The consumerist conception of freedom made for an impoverished understanding of what it is to be a citizen. It promoted the idea that democracy is economics by other means, a way of aggregating individuals’ preferences rather than deliberating about justice and the common good. The discontent that beset American democracy in the last decades of the twentieth century reflected this diminished aspiration; the consumerist notion of freedom fed a growing sense of disempowerment and failed to inspire the sense of belonging and civic engagement self-government requires.
