimed to rule on behalf of the people. The medieval Church was not destroyed; it was broken into pieces, each of which claimed to be the authentic continuation of the original. The question for the modern West is not whether its institutions will be transformed. It is whether the transformation will be managed or chaotic, gradual or catastrophic, and whether what emerges on the other side will be better or worse than what came before.

The Reformation, for all its violence, produced a world that was freer, more prosperous, and more intellectually vibrant than the one it replaced. The Roman transition produced an empire that, for all its tyranny, delivered two centuries of peace to a world that had known only civil war. But neither outcome was inevitable. Both could have gone the other way. The quality of the transition depends not on historical determinism but on the choices made by the people who live through it — including, and perhaps especially, the choices about which institutions deserve to be saved and which deserve to be dismantled.

The West’s institutions are sitting on an empty throne. The question is not whether someone will claim it. The question is who — and with what mandate.