Civic friendship as an essential element for democracy

 Brad deLong does his usual service -- drawing attention to important facts and ideas in a clear and convincing way -- by commenting on Brook Manville & Josiah Ober's The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691218609>.  I have for a long time been thinking about the role of what people often call norms; Manville and Ober seem to have come up with a better term and formulation.  Norms are bloodless; friendship is not.

 Here's the beginning of DeLong's post:

I  had wanted to spend this month's column writing a review praising Brook Manville & Josiah Ober with their very well-written and insightful book: The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691218609>. And indeed, the historical part is of enormous interest—is, indeed, a treasure for all time...But the what-do-we-do-now part? That part left me even more depressed than before, and with nothing constructive to say. For their big conclusion—with which I agree—is that democracies survive only where there is civic friendship, where, as Plutarch wrote of the Roman Republic before the year -150, points of contention "though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate."

But right now America has one political party—the Republicans—so constituted that it bankrupts itself if it ever acknowledges Democrats as civic friends rather than as mortal alien enemies. And so it cannot do it.

I date the beginnings of America's democratic decline to 1993. The Neoliberal Order established by the Reagan Revolution had, to put it bluntly, failed in policy terms. Newt Gingrich decided that since the Republican Party could not win by pointing to policy success it should try to win by arousing a combination of scorn and fear.

I was also struck by a comment on a different deLong post by Patrick Marren: 

       

And we no longer meet with people who disagree with us either; and the few times we do, we disagree on the basic facts, not just goals or means. To very roughly paraphrase Lincoln, "The realities of neither side could be completely true; those of one side must needs be false."

One hopes that other passages of that speech are not also echoed: "Neither party expected for the [conflict] the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of [any such fundamental] conflict might [not exist at all in reality]. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same [Constitution] and [honor the same Framers] and each invokes [their] aid against the other. It may seem strange that any [citizens] should dare to ask a just God's assistance in [dehumanizing their fellow citizens and targeting them with blood libels for short-term political gain], but let us judge not that we be not judged."

Yes, I hope, with Ebenezer Scrooge, that these are"shadows of the things that May be only, not shadows of the things that Will be."

Lincoln's second inaugural address is a treasure for all time.

As  is Lincoln himself.