The liberal idea of community is not one, as it is for many conservatives, of blood ties or traditional authority. It rests on an idea of shared choices. But the choices, and the sharing, are essential to it, including even a sense of sympathy for those caught on the losing side of an argument. Someone proposes a more equitable world—enfranchisement for working people, blacks, or women, or civil rights for homosexuals—and then makes the resulting reform last by assuring that those who opposed it may have lost the fight but haven’t lost their dignity, their autonomy, or their chance to adapt to
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