Between Virtuous Trust and Distrust: A Model of Political Ideologies in Times of Challenged Political Parties

2.1 A Tripartite Model of Wollstonecraftian Trust

The three dimensions or attitudes of trust that we operate with is what Niknam (2019) has termed open trust, virtuous trust and distrust, which he has developed as part of his analysis of trust in the works of the proto-feminist author and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), an early advocate of women’s rights in late eighteenth-century England. Wollstonecraft wrote most of her works in the 1790s as Europe was facing a time of great upheaval following the French revolution in 1789. Distrust is visible on various levels in her writings and bears on both the personal and the political. In Wollstonecraft’s last, unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, the main character Maria realises that her “extreme credulity” hindered her in gaining an understanding of her husband’s true, vicious character (Wollstonecraft 1989, vol. 1, 137). The novel portrays how Maria chooses to act on her sense of distrust towards her husband, George Venables, after having realised that he is an unfaithful libertine, who merely wants to be with her to gain access to her rich uncle’s wealth (Niknam 2019). In return, her husband puts her in a mental asylum from where Maria tries to escape to become reunited with her daughter. Distrust, risk, and freedom intertwine in this novel in the sense that distrust has the potential to lead women to risk their ordered lives for the hope of gaining an ideal state of freedom in their lives. Remarkably, distrust in Wollstonecraft’s work informs a progressive way of thinking about how people, especially women, should act as rational beings in the world.

While Wollstonecraft valued benevolence and relationships built upon a deep sense of trust, her writings also enabled women to strive for independence and greater freedoms in society through an emphasis on distrust. For example, in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman from 1792, Wollstonecraft writes about how a warm-hearted young woman can be misled by her own “sincere, affectionate heart” and turned into the plaything of men (Wollstonecraft 1989, vol. 5, 140). Being duped into fulfilling the needs of men through licentious behaviour is in this sense connected to a lack of distrust. This seems also to have been the case with Wollstonecraft’s criticism in Rights of Woman of the “negative virtues” which her contemporaries expect of women, such as “patience, docility, good-humour, and flexibility,” all virtues “incompatible with any vigorous exertion of the intellect” (Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, 127). By contrast, Wollstonecraft’s model woman and mother is independent in the sense that she, instead of being solely “adorned to delight man,” and, as a result thereof, “take things on trust,” rather is able to discern the true value of her own worth and have a degree of knowledge that enables her to properly assess her surroundings (Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, 122). Such a woman will live a virtuous life and earn her husband’s genuine respect as his equal and friend, not as someone who “with feminine softness” has to “caress a man” that only treats her tyrannically (Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, 157). Wollstonecraft thus endorses a personal form of distrust in Rights of Woman that aims at empowering women in order to prevent them from being duped into fulfilling the needs of men through licentious behaviour. One may argue that such distrust is not merely a personal form of distrust, but that Wollstonecraft in Rights of Woman, on a broader level, is calling for women in society to be distrustful of men’s intentions:

[T]ill women are led to exercise their understandings, they should not be satirized for their attachment to rakes; or even for being rakes at heart, when it appears to be the inevitable consequence of their education. They who live to please – must find their enjoyments, their happiness, in pleasure! … Supposing, however, for a moment, that women were, in some future revolution of time, to become, what I sincerely wish them to be, even love would require more serious dignity, and be purified in its own fires; and virtue, giving true delicacy to their affections, they would turn with disgust from a rake (Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, 188–89).

Wollstonecraft’s point here is that as long as society fails to offer women proper opportunities and education, it should not mock women for their desire to be attached to wealthy and profligate men. Indeed, women can easily become profligate themselves as this “appears to be the inevitable consequence of their education”. Wollstonecraft was thus offering a poignant criticism of the education offered to women of her time and blaming society for women’s improper behaviour. If women were better educated, they would “turn with disgust from a rake”. In other words, if women were better educated, they would be much more cautious in engaging in immoral behaviour and a crucial amount of distrust would make them critical of engaging with libertine men.

