It is often observed among scholars of democracy that an essential ingredient for the success of democracy is for political opponents to view each other, not as implacable enemies to be crushed, but instead as fellow citizens who have good-faith disagreements about what policies government should adopt. There needs to be a sense of a shared enterprise–we are all in this together, undertaking our mutual effort at collective self-government.

There are different ways to express this essential idea. Richard Hofstadter made it a core theme of his important book The Idea of a Party System , where he traces the development of the concept of a “legitimate opposition” in an ongoing electoral competition for temporary control of government power. More poetically, Lincoln in his first inaugural

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