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itself.

      What we will be calling civility is a set of norms that enable citizens to manage their political disagreements, even in cases where the stakes are high. Civility in general is the disposition to regard fellow citizens as politically equal partners in collective government even when they hold political views that you regard as fundamentally mistaken, injudicious, and even reckless. However, civility is not capitulation. And it needn’t mean social etiquette, like conversation with soft tones and maintaining a veneer of niceness. Rather, civility as we understand it in this book is composed of the dispositions needed to disagree well even when disagreeing vehemently, to hear each other’s reasons, make the stakes clear, and look at the various positives and negatives in ways that get to the bottom of the matter. Civility is a commitment to norms of proper argument.

      Democracy is hard to love. It’s noisy, contentious, frustrating, and inefficient. It involves meetings, caucuses, and committees. There’s a seemingly endless procession of polls, surveys, campaigns, and speeches. Sometimes democracy calls on us to canvass, demonstrate, and protest. More than this, democracy is also a suspicious moral proposal. It is the thesis that you may be required to live according to rules that you reject, simply because they are favored by others. Further, democracy is the claim that you may be rightfully forced to live according to rules that are supported only by others who are demonstrably ignorant, misinformed, deluded, corrupt, irrational, or worse. Democracy apportions equal political power to its citizens, regardless of their ability to wield it responsibly. Plato famously argued that as in any society there will be very few people who are wise, democracy is simply the rule of the foolish. What could be worse?

      In order to address this question, we need to take a step back. Democracy is many things. It’s a form of constitutional republicanism in which all citizens are ruled not by government but by laws, a system of popular government, a procedure for collective decision, a method for electing public officials, a collection of fair processes by which conflicts among competing preferences are domesticated, a means for creating social stability, and so on. But underneath all these common ways of defining democracy rests its fundamental commitment to the moral ideal of collective self-government among political equals. This commitment to the political equality of citizens is what explains the familiar mechanisms of democratic government. Our elections, representative bodies, constitutions, and systems of law and rights are intended to preserve individual political equality in the midst of large-scale government. Absent the presumption of political equality, much of what goes on in a democracy would be difficult to explain. Why else would we bother with all of the institutional inefficiency, the collective irrationality, and the noise of democracy, but for the commitment to the idea that government must be of, for, and by the People, understood as political equals?

      Now, if everyone agreed about which shots to call, there would be no need for democracy, or any form of politics at all. But, as we all know, politics is fraught with disagreement. And some of this disagreement comes to more than mere foot stomping and horse-trading. That is, political disagreement is not confined to instances where different people merely want different things and have to strike a bargain. Political disagreement often runs deeper than this. It frequently involves conflicting judgments of justice, meaning, and value, differences among citizens concerning what we, collectively, ought to do. The familiar architecture of the democratic decision-making process – open elections, equal voting, and majority rule – serves to ensure that collective political decisions can be made in a way that each citizen can regard as fair, despite their ongoing disagreements. Recognizing that, in a society of political equals, no one person can simply call the shots for everybody else, democracy provides a system for collective decision-making in which, although we are sometimes required to abide by rules and decisions that we oppose, no one is rendered a subordinate, a mere subject of another’s will.

      When cast in this light, our enthusiasm for democracy is easier to understand. For all of its flaws, democracy is the proposal that we each are entitled to an equal say in directing our collective life. No one simply gets to boss everyone else around. Despite vast differences in knowledge, experience, moral character, talent, and ambition, we are in matters of politics one another’s equals. As citizens, we look each other in the eye. And in looking each other in the eye, we keep government under our joint scrutiny and in check. Far from being merely the least bad, democracy turns out to be positively dignifying. Accordingly, democracy is not only beloved. It is eminently lovable, deserving of our attachment to it.

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