Ultimately, Wollstonecraft treats trust in others as both a blessing and a possible curse. This split is visible in her divergent attitudes towards trust, from the gradually increasing focus on distrust in her writings, to the opening, especially in her fiction, towards an innocent-like, open trust, as well as the ideal, grounded in a virtuous form of trust, of cultivating deep and equal relationships influenced and formed by the use of reason. Niknam explains the tripartite model of trust in the following way:

In her [Mary Wollstonecraft’s] work, distrust forms a means of empowering women to become more independent; virtuous trust is part of a striving towards experiencing genuine forms of equal and trusting relationships strengthened by reason; and open trust is a mode of trusting which is rather immediate and linked to a natural human desire of doing good and experiencing love (Niknam 2019, 812).

Virtuous trust relates to a predominantly Western idea of trust as something that: ideally becomes deep between the persons involved (through an almost complete trust in the other); includes a degree of intimacy and an openness of one’s feelings to the other; is based on people’s use of their reason; and, via its emphasis on reason, is upheld by the idea that the other person is as capable as oneself of being upright or (morally) virtuous. This ideal is difficult to realise in practice, which makes virtuous trust fragile, as is certainly the case in Wollstonecraft’s writings (Niknam 2019).

The features of virtuous trust in Wollstonecraft’s fiction to a great extent parallel ideas by Anthony Giddens about trust in modern times. Giddens notes how the development of modernity from a Western perspective brought forward ideals about the need for a deep sense of trust between partners. This ideal involves that partners become intimates and try to open themselves up to each other. Such a paradigm includes efforts of making one’s interiority and feelings explicit and, perhaps surprisingly, this focus on intimacy and openness involves a heightened sense of vulnerability, ultimately turning trust into a very fragile enterprise (Giddens 1990, 114–44).

According to Giddens (1990, 142), it is simply not true that people in modern times increasingly live in a ‘world of strangers’. Nowadays one can board a plane from Copenhagen and arrive in Los Angeles some hours later, and for Giddens (1990, 17–21, 112–14) possibilities such as this reveal how the categories of time and space has become separated in modernity. The fixed bound between time and space started to dismantle from the late eighteenth century with the invention of the mechanical clock as the clock made it possible to pen down time in a much more exact manner (Giddens 1990, 17). Moreover, ‘space’ has increasingly been torn away from ‘place’ as we nowadays can reside in London and instantly communicate with people in faraway foreign countries. As Giddens (1990, 18–19) observes, “[i]n conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phastasmoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them”. Giddens claims that this state of affairs has broken up and transformed the pre-modern sense of familiarity in one’s local community. Through his broad sociological analysis, Giddens (1990, 118) reminds us that most traditional cultures (with the partial exception of some larger cities in agrarian states) had a clear divide between insiders and outsiders or strangers, while modern social activity is characterised by “wide arenas of nonhostile interaction with anonymous others”. People continue to act in a local environment, but their local environment is highly shaped by their immediate access to ideas from around the globe and by their ability to communicate with people in distant places. In this manner, modernity does not mean a loss of community; we still have “a strong psychological need to find others to trust.” and, according to Giddens (1990, 120–21), such trust is exercised in relations characterised by a need of intimacy. In our age ontological security is sought through relationships characterised by intimacy. Giddens claims that such intimacy was not at all as central to relationships in pre-modern times:

Day-to-day contacts with others in pre-modern settings were based upon a familiarity stemming in part from the nature of the place. Yet contacts with familiar others probably rarely facilitated the level of intimacy we associate with personal and sexual relations today. (…) In relations of intimacy of the modern type, trust is always ambivalent, and the possibility of severance is more or less ever present. Personal ties can be ruptured, and ties of intimacy returned to the sphere of impersonal contacts—in the broken love affair, the intimate suddenly becomes again a stranger. The demand of ‘opening oneself up’ to the other which personal trust relations now presume, the injunction to hide nothing from the other, mix reassurance and deep anxiety (Giddens 1990, 142–43).

Giddens’ notion about the transformation of intimacy seems to suggest that the separation between time and space has caused changed patterns in the social structures of societies, which in turn has led to the development of an individual need to experience a deep kind of intimacy and trust with specific others. The deep form of trust in modernity described by Giddens is thus a consequence, not a cause, of the changed patterns in the social structure of societies. Such trust has to be continually worked upon in order to thrive and is cultivated by openness and warmth, yet it is also these attributes of trust in modernity, together with the changes in the social landscape, that have made trust into something fundamentally vulnerable. Both Giddens’ notion of trust in modernity and the virtuous form of trust found in Wollstonecraft’s fiction represent the risky striving towards a deep sense of trust based on openness and intimacy.

