Americans are far less likely to trust their institutions, and one another, than in decades past. This collapse in social and political trust arguably inspires our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. Many believe that our previously high levels of trust and bipartisanship were a pleasant anomaly and that today we live under the historic norm. For politics itself is nothing more than a struggle for power between groups with irreconcilable aims. Contemporary American politics is war because political life as such is war. This text argues that our shared liberal democratic institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social and political trust between diverse persons.