Chapter 4 considers a perspective that encourages citizens to develop a preliminary culture of trust on top of something other than a shared commitment to liberal democracy. According to “liberal nationalists” like David Miller and Yael Tamir, citizens should develop a sense of “bounded solidarity” on the basis of their shared nationality. Although nationality can assume exclusivist, illiberal, and anti-democratic forms, liberal nationalists maintain that it can evolve in inclusive and liberal democratic directions. This chapter shows that liberal nationalism is an incomplete perspective. Although liberal nationalism can help overcome the problem of initiation, it cannot adequately ensure that nationality will shed itself of exclusivist racial or ethnic components. Moreover, liberal nationalism does not provide citizens with the resources and capacities necessary to deepen any preliminary sense of trust which might have emerged; liberal nationalism only helps citizens better tolerate their differences and disagreements. So, this chapter paves the way for the rest of the book’s discussion of role-based constitutional fellowship. The chapter also considers constitutional patriotism.

Chapter 2 concluded that liberal democracy must be supported by a sense of unity that is oriented toward the preservation of liberal democracy and that does not suppress difference and disagreement. Chapter 3 explores what this unity ought to look like by engaging with Aristotle’s notion of political friendship. For Aristotle, citizens who belong to different factions are political friends when they share a commitment to preserve the regime, provided that the regime is “correct” or not excessively “deviant.” The chapter determines that the unity we seek should assume the form of a culture of trust where citizens believe that their fellow citizens probably value the continuation of their civic relationship, where citizens share a commitment to liberal democracy, and where they can nonetheless debate the meaning of equality and justice. Such trust, however, faces an initiation problem by virtue of presupposing a broad commitment to liberal democracy. This chapter concludes that citizens must either first develop a preliminary sense of trust on top of something other than a commitment to liberal democracy or be able to contribute to liberal democratic trust without realizing it.