The Values We Say We Hold—And the Culture That’s Undermining Them

How Trumpism is not just attacking institutions, but rewiring the cultural meanings Americans claim to hold dear.

We like to think of values as fixed—truths we inherit and carry forward. But anthropologists know values are never static. They are performed, reinforced, and contested. They live in practice, not just in principle.

What happens when that practice begins to unravel?

Across the country, people still speak of fairness, freedom, honesty, and community. But these words no longer land with the same weight. They sound less like shared convictions and more like fragments of an older language, out of step with present realities.

Fairness was always imperfect. Still, it once had traction. It informed laws, structured expectations, and helped define what was tolerable. Today, it’s harder to see where fairness lives. Corporations post record profits while workers scramble to make rent. Billionaires game the system while public schools beg for pencils. The idea of a level playing field has become less a promise than a bitter joke.

Freedom remains the most invoked word in American life, but it no longer means the same thing to everyone. For some, it’s about protection from state surveillance or economic precarity. For others, it’s the right to refuse, to dominate, or to harm. Once tied to civic responsibility, it’s now freely invoked to justify grievance or gain.

Honesty used to be a threshold. Politicians who lied faced consequences. Now they’re praised for “saying what they think.” Conspiracy outpaces correction. Public trust erodes—not because of a single deception, but from the normalization of distortion.

Community once evoked shared effort—porch conversations, potlucks, neighborhood watch. But the institutions that nurtured those bonds—unions, libraries, local newspapers—are withering. What remains is increasingly transactional or digital, not grounded in the rhythms of shared life.

Patriotism, once bound to ideals of service and sacrifice, now feels more like performance. Flags become signs of loyalty—not to country, but to faction. National symbols no longer represent unity, but division over who belongs and who does not.

This is not simply moral decline. It is cultural displacement. The values we invoke are being pulled away from the conditions that once sustained them.

Anthropology reminds us that values endure only when enacted. They are expressed and preserved through everyday practices. When those fall away, values begin to fray. Fairness loses meaning when it’s consistently denied. Honesty breaks down when lies become currency. And when common spaces close, community disappears.

You see it in a teacher who stops speaking up, a neighbor who no longer reaches out, a voter who walks away from the process. This isn’t apathy, it’s disorientation. A sense that what once held meaning no longer does.

And yet, values reemerge in new forms. Mutual aid, labor strikes, community kitchens—these are not just acts of resistance. They are efforts to reconstruct what’s been lost.

The work of repair doesn’t begin with slogans. It begins with practice. Values come back to life when embedded in action: when we welcome disagreement without disdain, when we build institutions that center care, when we teach not just content but connection.

We need spaces that make values visible again—schools where dignity matters, journalism rooted in place, town halls that listen, and public services that reflect shared responsibility rather than market logic.

The cultural reckoning we face is not just with what’s broken, but whether we’re willing to defend what still matters.

Values won’t save us on their own. But without them, we lose the compass that might.

They survive when practiced. And they are passed on by people who choose not to forget.

Suggested Reading

Biehl, João, and Peter Locke, eds. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology, Ecological Crisis, and Social Response. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.

Lakoff, George. Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Ortner, Sherry B. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

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