Wollstonecraft’s children stories from 1788 – Original Stories from Real Life – contains virtuous trust at its zenith. This is very clear when Mrs Trueman in one of the stories—in order to explain the importance of virtue to the two children Mary and Caroline—account for her relationship to her husband:

Mr Trueman has a taste for the fine arts; and I wish in everything to be his companion. His conversation has improved my judgement, and the affection an intimate knowledge of his virtues has inspired, increases the love which I feel for the whole human race. He lives retired from the world; to amuse him after the business of the day is over, and my babes asleep, I sing to him. A desire to please, and the pleasure I read in his eyes, give to my music energy and tenderness. When he is ruffled by worldly cares, I try to smooth his wrinkled brow, and think mine a voice of melody, when it has had that effect (Wollstonecraft, vol. 4, 435).

Mr and Mrs Trueman share an ideal marriage founded on constant affection and virtue. As in Socrates’ depiction of two male lovers in Plato’s Symposium (a work Wollstonecraft was familiar with, and whose ideas highly influenced her ideals about human and divine love (Taylor 2003, 16)), Mr and Mrs Trueman’s love inspires them to become human beings who are aiming for genuine knowledge and goodness, as is also symbolically hinted at in their names. In Original Stories, such goodness is portrayed as nothing less than striving for a love of “the whole human race”. Wollstonecraft’s children’s stories clearly appear as an allegory of the value of human virtue and goodness. Nothing seems to be able to threaten the deep sense of trust between Mr and Mrs Trueman, quite unlike the fragile attempts to cultivate virtuous trust in the rest of Wollstonecraft’s fiction.

While the use of reason and a sense of moral betterment is central for virtuous trust, open trust, on the other hand, is a concept which enables us to grasp a form of trust that arises rather spontaneously and first and foremost is connected to a (spontaneous) expression of innate goodness. In Wollstonecraft unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, the meeting between the warder Jemima and the main character Maria involves precisely such a depiction of open trust (Niknam 2019). Jemima is clearly sceptical of Maria’s intentions during their first meetings at the mental asylum where Maria has been put after wanting to divorce her husband. Nonetheless, the two women develop a strong friendship, which Barbara Taylor (2003, 244) has described as a “partnership … rooted in mutual sympathy and congruent interests”. At a fairly early point in the story, the narrator describes how Maria “failed immediately to rouse a lively sense of injustice in the mind of her guard, because it had been sophisticated into misanthropy,” after having told Jemima the story about her “confinement on false pretences,” and yet Maria still “touched her [Jemima’s] heart” (Wollstonecraft, vol. 1, 88). Jemima’s sense of compassion for Maria then leads her to help the struggling female patient by delivering books and writing material to her. Niknam (2019, 809–10) has previously shown that when comparing the meeting between Maria and Jemima to Danish thinker and theologian K. E. Løgstrup’s sense of trust, it becomes evident that Jemima’s assistance to Maria is neither driven by ulterior motives nor driven by a desire to help because to do otherwise would be a neglect in any moral sense. Jemima helps because she has gained a sudden sense of trust towards Maria, including a faith in Maria telling the truth about her confinement. There are some striking similarities between Løgstrup’s view of trust (particularly unfolded in Løgstrup 1956/2007 and Løgstrup 1968/2007) and the trust that evolves in the encounter between Jemima and Maria; they both involve a sense of trust that, as it were, have taken the will by surprise. Robert Stern (2017, 290–91) describes how trust for Løgstrup is different than practices or norms “like driving on the left, marriage, or even property” since these “practises or norms are brought into being by us in a contractual or quasi-contractual manner, and are thus goods that we introduce into the world and over which we have control”. Understood in this sense, “trust is not of our own making”, but is something given with the nature of human life as such, and thus a “good for which we are not ourselves responsible, and for which we can therefore claim no credit” (Stern 2017, 291). Likewise, the trust that arises between Jemima and Maria is based on Jemima’s spontaneous, almost unconscious, desire, to help Maria. As someone comparable to the Good Samaritan, Jemima offers her help.

