Liberals—the last believers in institutions and incremental reform—cry “Democracy, democracy, democracy!” But when the Supreme Court puts the president above the law, the president uses his office for shakedowns, the White House defenestrates speakers of inconvenient facts, the State Department flirts with dictators while shutting the door on dissidents and refugees, Justice Department lawyers lie to the courts, Congress votes liars onto the bench and pours money into a masked secret police force, and most Americans don’t seem to notice or care, then what good is democracy? The country and its government belong to us, so the most honest response is self-disgust.

But I don’t want to stop believing in my country’s essential decency. I don’t want to conflate America with one president, one party, or both parties. I want to feel, as Whitman did, that America and democracy are inextricable; and, as Dewey did, that democracy makes us agents who can always act to better our country and affirm our self-respect.

Tocqueville wrote: “In the United States it is believed, and with truth, that patriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance.” In a democracy, that observance takes the form of participation in public life. Harder still, it requires a vision of that life with everyone in it. We cannot wish away the other party, the other states, the other faiths, the newest arrivals, the oldest tribes. In his Claremont speech, Vance said one true thing: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common.” A nation—especially this one, with its short memory and incomprehensible diversity—can’t cohere simply as a geographic boundary and a set of laws. It needs a common language and culture—a way of life.

-George Packer in The Atlantic