We do not practice democracy alone, of course. We do it together, in community, as equals. “Democracy as a way of life,” wrote Dewey in a later essay, “is controlled by personal faith in personal day-by-day working together with others.”

Unfortunately, as the law professor Aziz Rana observes in a recent essay on political freedom in Boston Review, there are scarcely any spaces in the contemporary United States where ordinary Americans practice the habits of democracy and inhabit a more reciprocal, participatory and solidaristic vision of freedom. Decades after Ronald Reagan led a sweeping attack on the idea of the commons in American life, Rana writes, “there are vanishingly few sites in American life — at work or in politics — where these experiences actually exist.”

“We are simply not raised in cultural worlds in which collective agency is a meaningful reality,” Rana goes on to say.