In relation to distrust, Matthew Carey explains that whilst the terms ‘mistrust’ and ‘distrust’ are very close in meaning, “distrust is more likely to be based on a specific past experience, whereas mistrust describes a general sense of the unreliability of a person or thing” (Carey 2017, 7–8). ‘Distrust’ is hence more associated with reflection and with a more concrete form of evaluation than ‘mistrust,’ which tends to describe an atmosphere with a general lack of trust in a given setting. Edna Ullmann-Margalit understands the phenomenon of trusting as involving three main factors: I have good reason to fully trust you with respect to some matter when I believe that 1) You intend to behave or act in this matter so as to promote my interests and my general wellbeing. 2) You intend to promote my interests qua my interests (whether or not they coincide with your interests). 3) With respect to the matter at hand, you have the competence to behave or act so as to promote my interests. Ullmann-Margalit is aware that these three factors are often not applicable in practise, but she sees them as a useful model for understanding what is at stake in trust. Concerning distrust, she notes that “I have good reason to fully distrust you when I believe that you intend to behave or act so as to harm my interests, with respect to a given matter, in virtue of their being my interests and that you have the competence to thus harm my interests” (Ullmann-Margalit 2004, 67). Distrust may thus be described as a psychological phenomenon that concerns an outward, negative attitude and assessment of other people and their intentions towards oneself or one’s group (see also: Baier 1986). Moreover, research has highlighted that distrust may form a healthy “antiexploitation trait” that counterbalances the harmful strategies of others or enables people to anticipate and overcome potential aggression from others (Reimann, Oliver, and Cook 2017).

In general, distrust, open trust, and virtuous trust are interrelated and difficult to disentangle completely. In this sense, these three main forms of trust should not merely be viewed as opposites that stand in tension to each other. While the three terms do not represent the same thing, they influence each other and are thus interwoven: For example, one cannot become virtuous if one is too credulous and child-like. One needs to be able to distrust others to become a virtuous person, who is able to develop genuine and virtuous relationships. Nonetheless, a relationship between two persons inhabited by virtuous trust is still a relationship almost completely devoid of mistrust. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s vision of an ideal society where people help each other through a sense of universal benevolence, as outlined in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men from 1790, is also a society full of virtuous trust. Such a society can indeed be compared to Immanuel Kant’s idea about a kingdom of ends, that is, an ideal society founded upon virtue and respect for the (Kantian) categorical imperative by all of its members (Kant 1991 [1785]).

2.2 Honneth and the Social Foundations of Democratic Life

While the outlined concepts of trust are established mainly to describe interpersonal and social-political relations in Wollstonecraft’s authorship, we argue that they can be extended to explain the attitudes that certain modern political ideologies hold towards so-called social institutions of social freedom as these are conceptualized by social philosopher Axel Honneth in his work Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. In this book, Honneth (2014) reinterprets Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to develop what he calls ‘a theory of justice as social analysis’. Honneth argues that contemporary political philosophy has been decoupled from an analysis of society, which means that conceptions of justice – i.e., how to assess the moral legitimacy of social orders – are generated “in isolation from the norms [Sittlichkeit] that prevail in given practices and institutions, and are then ‘applied’ secondarily to social reality” (Honneth 2014, 1). In contrast, Honneth follows Hegel to suggest that these institutionalized ethical norms must constitute the starting point for a theory of justice. In this way, Honneth’s theory of justice as social analysis wants to move beyond “the traditional division of labor assumed by traditional conceptions of justice between the social sciences and normative theory, between empirical disciplines and philosophical analysis” (Honneth 2014, 5).

Thus, using an approach that he terms ‘normative reconstruction’, Honneth contends that there is a specific ethical value or idea of justice which more than any other has shaped the formation of (Western-European) democratic societies: “Of all the ethical values prevailing and competing for dominance in modern society, only one has been capable of leaving a truly lasting impression on our institutional order: freedom, i.e., the autonomy of the individual” (Honneth 2014, 15). In Honneth’s Hegelian interpretation, freedom is thus “the point of justice” (Honneth 2014, 18). However, Honneth distinguishes between possibilities of freedom and the reality of freedom in his outline of three different dominating models or ideas of freedom throughout the history of ideas. Accordingly, Honneth regards the two models that he terms negative freedom and reflexive freedom as possibilities of freedom, while the idea of so-called social freedom is described as the reality or realisation of freedom. Therefore, while Honneth describes how the historical institutionalization of negative freedom into legally guaranteed rights and the institutionalization of reflexive freedom into the moral autonomy of the individual have been pivotal to modern conceptions of freedom, he also argues that both of these models “feed of a social life-praxis that not only precedes them, but provides the basis for their right to exist in the first place” (Honneth 2014, 123), that is, social freedom. By social life-praxis, Honneth refers to social institutions and practices of mutual recognition, which he therefore regards as an integral part of the concept of freedom. Honneth calls these social institutions the ‘We’ of personal relationships, the market economy, and democratic will-formation, respectively. More specifically, he moderates Hegel’s famous tripartite family–civil society–state model into what Honneth terms the institutional sphere of interpersonal relationships (the institutions of friendship, intimate relationships, and families); the institutional sphere of the market (the sphere of consumption and the labour market); as well as the institutional sphere of the political public sphere (the democratic public sphere and the democratic constitutional state).

