Scott Cardais

Attention is the most valuable currency in modern politics, and these platforms are where it is traded.

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.

It asked Americans what they thought the top problem facing the country was. No. 1 was the economy. That was what I expected. But No. 2 wasn’t immigration or inflation or democracy or climate change or even Trump. It was political division. In that same poll, 64 percent of the country said we’re too divided to solve our problems.

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

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.”

“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.”

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

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

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.