A country born by breaking with a king inherits dissent as a birthright. Generation after generation faces its test of conflict management: crafting the Constitution itself, with all its convictions and compromises; balancing local vs. federal power centers; a Civil War exposing fissures in democracy’s bedrock; and on and on, battles over rights and responsibilities, suffrage, prohibition, isolation vs. intervention, and then the serial upheavals over justice for multiple marginalized groups—Black, female, gay, trans. Each era is tasked with not only choosing its fights but also deciding how to fight them.
Our current crisis of division, once again manifest as violence, feels shocking but not sudden; the dread has been deepening for years, a defining quality of this century that began with an election that ended
