| Sumario: | "Liberal democracy has always relied on civic friendship without acknowledging it. Though lacking the concept, modern citizens persist in many practices and passions once considered civic friendship: prejudices held in common, favoritism for each other and, despite disagreeing on specifics, overwhelming support for the assumptions of our regime: freedom and equality. Aristotle's theory reminds us that civic friendship is a factual condition of healthy societies, not a pie-in-the-sky ideal. Liberal civic friendship finds identity in vocations instead of ethnicity or class. It moves beyond communitarianism, which is limited by geography and religion. Civic friendship opposes economic models of society, joining hands with later classical liberals to criticize "rational self-interest" as an ideology that obscures the emotional attachments at work under its guise. Civic friendship is simultaneously progressive and socially conservative. Treated cautiously, it offers an alternative to populism by engaging some of the same passions. By recognizing and understanding civic friendship, we can build on it to counteract the current polarization"--
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