A

September poll

from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 54 percent of voters thought the Democratic Party was too liberal and 49 percent thought the Republican Party was too conservative.

And there is nothing that most of us fear as much as being out of step with our peers.

A

study

by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that in key Rust Belt states, when you attached the Democratic label to a candidate running on a populist platform, that candidate lost 11 to 16 points in support. That’s how Sherrod Brown, once one of the strongest economic populists in American politics, lost his Ohio Senate seat to a... See more

And for many I know on the left, it’s led to a kind of political despair:

Today, political tolerance is harder for many of us than religious tolerance.

Across much of this country, voters don’t agree with the Democratic Party as they understand it, and more fundamentally, they believe the Democratic Party doesn’t agree with — or respect — them.

In the end, most Americans want America to work. They know we disagree with one another. They don’t want us to hate one another. These divisions exist not just in the country but also in our communities, in our families. They’re painful. They want politicians capable of making that problem better, not worse.

“To the ancient Romans,” Rosenblatt writes, “being free required more than a republican constitution; it also required citizens who practiced

liberalitas

, which referred to a noble and generous way of thinking and acting toward one’s fellow citizens.”

One worry I have

about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country disagrees with them.