Of course, at the heart of the whole America thing is a representative democratic republic. Actually, it became clear with my experiences on this message board that not everyone had the same respect for our institutions as I thought. For the last 2-3 years that became increasingly obvious with the silence and/or denial of each assault on those institutions. Anecdotally, and in small samples, I have found that apathy toward our institutions among some friends and family, on maybe a lesser but still troubling scale.

It is as if American democracy has been infected with a disease in recent years and I'm not certain there's a vaccine for it.