All posts tagged: mistrust

Europe’s growing mistrust of the United States

Europe’s growing mistrust of the United States

Published by Sam Flores

US President Donald Trump heads to the White House in Washington, February 8, 2026. ALEX WROBLEWSKI / AFP At the height of the crisis between the 27 member states and Washington over the Danish autonomous territory, a survey conducted for the journal Le Grand Continent identified a “Greenland moment” in European public opinion regarding Donald Trump’s United States. According to the latest wave of the Eurobazooka barometer, conducted by the Institut Cluster17 between January 13 and 19, 44% of Europeans believed that the US president is acting like a dictator, and an absolute majority (51%) described him as an “enemy” of Europe. For 64% of those surveyed, US foreign policy – which has been particularly vicious toward member states and European institutions – is now being equated with “recolonization” and “predation.” According to the authors of the study, which was published on January 23, “in just one year of Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States’ status in European opinion has changed.” A new survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), published on Wednesday, …

Science Denial: From Post-Truth to Post-Trust

Science Denial: From Post-Truth to Post-Trust

Published by Jenni Sidey

Philosophers Stephen Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro open their book When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People with a dire warning. “Something is seriously wrong,” they write. “An alarming number of citizens, in America and around the world, are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas.” These ideas include the beliefs that vaccines cause autism, that the scientific consensus on climate change is a hoax, and that 5G cellular networks contributed to the spread of COVID-19. According to Nadler and Shapiro, the problem with those who hold such beliefs is not that they are unintelligent or uneducated. Rather, it is that they “think badly”—they should be “perfectly aware that they are forming and holding beliefs irrationally and irresponsibly, and even doing so willfully.” Nadler and Shapiro are not alone in thinking that liberal democracies are experiencing an epidemic of willful ignorance. In the last decade, many observers have lamented the advent of a “post-truth” era, an era in which a growing number of citizens have little or no interest in the truth and would rather believe what is …

In the Midst of a Crisis: Relational Liberalism and the Contemporary Challenges to Democratic Legitimacy

In the Midst of a Crisis: Relational Liberalism and the Contemporary Challenges to Democratic Legitimacy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Contemporary democratic societies are in the midst of a legitimacy crisis. This crisis relates to different dimensions of democracy: a breakdown in meaningful representation of citizens’ interests; a spreading tendency to resort to an unrestrained use of power that calls into question the liberal-democratic promise to protect individual rights and to cater to a stable system of checks and balances; and extreme and widening asymmetries in the distribution of power, status, and wealth among citizens. It is therefore not surprising that political theorists are called to investigate and possibly propose a way out from the so-called phenomenon of democratic backsliding, that is, a spreading perception that democratic ideals and practices are losing ground in the face of contemporary authoritarian and illiberal challenges and populist waves. As a general diagnosis, we can posit that these phenomena, although different in quality and relating to different aspects of democracy, are fostered by a general and widespread erosion of trust. This erosion of trust concerns both the horizontal relationships between fellow citizens as members of the same polity and …