Institutional credibility depends on not openly repudiating citizens’ counterfactual idealizations

Evidence

Even though these expectations are idealizations that the actual practice sometimes falls short of to a greater or lesser extent, they create social facts insofar as they are reflected in the citizens’ judgements and conduct. What is problematic about such practices is not the idealizing assumptions they demand of their participants, but the credibility of the institutions, which must not openly and enduringly repudiate these idealizations. Trump’s fatal exhortation would hardly have met with the intended furious response of the citizens who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 if the political elites had not for decades disappointed the legitimate, constitutionally guaranteed expectations of a significant portion of their citizens. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 13

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the 1962 Structural Transformation thesis about public sphere decline and to the January 6 literature on delegitimation; also resonates with Claude Lefort on the symbolic dimension of democracy. — connects to: Actual trustworthiness combines motives that resist institutional mimicry; Institutionalized discursive practices can lose credibility and collapse — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 53; Counterhistory functions to disinter truths that power has deliberately concealed — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 89 (+4 more)
• ADDENDUM: Speaks to the ‘complaints about immodesty’ moral-panic theme only obliquely, but the idea that institutional credibility rests on sustaining citizens’ idealizing assumptions parallels how social norms depend on collective pretense.

Related

• Institutionalized discursive practices can lose credibility and collapse (similarity 0.80)
• Delegitimation rejects knowledge institutions and opposition conventions wholesale. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Actual trustworthiness combines motives that resist institutional mimicry #complicates (0.78)
• Counterhistory functions to disinter truths that power has deliberately concealed #complicates (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 89
• Institutionalized discursive practices can lose credibility and collapse #expands (0.72) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 53
• Legitimacy and force co-vary through symbolic mediation, not inverse proportion #expands (0.70) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 718