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A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit’s constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it’s almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp’s line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that the other camps* are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

*(It seems to be a natural law that camps form only in opposition to other camps and that there are always at least two w/r/t any difficult issue.)

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