By Jonathan Emerson-Pierce, Public Discourse.
We cannot expect to preserve a liberal democracy until each generation learns to embrace its civic responsibilities.
It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.
–Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)
A Cultural Mirror
Today, political conflict in the United States is more than a social crisis—it is a cultural mirror. In recent years, violent attacks on elected officials, community leaders, and ordinary citizens have elicited not only sorrow but also troubling signs of approval. On major platforms such as Reddit, TikTok, and X, thousands expressed reactions ranging from mourning to celebration after Charlie Kirk’s murder.
At the heart of this trend is a civilizational challenge: a steady breakdown of the civic virtues that once sustained Western democracy. While algorithms, ideology, and partisanship may nurture division, the real concern is that we have quietly dismantled the scaffolding of our moral architecture.
Indeed, from the time of America’s founding, political differences were expected and, for the most part, respected. Although I can recall families, friends, and neighbors arguing throughout my life, mutual understanding was upheld as a civic requirement until recently. Reliably, public intellectuals praised diversity of opinion as a bulwark against extremism. And few citizens could have imagined danger lurking at a university campus, a town hall, or a local gathering where open debate had been encouraged.
Unfortunately, this world is rapidly vanishing. According to U.S. Capitol Police, threats and assaults on public figures have tripled in five years. Pew Research surveys indicate growing distrust in cultural institutions, and polling shows that the number of citizens who justify political violence is rising. These findings do not merely present isolated opinions; they reveal early signs of normalized aggression.
To understand why, we must look beneath the political surface to what earlier generations took for granted. Standard policy responses such as tighter gun laws, stricter speech codes, and more vigorous content moderation cannot repair what is decaying. What has emerged is not a regulatory failure or even a constitutional crisis. It is an inevitable consequence of neglecting the moral anthropology that a liberal democracy presupposes.
An Ignored Anthropology
From colonial self-governance to Alexis de Tocqueville’s civic associations, the American experiment treated public virtue as an essential part of its infrastructure. The contemporary decline of this tradition—once maintained in schools, churches, volunteer organizations, and homes—explains why regulatory fixes now fail to restore order.