The core political values of our free society are so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness that only a few malcontents, lunatics generally, ever dare to threaten them.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Our ideals are under the constant threat of extremism, whether in the form of radical Muslim groups or the emergence of other elements seeking to deny the rights and freedoms of others.
While some misuse their freedom to perpetrate evil, millions respond by feeling compelled to use their freedom to do good.
We are free, but not to be evil, not to be indifferent to human suffering, not to profit from the people, from the work created and sustained through their spirit of political association, while refusing to contribute to the political state that we profit from.
We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.
As long as anger, paranoia and misinformation drive our political debate, there are unhinged souls among us who will feel justified in turning to violent remedies for imagined threats.
We haven't usually had to face the extreme questions about liberty and order because we're not a nation of extremists. We love freedom and good government both.
The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
Our democratic societies are in danger. In allowing ourselves to be infiltrated by fear, to be blinded by the passion of identity, we are entertaining the most serious illusions about our freedom.
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.