Freedom & Flourishing Project: Kevin Vallier (BGSU)

Americans today are far less likely to trust their institutions, and each other, than in decades past. Many believe that our previously high levels of trust and bipartisanship were a pleasant anomaly and that we now live under the historic norm. Seen this way, politics itself is nothing more than a power struggle between groups with irreconcilable aims: contemporary American politics is war because political life as such is war. In my book, Must Politics Be War? (OUP 2019), I argue that liberal institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social and political trust between diverse persons on the grounds that liberal institutions alone can be publicly justified to a diverse public. In this talk, I develop and defend a public justification requirement by grounding it in the value of social trust and what respect requires of persons who trust one another. This standard can then be used to vindicate liberal institutions.