No Home, No Future. No Fight.

Patriotism is no meal ticket, nor a mortgage, nor a pension. If democracy won’t fight for me, why the hell should I fight for it?

This past weekend, in the rolling countryside of England, among old friends and new acquaintances, men of thought and quiet persuasion, we sat through long, searching conversations that solidified the concerns gnawing at many of us for years. Over cups of green tea and measured gulps of beer, we dissected a troubling reality, one that stretches across the Atlantic and cuts deep into the fabric of Western democracy. The United States, once the unwavering beacon of democratic ideals, is faltering, not merely because of the crude, bombastic force that was Donald Trump, but because the administrations before him allowed democracy’s very mechanisms to be weakened, corrupted, and exploited by those who now pose the greatest threat to its survival.

It would be easy, too easy, to lay blame squarely on right-wing populism, on the foreign adversaries who penetrated American institutions, on the corporate oligarchs who profited from chaos. But such blame, while justified, does not answer the larg…