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.

Liberality came to mean something like, as Rosenblatt puts it, “demonstrating the virtues of a citizen, showing devotion to the common good, and respecting the importance of mutual connectedness.”

One worry I have

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

There is no rule of civic generosity or political practice that Trumpism hasn’t broken

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.

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