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"Americans today don't trust each other and their institutions as much as they used to. The collapse of social and political trust arguably has fuelled our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. But is the decline in trust inevitable? Are we caught in a downward spiral that must end in war-like politics, institutional decay, and possibly even civil war? In A Liberal Democratic Peace, Kevin Vallier argues that American political and economic institutions are capable of creating and maintaining trust, even through polarized times. Combining philosophical arguments and empirical data, Vallier shows that liberal democracy, markets, and social welfare programs all play a vital role in producing social and political trust. Even more, these institutions can promote trust justly, by recognizing and respecting our basic human rights"--

Americans are far less likely to trust their institutions, and one another, than in decades past. This collapse in social and political trust arguably inspires our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. Many believe that our previously high levels of trust and bipartisanship were a pleasant anomaly and that today we live under the historic norm. For politics itself is nothing more than a struggle for power between groups with irreconcilable aims. Contemporary American politics is war because political life as such is war. This text argues that our shared liberal democratic institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social and political trust between diverse persons

In the eyes of many, liberalism requires the aggressive secularization of social institutions, especially public media and public schools. The unfortunate result is that many Americans have become alienated from the liberal tradition because they believe it threatens their most sacred forms of life. This was not always the case: in American history, the relation between liberalism and religion has often been one of mutual respect and support. In Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, Kevin Vallier attempts to reestablish mutual respect by developing a liberal political.

Catholic integralism claims that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorizes two powers to do so. The state governs in matters temporal, the Catholic Church in matters spiritual. Since the church has the nobler end of salvation, it may direct the state to help enforce church law. The integralist adopts two seemingly conflicting norms of justice: (a) coercion into the faith is always unjust, but (b) coercion to keep the faith is just. But if religious coercion is wrong at the start of the Christian life, why is it permitted after that? The integralist answer is baptism. Baptism serves as a normative transformer: it transforms religious coercion from unjust to just. My thesis is that baptism fails as a normative transformer. I critique Thomas Aquinas' approach to this question and then adapt gratitude, associative, and natural duty theories of political obligation to repair his argument. These strategies fail.

Political philosophers are overwhelmingly liberal: freedom and equality are the fundamental political values. Yet, in much of the world, people adopt religious anti-liberalisms. States must bring people into harmony with the cosmic moral order, not protect their autonomy. In this essay, I argue against Catholic integralism, the most intellectually sophisticated and long-standing Christian anti-liberalism. Most people believe that we should treat peoples of all race, nationalities, and creeds as equals. But Catholic integralism treats people unequally according to their creed because it coercively privileges one creed above all others—its own. So integralism treats its citizens unfairly.

Liberals can be distinguished from one another in a number of ways, including by what they regard as the greatest threats to liberty. According to Jacob T. Levy, "rationalist" liberals think that nonpolitical institutions are the chief threats to freedom and that democratic governance can free people from these private tyrannies. By contrast, "pluralist" liberals think that governments are the chief threats to liberty, and civil associations are a bulwark against encroaching state power. Levy has recently argued that the rationalist and pluralist strands of the liberal tradition cannot be combined into a single political theory. In this essay, I disagree. My strategy is to develop a version of contractarian political theory that treats associations as sources of legitimacy. This pluralist contractarianism solves two problems. It shows that the social contract theory can survive the pluralist critique. And since the social contract theory is often understood as rationalist liberalism par excellence, it shows that we can combine rationalist and pluralist insights into a single theory, contra Levy.

Public reason liberals appeal to public deliberation to ensure that a legal order can be publicly justified to its citizens. I argue that thisvoicemechanism should be supplemented byexitmechanisms. By allowing citizens to exit legal orders they believe cannot be publicly justified, citizens can pressure states to change their laws. This exit pressure is sometimes more effective than deliberation. I explore federalism as an exit mechanism that can help public deliberation establish a publicly justified polity.

Abstract:Public reason liberalism includes an ideal of political stability where justified institutions reach a kind of self-enforcing equilibrium. Such an order must be stable for the right reasons — where persons comply with the rules of the order for moral reasons, rather than out of fear or self-interest. John Rawls called a society stable in this way well-ordered.In this essay, I contend that a more sophisticated model of a well-ordered society, specifically an agent-based model, yields a richer and more attractive understanding of political stability. An agent-based model helps us to distinguish between three concepts of political stability — durability, balance, and immunity. A well-ordered society is one that possesses a high degree of social trust and cooperative behavior among its citizens (durability) with low short-run variability (balance). A well-ordered society also resists destabilization caused by noncompliant agents in or entering the system (immunity).Distinguishing between these three concepts complicates the necessary reformulation of the idea of a well-ordered society. Going forward, public reason theorists must now distinguish between types of assurance, specify heretofore unknown aspects of reasonable behavior, and reconceive of the nonideal preconditions for forming a stable, ideal social order.