Does It Still Make Sense to Invoke Trust between Democratic Citizens?

In this paper we investigate the wide breach of trust between citizens and toward democratic institutions that has recently come about. We illustrate how trust has deteriorated over the last decades, and we differentiate among three social groups as the main agents prompting such a process, namely the establishment and the ruling classes, the not yet fully included minorities and oppressed groups and the left behind segment of the cultural majority. We posit that to mend socio-political and epistemic trust, the civic virtue of reasonableness is to play a role, yet not the role that ideal theory envisages for a just democracy of free and equal citizens. We contend that in non-ideal circumstances of contemporary democracies, reasonableness should not be cashed out as a homogeneous normative requirement that applies to all constituencies regardless of agents’ social positioning. Rather, the requirement of reasonableness ought to be declined in such a way as to take into account the varying social standings and different perspectives on justice and democracy voiced by citizens belonging to different social groups. The conclusion will be that in the present, non-ideal circumstances of democracy, the civic virtue of reasonableness may require to be displayed asymmetrically, since some members of the citizenry, given their privileged social positioning, have a weightier duty to be loyal to the democratic ethos. We conclude that a positive posture of reasonableness showed by the most privileged may, in the long run, possibly enhance the motivation to act reasonably also in other segments of the polity as well, fostering mutual trust and more stable societies.