1. All of these institutions should be trusted. The problem is there is not enough enhancement in other institutions to build trust.

There should be ever stronger ethics laws for elected officials: the perception of self-dealing is inherently damaging, and there is peripheral damage to completely unrelated parties when it happens.

There should be a constitutional amendment getting money out of politics. Most everyone now believes elections can be bought, however indirectly, they who have the most money, get the most advertising, the most media coverage, will win.

The military industrial complex is an oligopoly but it's not regulated like one; Eisenhower called the complex a grave threat to democratic government. We were warned, we continue to ignore the warning.

2. Out of the entire Congress there might be 10 members who are very aware of our interventionist foreign policy, for 70 years, in the middle east, and the role that's played in destabilizing the whole region. There's no possible way we stop stepping on our own d|cks if we don't understand the multitude of ways we've been doing it already for that long.

This is a good primer from post WWII to 1991, most people are familiar with our extracurricular activities in the middle east since then.
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/ancient-hi...

3. Baby boomers will have to start dying in appreciable numbers before this will be politically possible. The baby boomers have cornered both political parties. There is no possible way we get back to the near 40 years where the top tax bracket was above 75%, and for 10 years it was above 90%. The incentive is to try as hard as you can to spend the money on allowed deductible expenses like growing or starting a business. And for that 40 years, this country build massive private and public infrastructure as money was moving. Taxes went down, and building went away, but the stock and bond markets flourished which is where the baby boomers have their money, and expect to find it even after death. Meanwhile that generation has charged the country credit card $20 trillion and that's just so far. If they can find a way to cheat death, they will demand to be first in line.

4.
Denigration of institutions needs to be resisted and admonished. Constructive criticism, based on facts, is necessary and appropriate, but this inane "so-called judges, activist judges" and the "do nothing Congress" and "liberal, fake news media" and "rigged elections" is a precision strategy to weaken checks and balances in a system, and favors a unitary executive. And that's a huge problem.

Democracies are not easy, and they're not on autopilot. The American Civil War was vicious. At the start, General Sherman made his men pay restitution for civilian property destroyed, and he was convinced the wonton destruction of private property was detrimental to the Union cause. Later in the war, he considered it an exigencies of the war to eviscerate Southern citizens themselves for aiding the Confederate Army. The photographs of what was done to the South are easy to confuse with Dresden and Berlin. It was wholesale obliteration. By any modern standard what was done was way beyond war crimes.

But today we have this batshit insane menace of unreality where large numbers of people are opting into alternate realities, and electing paranoid conspiracy theorist to run their countries.

Not even the free market with a minuscule government functions at all properly with a misinformed population.