In relation to our understanding of how trust relates to political ideologies, we first of all argue that Honneth’s Hegelian concept of social freedom can also be described as an institutional manifestation of the attitude of trust which Niknam calls virtuous trust, which we have outlined above. Since Honneth describes the social institutions of freedom as basically practices of mutual recognition, this opens a related complex discussion on the relationship between trust and recognition (e.g. Brennan 2021; Petherbridge 2021; Procyshyn and Wenning 2019), which is not the focus of attention for this paper, however. We therefore propose, on a more general level, that the intricate theoretical and practical relations between the concepts and phenomena of trust and recognition are what constitute the social foundations of democratic life (the subtitle of Honneth’s Freedom’s Right), that is, social freedom – which Honneth expresses from a recognition-theoretical perspective and which Niknam expresses from a trust-theoretical perspective, whereof we place an emphasis on the latter as a matter of applicability within current scholarly discussions of political parties.

In a historical perspective, practices and institutions of social freedom have developed in a democratic direction on the basis of social struggles for recognition (Honneth 1995) that have taken place within – and sometimes outright against – these practices and institutions as concrete and symbolic representations of the social order of society. The individual and collective feelings of disrespect that ignites these struggles (Honneth 2007), manifest in attitudes of what Niknam terms distrust, as also described above, which is thus an important part of processes of social change. In Western societies (which Honneth and Niknam primarily deal with through their philosophical points of departure in Hegel and Wollstonecraft, respectively) different attitudes of distrust and the derived political struggles have been expressed through different political ideologies and – in a more limited sense – political parties. Some of these ideologies and parties have in the course of time become co-developers of and guarantors of modern democratic institutions, while others directly or indirectly are perpetually trying to undermine some or all democratic institutions. It is this context surrounding the expression of trust and distrust in a political setting that the suggested model below (see Figure 1) attempts to capture, in a way which is related to the research literature about classification of political ideologies (e.g., Ball, Dagger, and O’neill 2019; Eatwell and Wright 1999; Geoghegan and Wilford 2014; Vincent 2023).

Figure 1:

Model of political ideologies and spheres of trust.

The model is first and foremost a model of the political spectrum, where the horizontal axis resembles the traditional (economic) left-right scale. However, instead of incorporating a vertical axis of for instance authoritarian-democratic (Eysenck 1957) or authoritarian-libertarian (e.g. Heywood 2017, 14–15) scale – which are a part of other influential models that generally seem to divide the political spectrum into “halfs” of anti-freedom and pro-freedom ideologies – we incorporate and moderate this distinction by illustrating it in terms of spheres of virtuous trust and ultimate distrust – and also propose a vertical axis that indicates level of nationalism, quintessential to both historical and present ideological conflicts (even though many textbooks on ideologies conceptualize nationalism as a distinct ideology). Thus, central to the illustration of the model is how the so-called “major ideologies” of socialism, liberalism, and conservatism (Alexander 2015) fall within what we call the sphere of virtuous trust (inside the red lines), which implies at least some degree of ideological support for all the democratic institutions described in Honneth’s normative reconstruction of social freedom. Ideologies such as communism, neoliberalism, fascism, and anarchism, on the other hand, fall within the sphere of ultimate distrust and thus aim to undermine or do away with one or more of these social institutions.

The distance between the various ideologies in the model indicates ideological affinity or remoteness, which means that the red lines between some of the ultimate distrust ideologies represent both an antagonistic ideological relationship, but also, conversely, the common aspects of these ideologies. The model can therefore be used to position for instance political parties, movements, or other actors in an ideological space.

There are three things to clarify regarding the model. First of all, the model does not explicitly include ideologies such as ecologism, Islamism, feminism, which are typically included in textbooks about ideologies (e.g., Ball, Dagger, and O’neill 2019; Eatwell and Wright 1999; Geoghegan and Wilford 2014; Vincent 2023), since these ideologies in a certain sense aim to transcend political ideologies and on a party-political level often have been seen as single-issue or single-prism frameworks. This means that specific parties such as ‘green’ parties or Islamist parties in various contexts must be understood in terms of their relation to one or more of the ideologies included in our model to fully grasp the attitude of trust such actors represent and hold towards the (democratic) institutional spheres that underlies Honneth’s idea of social freedom.

Secondly, and in continuation of the former point, since we interpret ideologies in terms of the attitude of trust they hold and represent in relation to Honneth’s institutional spheres, the closer particular actors can be placed to the centre of the figure, the more they resemble the ideal society that can be derived from Honneth’s – and to some extent Wollstonecraft’s – thought, which arguably resemble a form of social-liberalism in line with enlightenment ideals (see Honneth 2017). Accordingly, the discernible enlightenment ideals or visions of democracy that we find in Wollstonecraft and Honneth can be understood as an endorsement of social justice through an expansion of civil and political rights and an emphasis on the need of economic redistribution in order to give all citizens the chance to flourish and thereby create a society founded upon mutual respect and recognition between its citizens.

Thirdly, as we interpret distrust as a central aspect of social change, the model should also be able to help illustrate the argument that acts or expressions of distrust involves ideological movement or ideological pressure, respectively. Distrust positions in society (e.g. in political movements) that draw on neo-liberalism, communism, anarchism, fascism, or a combination of these can put pressure on the sphere of virtuous trust, so that parties or positions within this sphere either seek towards or away from this pressure – and thus towards the sphere of distrust (although often not completely, as this would imply a fundamental ideological shift to a position of distrust that aims to break down or abolish one of the social institutions underlying the sphere of virtuous trust). At the same time, political parties or positions within the sphere of virtuous trust can in their expressions or movements move towards distrust positions via internal dynamics, which will then bring the parties closer to the ultimate distrust ideologies to a greater or lesser extent. The point in this context, however, is that this ‘internal’ movement always takes place with the premise that such expressions of distrust does not aim at demolishing social institutions such as the family, the market, or the democratic public sphere, but to establish a critique that illustrates how “an institution we regard as ‘ethical’ could embody the values that serve as an overarching guideline for the reconstruction of ethical life in a better, more perfect or comprehensive way” (Honneth 2014, 9). This parallels Niknam’s (2019) argument that the movement towards virtuous trust always carries elements of distrust within itself. Therefore, a central element of politics for established parties will, in line with this, still be to change society through critique of society or through opposition to certain developments in society, and that socialist, liberal or conversative parties therefore often will have an inbuilt tendency towards expressing distrust against ideas or tendencies of an unregulated market, state force or the abandonment of cultural traditions, respectively. Social-liberal parties that might be placed close to the centre of the model will therefore exhibit a mixture of all these distrust positions in their political functioning. Yet, all of these parties will generally strive to move dialectically from virtuous trust in and of the existing social institutions, through attitudes of distrust, to a refiguration of these institutions with an expanded realization of social freedom. Our model thus also illustrates why many established parties will often be analysed as – or criticized for being – system-preserving.

The benefit of interweaving Niknam’s attitudes of trust together with Honneth’s social-philosophical framework in an analysis of the contemporary political landscape is that this method offers an opportunity to describe the connection between growing distrust towards different societal institutions in modern democracies and the adjoining ideological and historical development of existing and new political parties (and movements) – and to describe how this development disturbs the existing figuration of social and political trust. To utilize the model, we will now turn to an analysis of the contemporary, critical, as well as difficult circumstances surrounding the Danish political party Radikale Venstre, which is a social-liberal party with a historical ideological position that largely aim to embody the ideals of virtuous trust and social freedom. However, the model may of course also serve to position other political parties and actors and to explain how their distrust movements within the political spectrum, due to external pressure or internal dynamics, destabilize the fragile circumstances of virtuous trust, for better or worse.